I’m almost at the final leg of the seminar course I’ve been teaching at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. While I enjoy my students, comprising mostly those pursuing either their Bachelor or Masters’ at the Faculty of Art and Design, I remain a bit surprised by the total lack of any form of feminist instruction in their curriculum. It’s a mighty large void that my course is presumably meant to fill. Eighteen hours is not enough time to even begin to address the topic of my seminar: Gender Equity and Equality in Working Life Situations. It’s hard to imagine that skills that are so vital, particularly in a post #MeToo world, are only meant to be spoken about or addressed in the space of this course, making it seem tokenistic. I could conceive of a class of primarily white European students not having heard of a black lesbian feminist like Audre Lorde, but for them to not even have heard of Virginia Woolf feels unsettling. If it was another field of study, like computing or engineering or even economy, I could explain such a glaring lack. But how to justify art and design students arriving at the level of a Master’s degree without knowing even the name of one of the Western world’s most pioneering feminists?

I was excited to be the one to introduce them to Woolf through an excerpt from the lecture she gave to female college students, titled “A Room of One’s Own”, in which she speaks, among other things, about what it meant for her to have inherited 500 pounds a year after an aunt of hers died in Bombay from injuries sustained from a horse-riding accident. Having a stable income at a time when women had limited livelihood options was nothing short of empowering, and it even helped her temper any contempt she otherwise may have held for the male species, offering her the luxury of perspective, which inflects her lecture. Woolf, if anyone, knew the shame of gatekeeping, or being disallowed to enter the library on account of one’s sex, thus being forbidden access to knowledge, which, in any case, was the accumulation of centuries of male thinking. Her writing is still relevant because it was able to locate patriarchy’s role within a nexus of oppression that included colonisation and subjugation of subjectivities, making it intersectional. The kind of gatekeeping she spoke about, led by male supremacist beliefs, continues in various forms around the world.