The Role Of Women In 'Shakespeare's Sister'?

In the reading “Shakespeare’s Sister” by Virginia Woolf, Woolf makes up a fictional character named Judith Shakespeare who is the sister of William Shakespeare a famous poet from the Elizabethan era.“But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century”(693) Virginia Woolf sets up Judith in the golden age of English literature where she as her brother has that sense of a poet’s heart.Woolf puts Judith front and center of an era where there were no records of women in their daily live with the exception of Queen Elizabeth.Judith has this special ability of literature(poet’s heart)but is broken by social institutions, policies, and Men Dominance and Nurturing. Leading her to the question of suicide and if it 's the only way to leave an era where her talents couldn 't be used right.

Formally women were taught at a young age to idolize men if they were gods or something. This was important because of the fact women were nothing without a male presence by their sides. Women in this time just kept the men happy, have food ready, and tend to the children while the men were doing labor. Also, women were dominated by males because they could vote, abuse , own land, etc. Men knew this and took advantage of it making it impossible for women to say anything or stand up for themselves. Next women needed a man to survive in this era if not they would be homeless or worse dead because they were basically not allowed to do anything. “ That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman, at strife against herself.”(699) For these reasons Judith would suicide because with her talent, it 's useless because of the domination of males and no say in what she wanted to