When we were everybody: a lost feminist utopia

Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Pantheon, New York, 1979, 147pp., $8.95; paper, $2.95)

The year is 1917. A “big steam yacht” with a “specially-made motor-boat” and a “‘disassembled' biplane” starts on a secret expedition to discover a mysterious, mountain-enclosed country hidden in a remote and savage corner of the globe. On board are three young Americans: an athletic millionaire who says “Gosh!” a lot, quotes Kipling, and whose ideas about women are “the limit,” and his two college chums, a sentimental Southerner who believes in gallantry and is a “good boy,” and the narrator, a cocky sociologist, who is full of dogmatism about his ultra-modern profession. But what they find is neither King Kong nor a plesiosaur doing Heaven knows what to a beautiful girl in a chromium bathing suit; it is Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's paradise of free women.

Gilman's feminist Utopia, written sixty-four years ago and never before available in book form (it was serialized in her monthly magazine The Forerunner, which Gilman wrote entirely by herself from November 1909 through December 1916), bears a striking resemblance to the feminist Utopias written in the United States during the last ten years. Like them it is classless, cooperative, peaceful, and in harmony with the natural world. Like them it diffuses the maternal role. Like them it is passionately concerned with reclaiming the public world for women (an enterprise to which Gilman dedicated her life). Her Utopia has an ancient Greek flavour, which gives the delicious freedom of Herland (a world in which women go everywhere, do everything, are everyone) a cleanliness and orderliness both pleasant and odd to modern eyes (our landscapes are wilder, our characterizations more complex, our ideas of the possible more bitter and more limited). There is the primitive delight of wish-fulfillment, i.e. escorting American men all over Herland (the book follows the classic Utopian pattern of lots of tours and discussions) and hearing them say, “Yes, you're right. You're absolutely right. Feminism is the hope of the world.”