There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon—one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go …

From “The Mark on the Wall,” by Virginia Woolf

When Virginia Woolf was writing this short story in the 1930’s, “the masculine point of view” was governing people’s lives and so far, it has not been “laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go.”  Yet women have made great progress. A few days ago, my daughter remarked about an old TV series where the secretaries were expected to serve coffee to their bosses and tolerate sexual innuendos and even advances.  Now a secretary might tell her boss, “Get it yourself” and avoid punishment.  Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go.