Guineas and Locks

The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, by Alice S. Rossi. New York: Columbia University Press. 716 pp.

Guineas and locks, wrote Virginia Woolf, were two essential ingredients for creativity, and conditions virtually unobtainable for women. Alice Rossi’s anthology of The Feminist Papers informs me that a number of major feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Frederick Engels and Simone de Beauvoir have made that observation as well, each in their own way.

I have been making that observation, too, for as long as I can remember (in published research and private life, in prose and in hysterics). My female colleagues always nod and affirm, like a Greek chorus at the revelations and outbursts on t...