Women, Mental Freedom & Libraries

"Virginia Wolf in A Room of One's Own had a vision that someday young women would have access to the rich forbidden libraries of the men's colleges, their sunken lawns, their vellum, the claret light. She believed that would give young women a mental freedom that must have seemed all the sweeter from where she imagined it: the wrong side of the beadle's staff that had driven her away from the library because she was female."

In: The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, p. 181.