Virginia Woolf, who described those osbtacles with shrewdness and humor in 2 of her books, was asked to speak on wmn and creation in 1925. She called her lecture "A Room of one's own" which became the title of her most famous essay in which she developed her well-known theory on Shakespeare's sister. She said if Shksp. had had a sister as gifted as he was, she wld have been so thwarted, so paralyzed by her family, by society, by traditions that she wld have committed suicide, become insane, or wld have ended her life in a hut, half witch, half sorceress. But in no case could she have developed her genius.

In fact, being a witch was one of the only escapes of women during the Middle Ages, one of the ways of conquering a certain power and indepce. We know to-day what happened to these subversive females. Through recent enquires, we know that 9 million at least of those so-called witches had been burnt at the stake between 1486 and 1700 in Europe, after the instructions of Pope Inn. VIII. Joan of Arc was one of them: it's not as an enemy or as a war prisoner that she was burnt, it's as a witch. And witches were essentially females - 2% only of men chose that risky career. They had a choice. They had other solutions. Wmn had very few. Medical schools for instance who had been opened to them in early times were forbidden in 1380 and