This article argues about the rhetorical meaning around charitable cookbooks. It’s mainly discusses the cookbooks’ connection with maternal pacifist politics. The author Isaac West finds that most of the researches in communication ignore the rhetoric in cookbooks therefore she appeal the public to pay attention on rhetoric in everyday life. West begins with analyzing the essentialism critiques against maternal pacifist politics and cooking. She claims, “As with cooking, though, this rhetorical strategy has been critiqued for its essentialist implications” (West, 2007, p. 362). Some feminist believe that cooking, as a practice of maternal pacifist politics, is constraining women to act into stereotype against their freewill. To argue with that, West points out that “feminist projects can become stultified and ineffective when they take certain identity categories out of the …show more content…
Next, West explain to us that the “conflict between a mother's domestic duties and her duty to protect the world's children through her activism” (2007, p. 373). She politicizes the definition of motherhood in WSP from caring inside the family to the others in the whole world that outside their own family by analyzing the words and rhetoric in the cookbook. “Cooking” undoubtedly could be connecting to “family” therefore West illustrates that “the cookbooks can help a woman simultaneously satisfy her family's bunger and engage in activism” (2007, p. 371).
To me, what at stake in this article is the way West is able to connect charitable cookbooks with maternal pacifist politics in the first place. Moreover, we’ve been always focus on criticize the stereotype on women while her unique method help me realize that we should never force people to hide their identity, even the identity is matching the stereotype of