“What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?”

After describing the great pomp and circumstance that surrounds a luncheon at Oxbridge, a fictional male university, the narrator of Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One’s Own goes on to paint a bleak picture of dinner at Fernham, the female counterpart to Oxbridge. Furthermore, just to raise a small amount of money for the basic needs of a women’s University is a seemingly impossible task, while the fellows at Oxbridge never have to worry over monetary matters. Why can’t Fernham have the same amenities as Oxbridge? This is the question I would like to address in my response.

The answer lies in what Woolf refers to as the “reprehensible poverty” of the female sex. Women have always been poor, while men have accumulated wealth for centuries, which has allowed them to give back to their sex. Successful graduates of Oxbridge contribute to the school’s splendor with donations and gifts, however there are no successful graduates of Fernham that could be looked to for financial support, and the wealthy men certainly weren’t going to help since most deemed women unfit for education. This predictive leaves the narrator to ask, “What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?”

While the great graduates of Oxford and the men of the business world got their education and amassed their fortunes, their sisters and wives gave birth to, fed and raised the future students of these universities. Women did not have the time or luxury to learn “the great art of making money…like their fathers and their grandfathers before them.” They had obligations to family. And even if they did manage to make money, the law would prevent them from controlling it. Society simply did not allow women to make money or leave a legacy. But although these poor mothers have no money to leave behind to their daughters, they are responsible for their lives and memories, something much greater than a stuffy university library.