Woolf and the Velvet Underground

I usually do not like feminists or any strain of feminism, for similar reasons why I do not support campus movements for a multi-cultural center: both movements seem inherently to defeat their purposes of promoting equality and diversity. Feminism seeks to end male privilege by... advocating female privilege. A multi-cultural center seeks to promote diversity by... confining international students in their own special interest building. However, I didn't mind Ms. Woolf.
She was sensible in her arguments, often balancing her "Women have served... as looking glasses... reflecting the figure of man a twice its natural size (2110)" statements with those like "All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame (2146)." She does not let her observations on women lead to an overarching, patriotic call to arms for the empowerment of women worldwide. And for this I am thankful.
But it isn't her sensibility that makes me like Virginia - rather, it is this that keeps me from disliking Virginia. She befriends me when she sentimentalizes "reality," the reality that "overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech (2149)." Hers is a sensitive reality, that which quietly transcends the clamoring parlor talk of certain Granvilles and Percys. And to her, experiencing and concentrating this reality in the written word is the most notable job of the author: "to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us (2149)."
This is, I think, a power of the arts which is absent in most other studies - the power to overwhelm you in that lucid feeling of transcendence which arises after you read good literature, listen to a good song, watch a good movie: the power to, if only for a moment, redefine your reality. It's in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; Fitzgerald's letters to his wife, Zelda; Camus' The Stranger; Eliot's The Cocktail Party; the movie American Beauty; the song Heroin by the Velvet Underground; paintings by Edward Hopper - at least for me.
For Ms. Woolf, no doubt, it was in a room of one's own, reading Shakespeare.