Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is about a utopian society entirely composed of women and girls. When three male explorers (Van, Terry, and Jeff) enter Herland and begin learning about the history of the Herlandian people, they learn that the women have existed without men for over 2,000 years. With thousands of years and dozens of generations standing between the women of Herland and experience with heterosexual relationships, the Herlandians have peacefully existed without concern for gender roles or romantic relationships. However, the appearance of the three men makes it possible to reestablish the existence of opposite-sex relationships. To that end, Jeff and Celis, Terry and Alima, and Van and Ellador get married. However, it isn’t long before the newlyweds are forced to confront their very different lifestyles: the women wish to preserve the egalitarian spirit that characterizes Herlandian culture within their marriages, while the men expect their new wives to take on traditional Western gender roles; that is, to become submissive and passive. Van and Jeff adapt their beliefs about marriage to fit the expectations of their wives and thus enjoy happy marriages; Terry, however, tries to force Alima into a submissive role by attempting to rape her and is consequently expelled from Herland. In Herland, Gilman argues that by abolishing traditional gender roles and practices, men and women can enjoy happier and more equitable relationships.
The three American men enter their respective relationships with the assumption that they, as the stronger sex, will fulfill certain roles (such as protectors) while the women will limit their roles to wives and mothers. One day, while Jeff and Celis are walking in the woods, Jeff insists on carrying Celis’s basket because, as he explains, “We assume that motherhood is a sufficient burden—that men should carry all the others.” While this comment certainly recognizes the towering difficulties associated with motherhood and respects that role, this comment also tacitly implies that married women are limited to the role of mothers—they can no longer work or engage in an active life too far outside the confines of their homes because it is too much of a “burden.” However, Van realizes that because the Herlandians had been cut off from men for so long, they had grown up with nothing to fear and “therefore no need of protection.” As men, Van, Jeff, and Terry assumed they would take on the role of protectors, but because the women don’t need protection the men are unable to fulfill what they consider a vital role in a “normal” relationship. This calls into question whether the women can be reasonably expected to fulfill their assigned role if the men cannot, opening the door to the possibility of a new kind of relationship based on choice and equality rather than the restrictions of traditional gender roles.
Another element of traditional gender roles in relationships that the American men and Herlandian women confront is the question of last names. Terry, whose views are representative of the possessive element of traditional Western marriage, explains that “A wife is the woman who belongs to the man.” Because of this, the woman takes the man’s last name, thus showing who she belongs to and highlighting the commonly held belief that men take ownership of women upon marrying them. When she hears this, Alima exclaims, “Then she just loses [her name] and takes a new one—how unpleasant!” In calling this arrangement “unpleasant,” Alima highlights how unfair traditional gender roles appear from an outsider’s perspective.
After their respective marriages, the three men hope and expect that their wives will simply fall into traditional gender roles, especially in regards to sex. Instead, the men are forced to make a decision: either force their wills on their wives or adapt to a marriage based on equality and choice rather than possession and dominance. Van writes about traditional marriage in Western culture, saying, “The woman may have imagined the conditions of married life to be different; but what she imagined, was ignorant of, or might have preferred did not seriously matter.” This means that women are expected to surrender themselves completely to their husbands and husbands are allowed to do whatever they want with their wives. Terry eventually becomes enraged with Alima for not having sex with him after their marriage and tries to rape her, but he’s stopped and sentenced to expulsion from Herland. With this, Herland firmly rejects the notion that husbands own their wives and are therefore justified in using force to fulfill their sexual desires. Unlike Terry, Van finds happiness in his marriage because he decides to be with Ellador “on [her] own terms,” which includes not having sex until she is comfortable with the idea. This abolishes one of the central gender roles in a traditional marriage—the idea that wives must surrender themselves to their husband’s will—and instead establishes equality between Van and Ellador, which leads to her final decision to go to America with Van.
Van, Jeff, and Terry all marry Herlandian women with the expectation that their wives will simply and naturally fall into their prescribed gender roles. Even before their marriages, however, Celis, Alima, and Ellador reject American gender roles and traditional practices, calling attention to how meaningless they are and challenging the belief that gender roles are natural. This rejection opens the door to a new kind of marriage—one based on trust, equality, and choice.
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Gender Roles and Relationships Quotes in Herland
Jeff idealized women in the best Southern style. He was full of chivalry and sentiment, and all that. And he was a good boy; he lived up to his ideals.
You might say Terry did, too, if you can call his views about women anything so polite as ideals. I always liked Terry. He was a man’s man, very much so, generous and brave and clever; but I don’t think any of us in college days was quite pleased to have him with our sisters. We weren’t very stringent, heavens no! But Terry was “the limit.”
[…]
I held a middle ground, highly scientific, of course, and used to argue learnedly about the physiological limitations of the sex.
We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only women—why, they would be no obstacles at all.
Jeff, with his gentle romantic old-fashioned notions of women as clinging vines; Terry, with his clear decided practical theories that there were two kinds of women—those he wanted and those he didn’t; Desirable and Undesirable was his demarcation. The last was a large class, but negligible—he had never thought about them at all.
And now here they were, in great numbers, evidently indifferent to what he might think, evidently determined on some purpose of their own regarding him, and apparently well able to enforce their purpose.
These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call “femininity.” This led me very promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.
At home we had measured him with other men, and, though we knew his failings, he was by no means an unusual type. We knew his virtues too, and they had always seemed more prominent than the faults. Measured among women—our women at home, I mean—he had always stood high. He was visibly popular. Even where his habits were known, there was no discrimination against him; in some cases his reputation for what was felicitously termed “gaiety” seemed a special charm.
But here, against the calm wisdom and quiet restrained humor of these women, with only that blessed Jeff and my inconspicuous self to compare with, Terry did stand out rather strong.
As “a man among men,” he didn’t; as a man among—I shall have to say, “females,” he didn’t; his intense masculinity seemed only fit complement to their intense femininity. But here he was all out of drawing.
We had expected them to be given over to what we called “feminine vanity”—“frills and furbelows,” and we found they had evolved a costume more perfect than the Chinese dress, richly beautiful when so desired, always useful, of unfailing dignity and good taste.
We had expected a dull submissive monotony, and found a daring social inventiveness far beyond our own, and a mechanical and scientific development fully equal to ours.
We had expected pettiness, and found a social consciousness besides which our nations looked like quarrelling children—feeble-minded ones at that.
“We like you the best,” Somel told me, “because you seem more like us.”
“More like a lot of women!” I thought to myself disgustedly, and then remembered how little like “women,” in our derogatory sense, they were. She was smiling at me, reading my thought.
“We can quite see that we do not seem like—women—to you. Of course, in a bi-sexual race the distinctive feature of each sex must be intensified. But surely there are characteristics enough which belong to People, aren’t there? That’s what I mean about you being more like us—more like People. We feel at ease with you.”
What left us even more at sea in our approach was the lack of any sex-tradition. There was no accepted standard of what was “manly” and what was “womanly.”
When Jeff said, taking the fruit basket from his adored one, “A woman should not carry anything,” Celis said, “Why?” with the frankest amazement. He could not look at that fleet-footed, deep-chested young forester in the face and say, “Because she is weaker.” She wasn’t. One does not call a race horse weak because it is visibly not a cart horse.
You see, if a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and inexperienced; who in the second place is educated with a background of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest worthy of the name—why, it is a comparatively easy matter to sweep her off her feet with a dashing attack. Terry was a past master in this process. He tried it here, and Alima was so affronted, so repelled, that it was weeks before he got near enough to try again.
All the surrendering devotion our women have put into their private families, these women put into their country and race. All the loyalty and service men expect of their wives, they gave, not singly to men, but collectively to one another.
“They’ve no modesty,” snapped Terry. “No patience, no submissiveness, none of that natural yielding which is woman’s greatest charm.”
I shook my head pityingly. “Go and apologize and make friends again, Terry. You’ve got a grouch, that’s all. These women have the virtue of humanity, with less of its faults than any folks I ever saw. As for patience—they’d have pitched us over the cliffs the first day we lit among ‘em, if they hadn’t that.”
We have two life cycles: the man’s and the woman’s. To the man there is growth, struggle, conquest, the establishment of his family, and as much further success in gain or ambition as he can achieve.
To the woman, growth, the securing of a husband, the subordinate activities of family life, and afterward such “social” or charitable interests as her position allows.
This seemed to us a wholly incredible thing: first, that any nation should have the foresight, the strength, and the persistence to plan and fulfill such a task; and second, that women should have had so much initiative. We have assumed, as a matter of course, that women had none; that only the man, with his natural energy and impatience of restriction, would ever invent anything.
Here we found that the pressure of life upon the environment develops in the human mind its inventive reactions, regardless of sex; and further, that a fully awakened motherhood plans and works without limit, for the good of the child.
“What is a ‘wife’ exactly?” she demanded, a dangerous gleam in her eye.
“A wife is the woman who belongs to a man,” he began.
This is one thing which we did not understand—had made no allowance for. When in our pre-marital discussions one of those dear girls had said: “We understand it thus and thus,” or “We hold such and such to be true,” we men, in our own deep-seated convictions of the power of love, and our easy views about beliefs and principles, fondly imagined that we could convince them otherwise. What we imagined, before marriage, did not matter any more than what an average innocent girl imagines. We found the facts to be different.
You see, with us, women are kept as different as possible and as feminine as possible. We men have our own world, with only men in it; we get tired of our ultra-maleness and turn gladly to the ultra-femaleness. Also, in keeping our women as feminine as possible, we see to it that when we turn to them we find the thing we want always in evidence. Well, the atmosphere of this place was anything but seductive.
We talk fine things about women, but in our hearts we know that they are very limited beings—most of them. We honor them for their functional powers, even while we dishonor them by our use of it; we honor them for their carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the perverted maternal activities which make our wives the most comfortable of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our own decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way. Oh, we value them, all right, “in their place,” which place is the home[.]
