Views & Opinions
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Posted on March 26, 2015
When I got sick (three tumours in my throat, five-and-a-half-hour surgery, months of painful medical leave), I set up a blog called teamgloria.com. The instant connection with strangers, who cared, was mind-blowing. Suddenly, I had somewhere to go (virtually, because I was housebound) in the awful dark hours of the night when I couldn’t stop crying. And having a space to be heard made me feel empowered. After a while, I realised that having a place of your own online is a modern feminist statement.
Virginia Woolf, in her 1929 essay A Room Of One’s Own, said every woman needs a place where they can dream, write and create. She was talking about the importance for female writers of solitude, space and an income. But the analogy of a room – where you own the key – translates brilliantly to digital, and to the current feminist debate. The web allows women to speak up when something is wrong, or illegal, or, more positively, utterly brilliant. This is the first time this has happened.
My own experience made me realise we all need a room of our own to tell the unfettered truth about our lives. If you don’t have a voice on the internet, you don’t have a place in the future. You don’t take part in the conversation about how the world is run. It’s equivalent to not voting.
After returning from medical leave, I realised it was time to leave the safety of the corporate world, to build my own business. So, one night, I created sophiastuart.com and have been slowly discovering how I want to represent myself in the digital world ever since. Sharing my own thoughts online is liberating – and affirming. It’s given me a chance to sit back and figure out what I care about and where I’m going next.
When I work with female executives who want to reinvent themselves, the first thing I make them do is set up a site. If Virginia Woolf were alive today, she’d be encouraging women to do the same. She’d have set up a site with an online shop to sell her backlist. After all, Woolf set up Hogarth Press in 1917 to privately publish her own work. Which makes her the first female writer to self-publish and, through her diaries, essentially the world’s first blogger. So, if you don’t want to follow in my footsteps, follow in hers.
Sophia Stuart is the author of How To Stay Sane In A Crazy World (Hay House, £10.99) and runs The Digital Check Up (thedigitalcheckup.com) in LA.
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