Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman * * * *
I read Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman after hearing about it while I was reading The Yellow Wallpaper, and I was immediately intrigued by the idea of a feminist utopia written in 1915. I'm actually much more familiar with dystopias than utopias. Dystopia is one of my favourite genres, even though I don't read it that often anymore, and I've read most of the classics. So I was curious. What would a feminist writing more than a hundred years ago consider an ideal society for women?
At first, Herland sounds pretty great.
The story follows three American men who are exploring a remote part of South America when they hear rumours about a mysterious country inhabited entirely by women. They eventually manage to enter this isolated land and discover an advanced civilisation that has existed without men for about two thousand years. And, obviously, the first question is: if there are no men, where are all these women coming from?
Parthenogenesis.
The women of Herland reproduce without sex. When a woman has an intense desire for a child, she can become pregnant on her own. If she doesn't want a child, she doesn't become pregnant. Honestly, very convenient.
And because men disappeared from this society two thousand years ago, the women have also developed without the restrictions of traditional femininity. They wear practical, comfortable clothing. They have pockets. Apparently pockets were already an issue 111 years ago. They wear sensible shoes. They're physically strong. They run and climb. They study whatever interests them, work in every area of society, construct their own buildings, develop their own agriculture, and are never told that something isn't appropriate for them because they're women.
In 1915, that was a genuinely radical vision.
We see Herland through the eyes of Van, one of the three explorers. Van considers himself the rational and scientific member of the group. Jeff is much more inclined to idealise women, while Terry is the unapologetic male chauvinist who is convinced that women naturally want men to dominate them. All three are misogynistic in different ways, which is important because Van is not necessarily a completely reliable mouthpiece for Gilman. Some of the ridiculous things these men think about women are clearly supposed to look ridiculous, and much of the humour comes from the Herlanders calmly asking questions that expose how little sense their assumptions actually make.
The men are initially prevented from leaving, so eventually they decide to cooperate, learn the language and study this strange civilisation. At the same time, the women study them. The exchange gradually becomes a comparison between Herland and the outside world, and the more we learn about Herland, the more Gilman's feminist ideas become apparent.
But the more I learned about Herland, the less I wanted to live there.
The society began about two thousand years earlier. Herland originally had men and women, but war devastated the population and eventually all of the men were killed. The surviving women defeated their enemies and were left completely alone. Then, sometime later, one woman miraculously became pregnant without a man. She eventually produced five daughters, those daughters inherited the same ability, and the entire modern population of Herland descends from that single woman.
That already creates an extraordinarily homogeneous society. And Gilman makes the racial element explicit. Van identifies the Herlanders as white and speculates that their ancestors were of what he calls “Aryan stock.” We are in an isolated part of South America, surrounded by people who would largely have been non-white, and yet Gilman's ideal civilisation is populated entirely by white women.
That was the first thing that really didn't sit well with me.
Some of the racial attitudes in the novel can be attributed to Van and the other men, because they are deliberately written with the prejudices of their time. But knowing more about Gilman's own racial views makes it impossible to dismiss everything uncomfortable in the novel as merely an unreliable narrator. And the more I looked at the structure of Herland itself, the more uncomfortable it became.
One of the biggest problems for me was reproduction.
Originally, the Herlanders reproduced rapidly, with women having several daughters each, but eventually they realised that their isolated country could not support an endlessly increasing population. They therefore limited reproduction. At the same time, they transformed practically every useful part of their environment into food production. They stopped raising livestock because it required too much land and food, and their diet became entirely plant based, with a lot of fruit and nuts. As someone allergic to nuts, I wouldn't last particularly long in this utopia anyway.
Eventually, motherhood becomes carefully controlled.
And motherhood is not simply one possible path for women in Herland. It is the highest calling in their entire culture. It is almost sacred. Their religion, their society and their ideas about civic responsibility all revolve around motherhood. The women may have escaped the traditional idea that their highest achievement is becoming a wife, but they haven't escaped the idea that their highest achievement is reproduction.
Even more disturbingly, not every woman is encouraged to reproduce.
The society decides which women possess desirable qualities and which do not. Women who exhibit traits considered harmful to society are pressured to renounce motherhood. Gilman actually describes this period in the novel as “negative eugenics.” The women themselves explain that they have tried to train out undesirable qualities and, where possible, breed them out.
So yes. This feminist utopia practices eugenics.
It isn't the violent eugenics we associate with forced sterilisation and twentieth-century regimes. The mechanism here is primarily intense social pressure. But when motherhood is treated as almost sacred and the greatest contribution a woman can make to her society, being told that you should devote yourself to other people's children because your own qualities should not be passed on is hardly a neutral suggestion.
And this is where I couldn't help looking at Herland through a modern understanding of neurodiversity.
Gilman obviously wasn't thinking about autism or ADHD in the way we understand them today, so I don't mean that she deliberately wrote a society that eliminates neurodivergent people. But the system she created could very easily function that way. People who think differently, question accepted ideas, struggle with social conformity, behave impulsively, or simply don't fit comfortably into the expectations of their society could easily become the very people who are discouraged from reproducing.
Since traits associated with conditions such as autism and ADHD have substantial heritable components, over many generations this kind of reproductive selection could reduce the presence of those traits. It probably couldn't eliminate them completely, but it could certainly select against them.
And suddenly the extraordinary agreement among the Herlanders starts looking a lot less utopian.
There is almost no dissent. There is very little conflict. Everyone seems to agree about how society should work. Gilman presents this largely as the result of rationality, education and cooperation, but once you combine that conformity with two thousand years of controlled reproduction, it becomes difficult not to ask an uncomfortable question: how much of their harmony exists because the society has spent generations discouraging people who don't fit its definition of the ideal citizen from reproducing?
This is where Herland unexpectedly started reminding me of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Which is rather remarkable because Herland came first.
Zamyatin wrote We only a few years later, and it is explicitly a dystopia. Yet there are some striking similarities between the societies. Both are isolated from the outside world. Both believe that their way of organising society is superior. Both prioritise the collective over the individual. Both regulate reproduction. Both are suspicious of individual desires that interfere with social harmony.
Obviously Herland is nowhere near as oppressive as the One State. These women have names, careers, friendships and considerable freedom in their daily lives. But the underlying question is surprisingly similar: what happens when a society decides that it knows what the ideal human being should be?
Human variation becomes something that can be improved away.
But perhaps the part of Herland that felt most dystopian to me was something much more fundamental: love is almost entirely absent.
Not affection. The Herlanders clearly care about one another. They have friendships, they cooperate, and they are intensely devoted to their children as a group. But the deep, individual love that binds one person specifically to another has almost disappeared.
This is particularly strange because motherhood is supposedly the centre of their entire civilisation. Motherhood is sacred. Motherhood is the highest calling. Motherhood has practically become their religion.
And yet maternal love, in the individual sense, is deliberately weakened.
A woman gives birth to a child and knows that she is that child's mother, but the child is not primarily raised by her. Children are raised communally by women considered particularly talented and educated in childrearing. The biological mother is not supposed to regard her child as exclusively hers. The love between mother and child becomes secondary to the relationship between the child and Herland as a whole.
That creates a contradiction I found really difficult to ignore. Gilman has built an entire civilisation around motherhood while removing much of the intimate relationship that actually makes motherhood meaningful.
And then there is romantic love.
It has apparently disappeared completely.
Two thousand years without men has eliminated heterosexual relationships, obviously, but apparently nobody has fallen in love with another woman either. There are no lesbian relationships. There don't appear to be asexual romantic partnerships. There are no couples building lives together. There is no indication that two women might simply love one another more deeply or differently than they love everyone else.
Sexual attraction appears to have been selected against, but that doesn't explain the absence of romantic attachment. Love doesn't require sex. People can be asexual and still fall deeply in love. They can form partnerships, choose one another, build homes together and make another individual central to their lives.
Herland has none of that.
And that is where my dystopian alarm bells really started going off, because the destruction of private love is such a familiar feature of dystopian societies.
There is a reason for that. Deep love creates loyalties that compete with loyalty to the collective.
If I love one particular person more than everyone else, then there may come a moment when I choose that person over society. If I love my child more than I love some abstract idea of future generations, I may refuse to sacrifice my child's interests for the supposed greater good. If I love my partner, my family or my friends deeply enough, then those people become more important to me than the state.
That kind of attachment is dangerous to a society that expects the collective to come first.
Different dystopian novels handle this in different ways. In We, private emotional attachment threatens the rational order of the One State. In 1984, Winston and Julia's relationship gives Winston a loyalty and an inner life that exist outside the Party, which is precisely why that bond has to be destroyed. In Brave New World, exclusive romantic and familial attachments are treated as obscene because citizens are supposed to belong to everyone rather than forming deep private bonds.
And then there is Herland.
Gilman isn't presenting the absence of these bonds as sinister. That's what makes it so fascinating. But she has nevertheless created a society in which individual maternal love has been subordinated to communal motherhood, romantic love has vanished, private family life barely exists, and the strongest emotional devotion is directed towards motherhood as an institution and Herland as a society.
Love has not disappeared completely.
It has been redirected from people to the collective.
And to me, that is profoundly dystopian.
It also changes how I look at their lack of private homes and possessions. On their own, communal kitchens or a lack of interest in accumulating objects aren't particularly disturbing. But they fit into a much larger pattern. The Herlanders have systematically reduced almost everything that creates a private sphere separate from society.
There is very little mine.
My home. My possessions. My partner. My family. Even my child.
And while extreme individualism can absolutely damage a society, eliminating that private sphere creates the opposite problem. Human beings don't only need to belong to communities. We need intimate connections within those communities. We need particular people who matter to us in ways that humanity in general cannot.
A society can feed everyone, educate everyone, eliminate poverty and provide extraordinary security, but if the price of perfect social harmony is removing the deepest forms of human attachment, I don't think that's utopia.
The society has solved conflict partly by removing some of the things human beings care enough about to fight for.
Herland has also spent two thousand years almost completely isolated from the rest of humanity. The original isolation makes sense because the country had experienced invasion and war, but two millennia later nobody seems particularly interested in finding out what exists beyond the mountains.
That becomes especially uncomfortable when you remember the racial element.
The Herlanders have apparently spent centuries surrounded by non-white populations without seriously contemplating opening their borders to them. Then three white American men arrive.
Suddenly the outside world becomes interesting.
The three men eventually form relationships with Celis, Alima and Ellador. Jeff and Celis are the most successful couple, and Celis becomes pregnant through sexual reproduction, which the Herlanders regard as an extraordinary new biological possibility. Terry and Alima are a disaster. Terry cannot accept that marriage does not entitle him to sex, and eventually attempts to force himself on Alima. That is finally enough for Herland to expel him.
Van and Ellador occupy something of a middle ground. They develop a genuine friendship and eventually a romantic relationship, and when Van leaves, Ellador decides to accompany him. She effectively becomes Herland's first representative to the outside world, intending to study it and report back so that Herland can decide whether broader contact is desirable.
And this entire question of opening Herland reminded me of Wakanda in Black Panther.
Both societies isolate themselves partly because they are afraid of what outsiders could do to them. Both become extraordinarily advanced while the world around them develops very differently. But the reasoning behind eventually opening up is almost the opposite.
Wakanda ultimately has to confront the morality of possessing extraordinary resources and knowledge while people outside its borders suffer. Its isolation protected it from colonisation, but eventually the question becomes whether protecting yourself is enough when you have the ability to help other people.
Herland doesn't really have that moment.
The Herlanders aren't suddenly wondering whether they have a responsibility to humanity beyond their borders. They aren't particularly interested in sharing their agricultural knowledge, educational achievements or other advances with the people surrounding them. Their interest in the outside world arises after three white men arrive, partly because the return of sexual reproduction presents a fascinating new possibility for their own society.
That made their isolation feel much less altruistic to me.
And the fact that it takes three white men to make the wider world worth investigating is difficult to ignore in a novel that explicitly establishes its supposedly ideal population as white.
This is why I ended up finding Herland almost more interesting as an accidental dystopia than as the feminist utopia Gilman intended.
There are genuinely radical ideas here, especially for 1915. Women can be strong. They can be scientists, builders, teachers and leaders. They can wear comfortable clothes and sensible shoes. They can have pockets, which apparently remains revolutionary. They don't need husbands for economic survival. There is no poverty, war or sexual exploitation within their society. Gilman dismantles a huge number of assumptions about what women supposedly are by imagining what women might become if nobody spent their lives telling them what women were allowed to be.
But then she replaces one set of restrictions with another.
Women are freed from men, but motherhood becomes their highest calling. They are freed from patriarchal families, but reproduction becomes a matter of social interest. They are freed from male authority, but the collective gains enormous authority over the individual. They are allowed to develop their talents, but the society itself has remarkably little tolerance for traits it considers undesirable.
And perhaps most strangely, they are freed from relationships that might make another individual more important than the collective.
They are liberated from patriarchy.
They are not necessarily liberated from conformity.
And that is probably what fascinated me most about Herland. Gilman was capable of recognising the ways in which society artificially restricted women, but her solution was not necessarily greater individual freedom. It was a different kind of social organisation, one that she considered rational, cooperative and progressive.
From my perspective, some of that organisation looks remarkably dystopian.
It also creates an interesting connection with The Yellow Wallpaper. In that story, Gilman showed exactly how destructive supposedly benevolent authority can become. The narrator's husband is convinced that he knows what is best for her. He is educated. He is a physician. He believes his decisions are rational. And because his wife has less authority than he does, her own understanding of what she needs becomes irrelevant.
Then in Herland, Gilman imagines an entire society that is extraordinarily confident that it knows what is best for everyone.
Apparently paternalism bothered her considerably more than maternalism. I gave Herland four stars, and this is one of those cases where the rating absolutely does not mean that I agree with what the book is saying. I don't. But a book doesn't have to have a message I agree with to be a good book. Herland is well written, fascinating and incredibly interesting to think about. In fact, I probably got more out of it because I disagreed with so much of Gilman's supposed utopia. It made me think about feminism, eugenics, racism, motherhood, love, individualism, isolationism and what we actually mean when we call a society ideal. I went into Herland expecting a feminist utopia. Instead, I found a socialist dystopia wearing very comfortable shoes. Four stars.
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