Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopia novel Herland follows three American men—Van (the narrator), Jeff, and Terry—in the early 1910s as they discover and learn about the legendary Herland, an ancient civilization made up entirely of women who have not seen any men or other outsiders in over 2,000 years. The three men learn of Herland from natives in a mysterious and largely unmapped country; these natives claim that there is a dangerous country full of women and that men who go to find it disappear without a trace. After making the necessary preparations and armed with the latest technology (namely an airplane that can take them over the mountains that protect Herland), the three men successfully discover this lost civilization. However, the women there are not the timid, submissive, weak, and primitive creatures they expected, nor are the men themselves treated as the conquering heroes they imagined themselves to be. Through Jeff and Van’s changing beliefs about womanhood—and Terry’s refusal to change his own beliefs—Gilman argues that society’s belief that women are inherently inferior to men is based on socially constructed ideas of femininity and does not reflect women’s natural abilities and characteristics.
Van, Jeff, and Terry each harbor distinct ideas of what type of womanhood they will find in Herland. However, all of their beliefs are based on the assumption that the women of Herland will naturally possess all the same ideal qualities of femininity that women in American do. Terry is a wealthy and adventurous womanizer brimming with “intense masculinity.” He believes that “There never was a woman yet that did not enjoy being mastered,” and thus that the women of Herland will prove submissive to his sexual desires. Jeff is a doctor with the heart of a poet. According to Van, Jeff “idealized women, and was always looking for a chance to ‘protect’ or to ‘serve’ them,” highlighting Jeff’s perception of women as weak and helpless. Van, a sociologist, does not look forward to any kind of romantic or sexual conquests in Herland. With his “airs of sociological superiority,” Van believes that women are incapable of creating a “civilized” society without men’s help and hopes to study these women as inferior objects rather than as fully developed people.
Once they arrive in Herland and begin to learn more about the women there, however, it becomes clear to the men that the women there do not conform to traditional Western ideals of femininity. The women of Herland challenge their definitions of femininity and traditional beliefs about women’s natural inferiority. When the men first enter a Herlandian town, they are surrounded by a group of stern older women who forcibly carry them off to a fortress. Van describes them as “uncomfortably strong women,” which challenges Jeff’s beliefs that women are naturally weak and helpless. After failing to captivate the younger women, Terry declares that “these women aren’t womanly.” By this he means that the Herlandian women are not as submissive nor as flirtatious as he assumed they would be when the men began the expedition. Van, however, is pleasantly surprised by the “sociological achievements” of Herland. In fact, he accepts “Herland life as normal” and life in 20th-century America as “abnormal,” proving that women do have the practical and intellectual abilities to maintain a “civilized society” despite Van’s initial prediction.
Although Terry remains stuck in his narrow definition of femininity, Jeff and Van both learn that their beliefs surrounding womanhood and femininity are actually social constructs that defy rather than comply with nature. Entering Herland, all three men had an “easy air of superiority” that made them feel as if they could impose their will and desires on the women. This attitude leads to Terry’s attempted rape of his Herlandian wife, Alima, and his expulsion from Herland. Terry’s inability to change his perception of women as inferior stands in stark contrast to the realization both Jeff and Van come to: “those ‘feminine charms’ we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity.” In other words, what they considered natural femininity in women was actually a façade that women put on in order to “please [men] because they had to.” Jeff decides to stay in Herland, and Van brings a Herlandian wife back to America, highlighting both men’s acceptance of Herland’s brand of femininity. By the time Van leaves, he notes that he became “well used to seeing women not as females but as people.” This means that Van now accepts women as naturally equal rather than naturally inferior objects to be studied—they are not just inferior “females” but “people” just like himself.
Gilman created the country of Herland to prove that women are not naturally inferior to men and that popular conceptions of femininity are not rooted in biological fact. The success of Herland as a society proves that the only thing holding women back from achieving the same (if not better) things as men are the social restrictions that men have placed upon them.
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Womanhood and Femininity 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.
In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy.
“Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.
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.
“They are a protection,” Terry insisted. “They bark if burglars try to get in.”
Then she made notes of “burglars” and went on: “because of the love which people bear to this animal.”
Zava interrupted here. “Is it the men or the women who love this animal so much?”
“Both!” insisted Terry.
“Equally?” she inquired.
And Jeff said, “Nonsense, Terry—you know men like dogs better than women do—as a whole.”
“Because they love it so much—especially men. This animal is kept shut up, or chained.”
Here you have human beings, unquestionably, but what we were slow in understanding was how these ultra-women, inheriting only from women, had eliminated not only certain masculine characteristics, which of course we did not look for, but so much of what we had always thought essentially feminine.
The tradition of men as guardians and protectors had quite died out. These stalwart virgins had no men to fear and therefore no need of protection.
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.
As I learned more and more to appreciate what these women had accomplished, the less proud I was of what we, with all our manhood, had done.
You see, they had had no wars. They had had no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew together—not by competition, but by united action.
“But does not each mother want her own child to bear her name?” I asked.
“No—why should she? The child has its own.”
“Why for—for identification—so people will know whose child she is.”
“We keep the most careful records,” said Somel. Each one of us has our exact line of descent all the way back to our dear First Mother. There are many reasons for doing that. But as to everyone knowing which child belongs to which mother—why should she?”
Here, as in so many other instances, we were led to feel the difference between the purely maternal and the paternal attitude of mind. The element of personal pride seemed strangely lacking.
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.”
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.
In missing men we three visitors had naturally missed the larger part of life, and had unconsciously assumed that they must miss it too. It took me a long time to realize—Terry never did realize—how little it meant to them. When we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and all its activities. To grow up and “be a man,” to “act like a man”—the meaning and connotation is wide indeed. That vast background is full of […] men everywhere, doing everything—“the world.”
And when we saw Women, we think Female—the sex.
But to these women, in the unbroken sweep of this two-thousand-year-old feminine civilization, the word woman called up all that big background, so far as they had gone in social development; and the word man meant to them only male—the sex.
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[.]
