Virginia Woolf's extended essay A Room of One's Own, published in London in October 1929 and based on lectures delivered at Newnham and Girton Colleges at Cambridge, made the foundational argument that women's creative output had been stunted not by lack of talent but by lack of material resources — including money, private space, and freedom from domestic and bodily obligation. Woolf used the figure of Shakespeare's imaginary sister to trace the structural barriers to women's literary production, barriers that included the physical and social constraints of femininity.

Woolf's argument that women needed freedom from constraint — both material and bodily — to write great literature is the literary-critical equivalent of a half-century of feminist campaigning against the corset. Her concept of 'incandescence' — the creative mind freed from bitterness and self-consciousness — implicitly required bodily freedom as its precondition. The essay is the most influential single critical text connecting women's physical and social conditions to their literary production.