While Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own is a landmark piece of
             literature because it focuses on the rigid structure that women endured for
             hundreds of years, her assumption is too broad to serve as basic model for
             all women. Woolf exposes the complicated issues that women encountered and
             she does well to encourage women to instill such virtues as integrity and
             objectivity in their literary endeavors. In this way, she is not drawing
             gender lines when observing the characteristics of a good novelist or poet.
             In fact, it is Woolf's hope that women everywhere could successfully
             overcome any obstacles. However, her means for reaching this end may be
             One aspect we should consider when reading Woolf's essay is her
             androgynous reference. For example, she writes, "The normal and
             comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together,
             spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain
             must have effect; and a woman must also have intercourse with the man in
             her" (Woolf). Bernard Blackstone says that we can call Woolf an
             androgynist because "she puts the emphasis every time on what a man and a
             woman have to give to each other, on the mystery of completion, and not on
             the assertion of separate superiorities. If there is in woman a
             superiority, it is because she is the one to take the first step toward
             understanding . . . more discerning than the male" (Blackstone). While
             this may seem like a good idea, we must realize that denying or ignoring
             one's circumstances in life may result in less inspiration, not more. In
             other words, a woman can write about being a woman and make an impact in
             For example, Isabella Whitney was able to capture the essence of female
             liberty in her poem, "A Sweet Nosegay." Patricia Phillippy describes this
             poem as "a symbol of the difficult situation of the early modern woman who,
             whether by choice or by force...