Charlotte Perkins Gilmans Cupid in the Kitchen Essay -- Cupid

Charlotte Perkins Gilmans Cupid in the Kitchen As a reader in the 1990s its tempting to see Charlotte Perkins Gilmans Cupid in the Kitchen as revolutionary and ahead of its time. She proposes the complete professionalization of the nutritive and execretive functions of society, a radical, if not revolutionary notion. However, in the light of the fin-de-siecle birth of the modern womens rightist movement, Gilman is but one voice in m some(prenominal) crying for scotch and social justice for women. In effect, the rhetorical situation of 1898 demanded and created this discourse as it does all discourse (Bitzer 5). Gilmans Cupid is a natural and elegant response to the conditions which created it the keep surplus of unmarried women in Britain and America as verified by census data, and the persistent injustice of the forced domestic servitude of married women. peerless need only look as far as the literary productions of the 1890s to see that womens issues influenced the thinking of many intellectuals. The discourse of the period is obsessed with the square-toed roles for women, debate about suffrage, and considerations of what to do with all the odd women who couldnt find husbands. As early as 1860 census data indicated that more and more women were remain single and unmarried (Showalter viii). In an essay written for The Edinburgh Review Harriet Martineau argued that because at that place were not enough husbands to go around, girls should be educated and trained to be self-supporting (Showalter ix). By the end of the century the numbers of unmarried women wanting economic support reached crisis proportions. This event, as much or more than any other, precipitated the feminist movement of the late nineteenth an... ... surprise. Economics drove the rhetorical situation in which Cupid was produced as it drives the rhetorical situation in which we choke to Gilman for enlightenment now. Similarities in the rhetorical situations of reader, subject and author create the cat valium ground that makes Gilman seem so topical, but it is the clarity of her vision and the simplex logic of her proposition that makes her work so remarkable. Works Cited Bitzer, Lloyd F. The Rhetorical Situation. ism & Rhetoric 1.1 (1968) 1-14. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics Cupid in the Kitchen. A World of Ideas Essential Readings for College Writers. ed. lee side A. Jacobus (Boston St. Martins, 1990) 208-19. Showalter, Elaine. introduction. The Odd Women, by George Gissing (New York Pennguin, 1983) vii-xxvi. *