Controlling Women with Hunger: Intellectual Starvation in A Room of One’s Own Gloria Endicott College

The social roles of women during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime restricted half the world’s population from developing individual purpose and meaning within their lives. The burgeoning of suffrage and equality brought on a new horizon of philosophy regarding the function of women as equally capable humans. Masked as a ploy to ‘save women from themselves’, dieting, corsets, having children, and giving up passions and pleasure become the primary force behind controlling their behavior and directing their futures. The intellectual starvation women face directly ties to the physical starvation encouraged by our patriarchal society. The rushed meal Woolf describes at Fernham becomes the illustration of spiritual and intellectual starvation of womankind. The fact remains, hungry women only think about food. Woolf perfectly captures the idea that surviving is not living through the style and pacing in her writing, illustrating the inequity among men and women. Women starve themselves in order to socially survive, making this type of appetite control most relevant when it comes to marriage.

Although ‘ideal’ body types have slightly changed throughout human history, controlling one’s appetite remains a prominent treatment for weight loss....