“It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because — this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one’s head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say, in the time of Elizabeth.
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived? I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan’s History of England. Once more I looked up Women, found ‘position of’ and turned to the pages indicated. ‘Wife-beating’, I read, ‘was a recognized right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low. . . . Similarly,’ the historian goes on, ‘the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the “chivalrous” upper classes. . . . Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses’ charge.’ That was about 1470, soon after Chaucer’s time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. ‘It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him.” (beginning of chapter three)

i think the main idea in chapter three would bring gender inequalities. The narrator brings up issues about inequalities between women and men being compared. The difference of statues and poverty, which affected mainly to women’s right of freedom. Woolf investigates women in the time of Elizabeth because she was frustrated that there were no women writers and that every man who were writers consider themselves amazing and great. Woolf is surprised that women had a few rights around the time of Elizabeth. And the difference between women’s lives as showed in the history books, that women were beaten up by their husbands. But does not find any thing about middle class women. The point of the passage is the inequality about men and women and the fact of how powerless women were if they got marry to the men, the men would become the lord or the master.

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This passage is from A Room of Ones Own Chapter 3 In the 5th paragraph. The paragraph began with ” A very queer, composite being thus emerges” .  Virginia Woolf then goes on to say “Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger” . My understanding of A Room of ones own so far is that the author is speaking to the injustices which were being done to women in those times. 

“imaginatively she is of the highest importance”

this statement helps helps me to understand that In those times In order for a woman to be of importance she could only have imagined it. I however do respect the fact that although women were not treated with the respect that they were deserving of , there was still an idea in their minds that they should be accepted and respected. “Practically she is completely insignificant “. In fact that statement confirms the thought that women were said to be of little or no relevance in those times. Though this passage is in reference to writing it signifies the notion that women were not recognized for their literary work, or looked at as intellectual beings. In the rest of the passage it mentions  her being present In history, dominating and conquering through her poetry. Women in those times could have absolutely been more intelligent than they were given credit for. Women were actually very significant , but treated in a way which made them unaware of their worth. This passage for me ties itself into the entire reading because it helps me to visualize the ongoing battle in which women fight with society.

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