A Room of One's Own

On pages 37-39 of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf begins to describe the importance of a woman having an individual income by explaining how the state of mind of the narrator changed upon receiving an inheritance.
The narrator says that she received news of her inheritance shortly after women had finally succeeded at acquiring the right to vote. However, even to the narrator, a thoughtful, world-wise woman, the money seemed the more important of the two discoveries. The sum, 500 pounds a year, was not extravagant, but merely enough to live comfortably and free from worries of poverty. This security was of the utmost importance to the woman as it allowed her the freedom to move beyond the day-to-day struggle to make a suitable income, and truly consider her own ambitions.
At this point, the narrator takes a moment to criticize the working world for women, mentioning how incredibly few possibilities exist for the semi-respectable woman. Her options are constrained to menial supportive tasks or nurturing children. The only jobs that were deemed fit for women were those that perpetuated the stereotype of women as nurturers or inferior assistants to men. The narrator describes the bitterness that these jobs engender by in women by forcing them to work in demeaning tasks, and also forcing them to use flattery instead of merit to excel at a position.
But as soon as the narrator had a fixed income, she said that this bitterness faded. When she was no longer directly confronting the issues faced by poor women, she forgot about them and was more content to accept the circumstances as regrettable but immovable. In some ways this seems like an indictment of Virginia Woolf herself. Woolf was not poor, and did not have to work to support herself. Therefore it is possible that in this passage she is really examining her own feelings, and wondering if her isolation from working women keeps her from working towards women’s reform as arduously as possible. It seems that she is urging all women to pay more attention to the plight of working women, instead of letting their own circumstances veil the bitterness that all women should feel.
Even when the narrator has gained her independence, she is still not truly an accomplished person. She did not do anything to earn her income, and therefore is still owes her independence to someone else. But Woolf seems to be saying that this kind of good fortune is necessary for a woman to excel in her own direction and follow her own ambition. She needs the freedom to think and act on her own accord. Also, it is only when the narrator has been liberated from daily labor that she begins to tolerate men without resentment, and only when she is free of that resentment that she is able to ‘see the sky’, or look at the world through a clear, unaltered perspective.