Herland

1915
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Herland
B-

Three modern men of various types, not unlike the suitors in A Mischievous Rudiment, discover a land populated solely by women.  Narrator Van is quietly realistic, while Jeff is chivalrous and Terry is macho.  Van is a sociologist, so he's particularly interested in how this society works.  Jeff puts women on pedestals, so he adapts fairly well, once he realizes that the women don't need his protection.  But Terry agrees with Wyndham that women need to be mastered.  The three men find brides among the Herlanders, but Terry's marriage is very unhappy, culminating in attempted marital rape.

For 2000 years, the women have been reproducing through parthenogenesis.  They're aware of sexual intercourse because of the animals they breed (Gilman is amusing about cats), but it's not part of their own lives.  When Elladora, Celis, and Alima get married, the whole nation is excited about the possibility of Fatherhood.  But sex is only seen as for reproduction, in a land where Motherhood is central.  This leads to difficulties even for the more understanding Van.  (Jeff and Celis soon decide to have a child.)

It's interesting to see what Gilman imagines a country without men would be like:  peaceful, crime-free, clean, well-fed, well-educated, and generally well-run.  There are also of course none of the limiting gender stereotypes, for men or women, that plagued her time.  However, how utopian is this utopia?  Besides the lack of sex (including lesbianism), it's a world where only women who are good enough, as defined by society, can have a child, with a few rare women ("Over Mothers") being allowed more than one.  Yet motherhood, in the sense of childbirth, is seen as the great act of a woman's life.  On the other hand, most women don't raise their children themselves, because that would be like, as Gilman says, practicing dentistry on your family when you don't have the training.

As utopias go, sure, I'd rather live here than in More's, although not as much as Oz.  At least I'd be able to have an interesting job and lots of friends, without having to confess my "sins" to my husband, as in More's land.  In Oz, I'd have to live where Ozma told me to, but I'd otherwise have some measure of freedom, and be surrounded by magic.  Ironically, magic aside, I think Oz is the most plausible utopia, or dystopia, I've examined so far.  Herland, in its isolation, with "savages" as the nearest neighbors, most resembles Erewhon.

This is a very dated novella but I think it'll be interesting to look back on when I get up to my "radical feminist" books of the 1970s.  And it's not a bad little story, without the dull patches of Erewhon, although none of the hm moments of that novel.