With Her in Ourland

What happens when a woman from a perfect society visits turn-of-the-century America? Ellador, daughter of a two-thousand-year-old civilization where women built peace and cooperation without men, arrives in 1916 with her husband Vandyck Jennings, and finds our world bewildering, brutal, and almost unbearably silly. Told from Vandyck's perspective, this satirical sequel to Herland watches an American man finally see his homeland through outsider eyes: a culture that worships war, squanders resources, and treats half its population as ornaments. Ellador asks innocent questions that cut like knives. Why do your newspapers overflow with murder? Why do your women not trust each other? Why is there poverty when you have enough? Part comedy of manners, part utopian critique, this is Gilman at her most playful and most pointed, using the shock of otherness to make familiar cruelties visible. The romance between Ellador and Vandyck deepens as he, too, begins to see his world anew. A strange, hopeful, occasionally uncomfortable book about what it costs to build a better world, and whether those who see clearly can ever belong anywhere again.