"Raising the Dust" identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls literary housekeeping. The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to set the human household in order.
To Mary Augusta Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, housekeeping represented public responsibilities: making the food supply safe, reforming politics, and improving the human race itself. "Raising the Dust" places their writing in the context...

"Raising the Dust" identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls literary housekeeping. The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to set the human household in order.
To Mary Augusta Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, housekeeping represented public responsibilities: making the food supply safe, reforming politics, and improving the human race itself. "Raising the Dust" places their writing in the context...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most famous novel makes a sardonic commentary on American culture through its depiction of a society without men.