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Most critics analyze “A Woman on a Roof” from the perspective of feminism, and some critics also discuss about the political issues from the story, such as class conflicts. Doris Lessing herself once said that “What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, ‘Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle towards the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.’ Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.” (Hazelton 3)
The topics and implied meanings in “A Woman on a Roof” cannot be simply summed up by feminism. In “A Calling for Equality”, Peng Runrun believes that, “On the one hand, the story implies the silent woman on the roof as a representation of women with the awakening female consciousness, on the other hand, it also sharply reveals the hard life of the three male workers through a variety of comparative symbolism and comparison techniques, which, from another point of view, indicates Lessing’s humanitarian concerns. Her characters are always living in the margins of society, like women, people of colors and the elderly.” (Peng Runrun 17)
Wen Jianlan in his “The Analysis of Feminist-Thought in the Works of Doris Lessing’s ‘A Woman on a Roof’” pointed out a wider topic that Lessing is talking about finding a proper way for interactions between men and women, with which I mostly agree. Wen believes that Lessing made an incisive description on the contradiction between gender relations. She not only focused on the state of women but also paid close attention to the intense relationship between men and women. “In this story, they are on different rooftops from a certain point of view where a distance of about 15 yards is. The gender conflict and the social distance baffle the communication and understanding between men and women, showing the difficulty in cross-gender communication. Lessing does not treat her works with a radical vision; she is usually in a dialectical development of the vision to see the problem and feels free to adjust the angles of looking at things.” (Wen Jianlan 662)
Similarly, Li Cong made the following comments in his “An Interpretation of Doris Lessing’s Female Images”: “Nowadays, some researchers begin to use Post-Modernism and Structuralism to analyze Lessing’s works, and even ecological feminism implied in Lessing’s works to demonstrate more conceivable ideas, which expands the domestic scholars’ knowledge on Lessing. Feminism is not just a literary theory that promotes female independence and asks for female rights, but also a method that gives Lessing a guidance to lubricate the relationship of two sexes in our modern society.” (Li Cong 132)
1.2 Female Consciousness and Women’s literature
As the subject in the objective world, female self-consciousness of status, influence and values is a personal motivation to stimulate women’s pursuit for independence, freedom, initiation and creativity. It creates a sense of rights and obligations and provides motive forces for actions different from what Marxist or feminist theory generally tries to explain. To be specific, female consciousness means that women wake up from the domination of men and start to achieve their personal obligations, social responsibilities and historical missions; meanwhile, they know their natural attributes well which are inborn and different from men, and take active part in social activities in their own ways.
Women’s literature or writing is a discrete area of literary study based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their gender, and so women writers are forming a group worthy of specific study: “Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men.” (Blain, Virginia, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements 89) Due to the political, economic, cultural and spiritual aspects of life, female consciousness exhibits different connotations at different stages of historical development, which is also a fundamental source for women’s literature. With the further exploration of female consciousness and the development of civilization, women's literature is in the progress and reaches a higher level.