ABSTRACT
Writing in the 1920s Virginia Woolf provided her own answer to the question of why women are poorer than men: they were having children. A woman with children lacked the conditions to be a writer-money and privacy. When Woolf made such observations, she stood apart from her contemporaries by considering the economic status of women as a group separate from their husbands, fathers, and brothers. When others began to write about women in a similar way in the mid-twentieth century, evidence showed that a large proportion of them were classified as poor, defined as receiving income in an amount below government’s set limits.1
