A psychological room of your own?

It is 50 years since an article entitled A Room of One’s Own by Doris Lessing was published.

It is more than 80 years since Virginia Woolf wrote her iconic essay of the same name.

It is also 40 years this year since Virago Books started championing female writers.

In 2013, has the story for women changed?

‘Outside was the noisy quarrel, the commotion of the street market, the world barging its way through the thin, blue curtains into the inner sanctum of a writer’s room and writer’s mind – sparking a nightmare where peace once slept’.

Doris Lessing’s vivid picture of security and insecurity, of real and imagined memories, in her feature essay ‘A Room Of One’s Own’ was republished last week by The New Statesman, 50 years after its original outing.

A year before, in 1962, Lessing’s novel “The Golden Notebook” had been hailed a feminist bible.

The Golden Notebook is famous for invoking the spirit of Virginia Woolf; and just as Woolf exhorted in her own original and iconic essay female writers needed to have ‘A Room of One’s Own’, here Lessing had found a physical space of her own.

It gave Lessing the mental freedom to let her thoughts flow – both peaceful and disturbing.

Women, as underlined by a report this week in the Daily Telegraph, still take on the lion’s share of domestic duties along with paid employment.

And statistics show that women are twice as lightly as men to have depression.

What women now need is the peaceful psychological room rather than an actual physical one.

For 80 years after Woolf wrote her essay, and 40 years, this year, after Virago Books was set up, male writers still outstrip women both in literature and media as the VIDA count for 2012 shows.

The two issues of women writers not being as prominent as men, and women being twice as likely to have depression, could emanate from the same source: the absence of any clear thinking space as women’s lives are crowded by the ‘busy-ness’ of it all.

Journalist Allison Pearson has talked about her own battle with depression and that she has fallen foul of sandwich woman, the woman caught between the generations of being home provider, and career woman.

She asked: “Is it women who are mad, or is it the society we live in? We always suspected there would be a price for Having It All, and we were happy to pay it; but we didn’t know the cost would be our mental health.”

Kira Cochrane in her exploration of why women should be twice as susceptible to the ‘black dog’ as men, quotes psychologist Dorothy Rowe saying: “Now, says Rowe, while women are still often seen as mothers rather than individuals, there are many more pressures at play.

“There’s still this idea that you’ve got to be a wonderful mother, but you also have to have a brilliant career, and you’ve got to look attractive all the time,” she said.

“There is no way that you can maintain that and bring up children. But it’s still being presented to women all the time, in every magazine, on every screen, that you should.”

Virginia Woolf talked about Shakespeare’s sister, who died young but never wrote a word because she never had the opportunity.

Woolf said: “Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives.

“She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.

“But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”

Shakespeare’s sister lives in Lessing, and she found space for her in her flat, where her bedroom becomes her place to think.

“I spend a lot of time in the bedroom. Bed is the best place for reading, thinking or doing nothing. It is my room; it is where I feel I live – though the shape is bad and there are things about it that can never be anything but ugly.”

A metaphor then for the mind, too.

From her apartment, Lessing can hear the Swedish woman upstairs, who has an obsession with cleaning, and dresses ‘like a bride’ when her husband returns from trips abroad.

Lessing is separate from her, pursuing a different life from that strand of domesticity, but she is glad the other woman is there, acknowledging their dual existence and sisterhood.

“I think of her and of myself, lying horizontally above each other, as if we were on two shelves,” Lessing wrote.

In the afternoons Lessing takes a nap, entering a dream world where vivid images and loose connections ultimately informed her writing.

While most naps were benign, she recounts how one occasion left her feeling frightened and lonely, how the room she had lovingly painted took on a different, faded hue.

“I was alone in the room, though someone was next door: I could hear sounds that made me unhappy, apprehensive. From upstairs a laugh, hostile to me.”

She was part of the world, but apart from it.

The nightmare stayed with her, but she was never to revisit that particular room again.

But what Lessing vividly articulates, thousands of women can identify with – lives lived in a crowded world, but ones that at their core have moments – and for some, many years – of intense loneliness and fear; and how if women break from the expected norm of provider, domestic worker, supporter of partner, they can become outsiders.

Woman as “all things to all men” is still firmly fixed in society’s mindset.

As Cochrane pointed out in another Guardian article, the feminist book press has made an impact.

However, there is still a long search and mass spring clean of sexism and stereotyping to be had, before women can truly find their own sacred room of their own.

A place where women are free to dream, and where the outside world stays beyond the thin, blue curtains.