Headline, September 13 2025/ HONOURS : ''' A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN '''

HONOURS : 

''' A ROOM OF ONE'S 

OWN '''

THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY RISES to give every woman and girl a standing ovation - and assure them the honour, dignity and respect and equal inclusion - by every student of the world.

IN AN AGE OF GROWING AWARENESS about who gets to speak and who remains unheard,  Virginia Woolf's call for A Room of One's Own still resonates.

Her extended essay, written nearly a century ago [ 1929 ], speaks not only about women's exclusion from Literature, but about a larger issue : the unequal distribution of intellectual authority.

Who gets to create knowledge? Whose ideas are preserved and celebrated? And, who is left out of conversation altogether?

PHILOSOPHY claims to seek truth, but what counts as truth - and who defines it has long been shaped by partial, gendered perspectives.

The History of knowledge is not just one of discovery, but also of exclusion : of deciding which voices are amplified, and which are ignored.

This is the central question of feminist epistemology, a field that asks how gender shapes the process of knowledge-making.

Prominent thinkers such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway remind us that what often passes as '' neutral '' truth reflects the social positions of those producing it.

Woolf anticipated these questions. She critiqued how intellectual traditions were built through a male lens. Her famous metaphor - that women need both money and a room of their own to write - was a demand for autonomy : space to think and create without the burden of male expectation.

IN A STRIKING SCENE in her essay, she recalls entering a library at OXFORD and finding shelves of books about women - almost all written by men.

WOMEN appear as subjects to be studied, not as thinkers in their own right.

She notices her notes becoming chaotic and fragmented, as though the disorder of sources infects the mind. A male student, by contrast, takes confident, orderly notes, his experience affirmed by centuries of tradition.

WOOLF captures what philosopher Miranda Fricker would later call epistemic injustice : the unfair treatment of someone as a knower. When certain perspectives are excluded, certain knowledge itself is diminished.

This is not a historical curiosity. In the Developing World, Woolf's insights remain urgent.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [ UNESCO ], reports that female literacy, say, in Pakistan and India is still below 50 per cent, compared to over 70 per cent for men.

Even among educated women, philosophy, history and science remain male-dominated fields.  Textbooks celebrate male poets, philosophers and leaders, but rarely highlight women as intellectual authorities or specify the causes of their systematic exclusion.

The absence has consequences. Just as Woolf faced a library filled with male-authored treatises on women.

Pakistani students often confront syllabi where women appear as topics of discussion, not as producers of knowledge. For young women searching for reflections of themselves in intellectual traditions, this silence can be stifling.

And, yet resistance persists. Global advocacy for girls' education, women scholars who challenge the patriarchal curricula, and journalists who carve out space for alternatives, narratives are all part of a long fight to claim intellectual authority.

But too often their contributions remain undervalued, treated as exceptions rather than as central to the mainstream. Except, of course, The World Students Society - for every subject in the world.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on ''Critical Voices That We Tend To Ignore,'' continues. !WOW! thanks Iqra Mangi, from Hyderabad, Pakistan.

With the most loving and respectful dedication to all the Women, and Girls of the world. See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless