When Kairos Compels Composition: Women’s Response to the 1924 Burpee Seed Company® Contest, “What Burpee Seeds Have Done for Me”

Abstract

In 1924, the W. Atlee Burpee & Company® announced a contest calling for letters responding to the prompt, “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done for Me.” By the deadline, Burpee had received thousands of letters, many written by women. Significant elements of this early twentieth-century contest influenced women’s response. These elements—the historical context, the call for letters, and the act of gardening—converged in a kairotic fashion to form a rhetorical opportunity particularly accessible for women. The contest allowed women to apply familiar rhetorical acts in risky and self-promoting ways to validate their work and publicly identify as successful gardeners.

Notes

¹ I gratefully acknowledge RR reviewers Patricia Fancher and Suzanne Bordelon for their generous feedback that substantially raised the caliber of this work. I also express sincere appreciation for the guidance and support of Whitney Douglas, Maureen Goggin, and Shirley Rose.

² I have made every effort to leave the personal expressions from the letters unchanged and true to their original intent, which has led to some creative grammatical compromises particularly with tense and the contestants’ use of the pronoun “I.” I have also included the names as signed by the women with some interesting use of parentheses. Their signatures are significant, and it would do a disservice to the authors not to include them as written. Citations for contestants’ letters are as follows: (Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens collection box.folder.letter number).

³ The term “farmerettes” was adopted by members of the Women’s Land Army who stood-in for absent male farm-hands during WWI.

⁴ While I haven’t found evidence suggesting the judges to be exclusively men, most letters are addressed to “Dear Sirs,” which suggests the authors envisioned their judges as such.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cheryl Price-Mckell

Cheryl Price-McKell is in the doctoral program of Writings, Rhetorics, and Literacies at Arizona State University. Her research interests include rhetorical theory, feminist historiography, and archival methodology and analysis. She can be reached at [email protected].