PrepTest 149, Section 2, Question 25
The novelist and social theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman,(435 more words not shown)
The passage gives evidence that(16 more words not shown)
- Bfiction(1 more words not shown)
- Cinternational(1 more words not shown)
- Dreligious(1 more words not shown)
- Ecombative personality(1 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
An instrument of social progress is something Gilman could use to help bring that progress about. We know she wants women to work toward reorganizing society. How does she encourage them? The third paragraph tells us: she does so in both her fiction and her social theory.
What we’re looking for
That is stronger evidence than simply noticing that she was a novelist. A person can write novels without using them to promote social change. Here we are told what her writing is meant to accomplish, which supplies the connection the question needs.
Working the answers
- A
The reference to work does not establish a claim about industrialization. Factories or the growth of industry could be relevant to some account of social change, but they are not identified as Gilman's instrument here.
- BCorrect
Her stories and theoretical writings both encourage women to advance society's development (paragraph 3). Her fiction carries an appeal for collective efforts to reorganize society. That makes writing fiction a way of promoting the progress she values, not merely an occupation she happens to have.
- C
International travel is not connected to her program. We are not told that visiting other countries helps people achieve the changes she advocates.
- D
Religious training is not discussed as a means of advancing those changes.
- E
Combat does appear, so the timing matters. Gilman thinks assertiveness, combat, and display once helped a complex society develop. The question asks about progress in her time, when she calls for a restored balance including cooperation and nurturance. A trait's usefulness in an earlier period does not make it the tool she is now urging people to rely on. Nor should we turn her appeal to women into a claim that she wants them to become more combative.
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