How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Let us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become a writer, painter or scholar. "See what Mr. Oscar Browning says," he would say; and there was not only Mr. Oscar Browning [...] there was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. (3.13)
This is about the exact opposite of telling your daughter that she can be anything she wants to be. What's worse, Woolf says, is that "body of masculine opinion" is exactly that—opinion. No facts involved.
Quote #5
Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. (4.32)
Pot, meet kettle. Is Woolf being an "eternal pedagogue" too, or does she stop short of telling people what to write and think?
Quote #6
There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures, neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper. (5.9)
You can't measure a housewife—although maybe by now the nice folks who make the SAT have figured out a way to do this. So, here's a thought: should we even want women's lives to be more measurable?