Herland
1915
Herland
1915
In 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote one of the most audacious novels in American literature: a comedy of male assumptions that happens to also be a radical feminist utopia. When three American explorers stumble upon a hidden Amazonian society of women who have reproduced without men for two thousand years, they cannot fathom how civilization could exist without them. Each man carries his own certainty that the women must be subordinate, helpless, or secretly longing for male attention. Each man is hilariously, devastatingly wrong. The society Gilman imagines is not a dystopia in disguise but a genuine utopia: cooperative, prosperous, free of war and poverty, built on principles of mutual aid rather than domination. What unfolds is both a sharp satirical comedy, watching the men's theories collapse in real time, and a genuine thought experiment about what humanity might achieve without gendered hierarchy. Written with wit, generosity, and startling modernity, Herland remains a book that makes you laugh while it makes you think.
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“Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.””
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.””
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?”“Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them”
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.””
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“I always liked that Arab saying, 'First tie your camel and then trust in the Lord,””
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“I was madly in love with not so much what was there as with what I supposed to be there.””
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“But only this-that people who are utterly ignorant will believe anything-which you certainly knew before.””
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only women”
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“And, as I traveled farther and farther, exploring the rich, sweet soul of her, my sense of pleasant friendship became but a broad foundation for such height, such breadth, such interlocked combination of feeling as left me fairly blinded with the wonder of it.””
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
