How is the average woman portrayed in history books before the 18th century?

In the book, A Room of One's Own, Woolf gives an historical argument that lack of money and privacy have prevented women from writing with genius in the past. Without money, women are slavishly dependent on men; without privacy, constant interruptions block their creativity. Freedom of thought is hampered as women consume themselves with thoughts of gender. They write out of anger or insecurity, and such emotions make them think about themselves rather than about their subjects. Aphra Behn is the first female writer to earn her own money from writing. She paved the way for 19th-century novelists like Jane Austen who were able to write despite the lack of privacy in their family sitting-rooms. Woolf believes that contemporary female writers still generally operate out of anger or insecurity, but that in the future, with money and privacy, their minds will be freed and their genius will blossom.

Woolf also posits that men historically belittle women as a means of asserting their own superiority. In her metaphor of a looking-glass relationship, men, threatened by the thought of losing their power, reduce women to enlarge themselves.

Much of the book is also dedicated to an analysis of the patriarchal English society that has limited women's opportunity. Woolf reflects upon how men, the only gender allowed to keep their own money, have historically fed resources back into the universities and like institutions that helped them gain power in the first place; in contrast, the women's university the narrator stays at had to scrap together funds when it was chartered.