Virginia Woolf's writing lodge, Monk's House, Sussex, 1921-1941Virginia Woolf's writing room at Monk's House in Sussex.  Originally a tool shed, evidently it was full of garden distractions in the summer, cold and damp in the winter.  But it was hers.  And her £500 a year income was inherited from her aunt.

She wrote in A Room of One's Own, 'Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time'.

Like the vote, we have so many of the material things that people around the world are dying to achieve. and we do so little with them.