Social inequality occurs when certain resources such as wealth, privilege, and social justice of societies are distributed unequally, affecting more people than us let's not think so. Frederick Douglass and Virginia Woolf are two very influential writers who suffered from these inequalities and used their literacy skills to relay information and reality to their readers in order to change the way people are perceived. Specifically, Douglass wrote an autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in hopes of gaining more rights for African Americans, and in A Room of One's Own, Woolf focused on introducing the unequal treatment of women around the world. the public eye. Aiming to help two different groups of individuals, these two writers still share many characteristics and tactics; as well as differences when reading their writings. Later in this essay, these similarities and differences will be expressed in more depth, as well as how these two writers may have helped shape the way people are perceived today. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayDouglass and Woolf both come from completely different backgrounds, but still found a way to fight for similar causes to during the changing years of the world's past. . Douglass was born in the 19th century directly into slavery. This allowed Douglass to ground his narrative in his past and the personal encounters he faced while held within the confines of slavery. Douglass was heavily criticized for exaggerating the truth, claiming that slaves were not really as evil as he had written. This is made possible by the fact that he is a slave in Maryland, where slavery tends to be less extreme, and he was actually able to secretly learn to read and write from the plantation owner's wife . Nevertheless, he was still a slave, treated poorly and facing the same degrading psychological trauma that other slaves would have suffered. In fact, "white speakers on his circuit patronized him, urging him to concentrate only on his own life story, because Garrison suggested that a black man was not capable of analyzing slavery as a large-scale social problem” (232). . Douglass broke the boundaries of the Garrison organization (an anti-slavery organization) by not sugar-coating the true reality he faced while enslaved, so he would not have started his own anti-slavery newspaper. slaveholder and might not have been as successful during the campaign. to end school segregation. He did not let slavery stop him from striving to help create a better life for African Americans and continued to break many boundaries that many African Americans would attempt to cross. For example, "When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Douglass led efforts to persuade Congress to allow African American men to enlist in the Union Army" (233), this would mean that he was ready to fight alongside the white men. to help fight for black suffrage against the South. Virginia Woolf was a 20th century feminist writer who also broke many of society's boundaries. She went against many of the social rules that women had to obey, which was very impressive to her readers since she too was oppressed by the boundaries created by men and society. She saw how womenwere considered an inferior sex compared to men and built its entire position on the idea that women will have difficulty breaking through the constraints that prevent them from being on the same economic level as men. More specifically, she wanted to express the difficulties a woman writer would face. "A woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction, and this, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved." (339). She even writes about an incident in which she was arrested at the library. “A depreciation, silvery and kind gentleman, who regretted in a low voice while beckoning me to respond that ladies are only admitted to the library if they are accompanied by a member of the College or provided with a letter of introduction” (342). She believed that women could not have the same impact as other successful male writers, due to the power men held in society. She wrote that if women had the same resources as men, there would be female versions of people like Shakespeare. For example, Woolf creates a fictional character, Judith Shakespeare. She imagines Judith as the sister who never had the same opportunity as Shakespeare himself. “This woman, born with a gift for poetry in the 16th century, was therefore an unhappy woman… All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts were hostile to the state of mind necessary to liberate all that there is in the brain” (367). Like Douglass, she was also willing to break boundaries in order to express the limitations of African Americans and women around the world. As can be seen, both of these writers are determined to make a difference in terms of social power, even though they know that they are both focusing on two different specific groups, but they can both help both causes. For example, Douglass was also a supporter of gender suffrage and not just racial suffrage, as the biography of Frederick Douglass shows: "In 1848 he attended the women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, and he became a staunch defender of women’s suffrage” (233). [ER1]They also share differences in their textual tactics. For example, Virginia Woolf uses her long essay in a way that is constructed as a partly fictionalized account of the events she experienced while developing her thesis. While Douglass, on the other hand, seems to resort more to non-fiction when describing past personal events, as he is aware that he is angered by the powerful voice of white writers telling Douglass that he should not not exaggerate his past as a slave, which could imply that he was angered by the fact that people believed in the real evils that slaves faced. “The motto I adopted when I left slavery was: 'Trust no man!' “I saw in every white man an enemy and in almost every colored man a source of distrust” (284). Even that being said, if both writers used fiction or exaggeration in their writing, it helped to grab the reader's attention, allowing their expression of belief to be seen by others. Their ability to present personal issues from the first person perspective helps the reader perceive the writer's purpose and ideology from the personal perspective they share. That said, there is sometimes a somewhat romanticized tone when Douglass or Woolf possibly withholds information that would cause readers to perceive their words from a different perspective, but on the other hand, this aspect allows for deeper insight into.