Women have been fighting against the traditional female role since the 1820s. Unhappy with their submissive family duty, women began to voice their discontent with the responsibilities forced upon them. The concern over societal limitations and professional industry for women grew. In Virginia Woolf’s speech “Professions for Women,” she utilizes metaphors and rhetorical questions to show how she was able to break the societal limitations placed on women and question women’s professional futures. Woolf utilizes metaphors to highlight the issues that women face with their jobs. For instance, when Woolf talks of her time as a writer, she explains how she always had the “Angel in the House,” who would negatively affect her writing. Woolf…show more content… After killing the “Angel in the House,” Woolf uses rhetorical questions to push her message further. Once societal limitations are killed, what then? What next? She questions, “What then remained?” This allows her to lead into the idea of a woman writer writing as herself. AGain a rhetorical question is posed, “...but what is herself? I mean, what is a woman?” These questions lead her to explain that no one knows who “herself “is. That only the person that is “herself” can let the world know who she is. Every woman is different, and once the angel is dead it is up to the women tor reveal their true selves, their thoughts, their opinions, their words to the world. When speaking of the metaphorical room that a woman can obtain in a man owned house, Woolf questions, “ How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to hare it, and upon what terms?” These questions lead the reader to ponder about how they can take their new freedom and make it their own, how will women take what they have fought for and change it to better suit them. Woolf wants women to think about their future beyond achieving the freedom to speak their
