Paragraph Summaries
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer in the Social Darwinism movement. This group tried to apply Darwin’s ideas of evolution to society.
One group believed Darwin’s ideas meant human society had to be competitive. But an activist group of Social Darwinists thought that changes in human society could lead to collective action instead of competition. - Gilman was in the activist group and thought society could change to be cooperative. One of her ideas is that we have the capability as humans to consciously direct our own social evolution.
In fact Gilman believe we have an ethical responsibility to direct our evolution. She focussed on work. One of a person’s ethical responsibilities is to find relevant work that uses the person’s talents. - Gilman wasn’t arguing in a vacuum. She argued people should actually change. She wanted women to take more forward roles, and reshape society to be more cooperative and nurturing. Male traits such as aggression had once been necessary but now weren’t.
Analysis
This passage may seem a bit dry and abstract. I suspect you may have found the third paragraph the most engaging, as it hits upon something we still debate in the present: what is the role of women in the workforce? What is the role of “feminine” traits such as cooperation, as opposed to competition?
The whole passage leads towards this, but the first two paragraphs can seem more removed from the present day, as social darwinism is utterly dead as an intellectual movement.
If this described your experience of the passage, then I would recommend the following: once you reach a point where some ideas become clearer, go back and reskim the earlier paragraphs. They will be easier to understand once you have that hook from the final paragraph.
The main points of Gilman’s beliefs and works are:
- She wrote both fiction and non-fiction
- Her work wasn’t Darwinian science per se. Rather, she was inspired by Darwin to make arguments about how to organize society.
- She believed we could guide our own evolution (paragraph 2), that we humans have enough capacity to do so consciously.
- It is an individual’s duty to make themselves useful by finding work that suits them
- Gilman was practical: she wanted people and society to actually change
- She wanted women to move forward in re-organizing society. She wanted genderless work roles, and an increase in stereotypically feminine values such as cooperation and nurture.
- Gilman thought modern times enabled this gender neutrality. In the end of paragraph 3, she says that male traits had once been necessary for social progress, but now weren’t.
Unusually, this passage requires you to know a fair bit of detail. Most of the questions can roughly be described as “What does Gilbert think” or “what does the author say”. I’d say each half of each paragraph has at least one key fact, so 6-7 key facts total. You need to make use of all of them on the questions. LSAC seems to be mixing things up on recent RC passages: knowing at least where details are and having a vague recall of them may become more important.
A note on the darker side of Social Darwinism
Incidentally, one of the reasons Social Darwinism is dead and Gilman is largely forgotten is that Social Darwinism often strayed into eugenics and racism. For example, Gilman argued for “enlistment” of African-Americans, a system of forced labor that sounds like it was enslavement by another name. (This is from Wikipedia, not the passage).
Social Darwinist ideas disappeared after World War II. The Nazis openly embraced eugenics, and thoroughly discredited it and anyone who had argued for similar ideas.
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