“[At the British Museum] For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word [in the time of Shakespeare] when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; (...) [In] Professor Trevelyan's History of England [one can read that] wife-beating [or daughter-beating] was a recognized right of man (...) [A woman] could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband [or father]. Here I am asking why women did not write poetry in the Elisabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were 21; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; (...) they were married whether they liked it or not (...) at fifteen or sixteen very likely... [Under these circumstances] It would have been extremely odd (...) for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. (...) When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet (...). Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anom, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. (...) And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly.” PatriarchyMysogynyFear Of WomenInvisibility Of WomenWomen Property Of Men Book:A Room of One’s Own Source: A Room of One’s Own