Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (review)

Raising the Dust takes its title from a passage in Sarah Grand's 1894 "The New Aspect of the Woman Question" where an extended metaphor of housecleaning is used to illustrate a distinctly female approach to social reform. "It is for us to set the human household in order," Grand explains, "to see that all is clean and sweet and comfortable for the men who are fit to help us make a home in it" (qtd. in Sutton-Ramspeck 23). Within a definition of "household" that is expansive enough to accommodate at least the British nation and its larger Empire, cleansing rituals certainly take on a more public function than we might normally perceive, and it is here that Sutton-Ramspeck develops her argument. Rather than evince covert antifeminism or conservative backlash, housekeeping tropes and terminology in the literary productions of Grand, Mary Ward, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman articulate a vision of domestic cleanliness as a form of civic participation and even activism. "Literary housekeeping" is the term Sutton-Ramspeck coins to describe an understanding of female domestic labor that exceeds the boundaries of the individual household, "sweeping away" traditional divisions between public and private, personal and political, artistic and practical, and even British and American (3).

As Sutton-Ramspeck herself notes, the explosion of these dichotomies is hardly new practice in literary studies, and recent feminist criticism in particular has consistently pointed out the inadequacies and contradictions endemic to such categorization. But by reminding us that home economics, as a discipline, was very feminist in its origins, and was designed to reveal the fundamental link between the economy of the middle-class household and the economy of the nation, Sutton-Ramspeck manages to take a fresh look at housekeeping as a paradigmatic feminist activity. Sweeping away such boundaries also enables her to focus exclusively on Ward, Grand, and Gilman, three female writers not usually discussed in the same study, and encourages readers to understand "literary housekeeping" as both a genre of literature and a deconstructive tool. As Sutton- Ramspeck points out, the most productive periods in the lives of each of these writers roughly coincide, not only with each other, but with the eugenics movement, the "house beautiful" movement, the rise of print advertising, and the decline in available domestic labor for hire. These cultural events provide interdisciplinary context for Sutton- Ramspeck's carefully researched argument that all three writers fundamentally believed that women's natural talents for household tasks like sewing, cooking, cleaning, and mothering could successfully solve a variety of social problems, from food adulteration, to bad sanitation, to sexually transmitted disease.

Sutton-Ramspeck's goal is to demonstrate that these writers participated in the same cultural project, and she organizes her book to promote a sense of continuity rather than difference, devoting chapters to various aspects of housekeeping rather than to individual authors. While richly productive in some respects, this strategy fosters a degree of repetition in the volume and leads her to diminish salient distinctions between English and American contexts. It also causes her thesis to wane whenever it proves difficult to get these three diverse voices on the same page. To highlight their differences, Sutton- Ramspeck identifies three "approaches" in her literary housekeepers' work: the parabolic, the exemplary, and the dialogic. While Grand inspires through parable, and Gilman through modeling or "example," Ward unveils her political interests through the "clash of ideologies" found in dialogic writing (23). This classification of Ward reveals some of the real difficulties involved in including her in this study: she is the most unlikely member of the threesome, primarily because her status as a feminist is undercut both by her anti-suffrage stance and by the disappointing marriages that often conclude her novels. On the other hand, Ward's lifelong activism allows Sutton-Ramspeck to chart her involvement, interestingly if unevenly, in cultural movements with which we...