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.
