Asked to give a lecture on the "topic" of women and fiction to students at a women’s college, Virginia Woolf begins not with a complicated analysis of the "problem" but rather with a bit of practical advice: she advises them to drink wine and have a room of their own. Why?

Woolf is making the argument that women are not producing literature at the same rate as men—especially good literature—because they lack economic resources. In the 1920s, when she was writing her essay, it was often argued that women didn't achieve as much as men because of natural inferiority and lack of intelligence. Woolf emphatically wants to show this is untrue. She does this, in part, by comparing, step by step, a well-endowed men's college, that can afford good food, good wine, and comfortable quarters, to a much more austere women's college, stretching its resources to cover the basics.
Woolf's argument is that creating and producing good literature takes uninterrupted time, which includes privacy. Until women get rooms of their own in which to work and some money (symbolized by the wine the men drink at their college), they can't fully develop their talents. Woolf wants women to come out of the idealistic clouds and to face up to and battle their collective poverty in comparison to men so that they have the resources to become the people they can be. Though she controls it, Woolf is very angry at the way men have appropriated most of society's resources and fail to share them equitably with the women who helped make gathering the resources possible.