Before the Second World War and long before the second wave of feminism, Virginia Woolf argued that women’s experience, particularly in the women’s movement, could be the basis for transformative social change.

In her book A Room of One’s Own, Woolf “describes how men socially and psychically dominate women”. The argument of the book is that “women are simultaneously victims of themselves as well as victims of men and are upholders of society by acting as mirrors to men”. She recognizes the social constructs that restrict women in society and uses literature to contextualize it for other women.