0 I believe Virginia Woolf best says it on page, 216, posing us women the question

of “[a]re you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? . . .
It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently . . . one confined to the male sex.”
Everything a woman does, is to better Mankind, not Human Kind or Human beings, but
Mankind. When she slaves all day over the stove, cooking a meal, she did it for her
husband to keep him well fed. When she spends all day at work (tailoring clothes,
providing day care, etc.), it was so that her husband need not work as hard. As talked
about on slide 2 of the lecture, an image is a way someone saw and interpreted reality.
[This] is linked to knowledge and belief, [which then] shapes the image or representation.
Women have always been seen, through images, as housewives, care-givers, mothers,
delicate, fragile girls, or temptresses or raw sexuality. When a woman of creative genius
breaks that norm, “typically, however, creative women were omitted from the historical
record on the grounds that their works were inferior to the works of men of failed to
address topics of ‘universal’ concern (pg xxii, Creating Women Anthology)” and
unfortunately become “invisible as real women (lecture slide 12).”
When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, would you say that her novella failed to
address a universal topic that all men of that time discussed? She was poignant in her
works, her writings were well thought and backed with an arsenal of intellect. While
accepted in her writers group, Shelley well knew that her works would not be accepted if
they had been written by a man. Virginia Woolf makes reference to this on page 218 as
she discusses many of the great female authors who were forced to assume a male
pseudonym: “It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women
even so late as the nineteenth century. [T]hus they did homage to the convention, which
if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them . . ., that publicity in
women is detestable.” Despite the occurring theme of how despicable it was for a
woman to express herself creatively and openly to the world, by showing Mankind that
she was not just a porcelain doll to be placed in a box on a shelf. Our foremothers, even
though penned under a male pseudonym, showed the world, in a secret sort of way, that
women were not just air-filled toys. We have thoughts, and emotions, and are able to
comprehend morality and rationality in the same way a man can.