Vandyck Jennings, the narrator, does his best to tell the story of his time in Herland, but Gilman hints that his biases nonetheless make him a somewhat unreliable narrator. For example, in Chapter 1, Van alludes to "the woman question" and admits that he used to have a bad take on it:
I held a middle ground, highly scientific, of course, and used to argue learnedly about the physiological limitations of the sex.
We were not in the least “advanced” on the woman question, any of us, then.
The "woman question" was the shorthand way that people in Gilman's day referred to the many debates surrounding women's place in politics and the economy. People (ridiculously) worried what might befall society if women were allowed to vote and enter the workforce. Were women cut out for the kind of thinking it required to vote? Could they handle the demands of a job outside the home? Where would that leave the children who had typically been raised and educated by their mothers?
As Van states, none of the men have a very enlightened stance on all these questions at the beginning of the novel. Jeff seems to think women should be protected from all the demands of labor and voting. Terry sees women merely as sexual objects. Van sees himself as more "advanced" than either of his friends because he looks at women through a "scientific" lens that he imagines is neutral. He admits that his time in Herland proves him wrong about the "physiological limitations of the sex," and he seems to think that he has grown into a feminist.
While Van tries to admit his shortcomings, he doesn't quite get there. He thinks of Herland as scientific evidence that women are not as limited as he once thought. While he ends up on Gilman's side of "the woman question" (i.e. believing that women are capable and competent), it is a bit absurd that he needed to see a fully-functioning utopia before he would believe in women's ability to handle themselves. Van is incredulous at the ingenuity of the Herlandians' social safety nets, even though women—including Gilman herself—had long been demanding those same social safety nets. Thus, while Van is not the type of unreliable narrator to conceal key facts from the reader, his excitement about the supposedly novel ideas of Herland can't quite be trusted.
In Chapter 6, Van recalls reading about how the women of Herland came together long ago and developed a pact to limit population density and its demands on the land. This passage alludes to "negative Eugenics:"
There followed a period of “negative Eugenics” which must have been an appalling sacrifice. We are commonly willing to “lay down our lives” for our country, but they had to forego motherhood for their country—and it was precisely the hardest thing for them to do.
Following the Holocaust and other events of the mid-20th century, the term "eugenics" is an immediate red flag signaling authoritarianism and crimes against humanity. In the early 20th century, though, many people in the progressive movement thought of eugenics as a promising tool to build a utopian society. They thought that by controlling the population and making sure new generations of citizens were comprised only of the "best" people, they could eradicate many social ills and injustices.
But eugenicists were divided in how they thought eugenics should be practiced. "Positive eugenics" involved selecting for desirable traits and encouraging the people who possessed those traits to have children. For example, many American cities held "better baby contests," in which babies were judged like livestock, and parents were rewarded for producing the "best" babies. "Best" was often code for whitest. "Negative eugenics," on the other hand, involved discouraging "undesirable" people from reproducing. One example of negative eugenics is the forced sterilization of mentally disabled people (something that was routine for a time in the United States). Both positive and negative eugenics were part of Hitler's regime in the 1930s and 40s.
Unfortunately, Gilman depicts eugenics as one of the practices that has helped the Herlandians "perfect" their society. Their version of "negative eugenics" is less violent than Hitler's, for instance, but the Herlandians nonetheless control the population by discouraging the "less fit" among them from acting on the deepest of Herlandian desires, which is the wish to have children. Even those who are allowed to have children are only allowed one, unless they are exceptional citizens (this is an example of positive eugenics). Gilman is espousing fairly standard progressive ideals for her day, but it is important to note that her utopia relies on some practices that have since proven to be horribly inhumane.
