Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lillian S. Robinson

Critical Essay by Lillian S. Robinson

SOURCE: “Killing Patriarchy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Murder Mystery, and Post-Feminist Propaganda,” in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2, fall, 1991, pp. 273-85.

In the following essay, Robinson discusses Gilman's detective novel Unpunished as a political novel.

In one of Nicole Hollander's delightful “Sylvia” cartoons, that dumpy, middle-aged standard bearer of feminist wisdom assigns a writing exercise: use the word “post-feminism” in a sentence. Sylvia's typically caustic paragraph-for-completion goes something like this: “The manuscript took me a lot longer than anticipated, and it was so late by the time I got it done that I had to rush it off post-feminism.”¹ In this version, then, and with tongue very much in cheek, “post-feminism” is rather like Federal Express, a mode, if not a means, of communication.

Putting another spin on the joke, novelist Valerie Miner says that the term “post-feminism” always conjures up an image in her...
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