A Room of One's Own, Chapt 5 (Virginia Woolf)

(I'm not sure how I got through undergrad without reading this, but it's pretty amazing. Especially for it's time. Some prose for ya, to get the weekend started. You must understand, these ideas can be applied to all kinds of jobs/ways of life, not just writing. She is describing a whole system of inaccessibility and denial and contempt/scorn/hate. I'll stop ranting and let her speak for herself...)

All these relationships between women, I thought, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at in in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that; and how little can a ma know even of that when he observes it though the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity... Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.