Herland (2 page)

She came of age during a time of struggle over the ideas of Charles Darwin and their application to society. Darwin’s theory of evolution did not directly apply to social theory, but intellectuals translated his ideas of natural selection into social language, and argued about their interpretation. One view, formulated by English theorist Herbert Spenser, and defended in the United States by William Graham Sumner, was that society’s laws are irrevocably rooted in the evolutionary process, and that there is no way to interfere with the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Lester Frank Ward, an American sociologist, rejected this interpretation of Social Darwinism, as it was called. He insisted that it was possible for humans, who, unlike other animals, possess a Mind and therefore a Culture, to shape the social laws under which they operate. Gilman early identified herself with the ideological camp of Ward in believing that human beings were the key to determining their own destinies and in using evolutionary theory as a weapon in the movement for social change. Convinced of the plasticity of human nature, she vehemently sought to destroy the molds into which people, especially but not only, female people, were forced. Her specific contribution to this wing of Social Darwinist thought was her assertion that women, as a collective entity, could, if they so chose, be the moving force in the reorganization of society.

Gilman’s ideas matured at the turn of the century. Like most other intellectuals of her time, particularly those in the new social sciences, she struggled to create a theory and to envision a world that relied neither on class violence nor on uncontrolled individualism. Unlike other social scientists, most of whom were university-affiliated, she did not seek explanations for social problems or solutions to them from experts in these newly created disciplines. The new social sciences that emerged in this period, for all the differences that separated sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science, had a common set of assumptions about society that distinguish them as a group. They affirmed the primacy of culture over biology. They believed in a social intelligence, dominated by trained, disinterested specialists who ostensibly would transcend politics, but who, in reality, shared a tacit commitment to the prevailing ideology. They relied primarily on descriptions of the interdependence of institutions and relations in society, which inevitably raised questions of how society functions but left untouched questions of why and for whom it operates the way it does or how it had evolved to that point; that is, the role of power was unexamined. By stressing the relationships among all social phenomena, implying that all are of significance, the social scientists obscured the reality of class rule in the United States and therefore made irrelevant any program to alter that rule.

Gilman self-consciously dissociated herself from this intellectual environment. Her work, on the contrary, was an effort to devise and to carry out a strategy for change. Opposed as she was, temperamentally and ideologically, to violence or force, she also separated herself from Marx’s revolutionary ideology. In her vision, the peaceful collective action of women replaced Marx’s class struggle.

Describing herself as a humanist, Gilman argued that since “it is only in social relations that we are human … to be human, women must share in the totality of humanity’s common life.” Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of the organism, she said, the individual, or the social body requires the use of all of our powers in four areas; physical, intellectual, spiritual, and social. In each, women are denied their share of human activities.

Women’s historic subordination she dated from the expropriation by men of the surplus that women produced in agriculture. It was, she said, the first form of subordination, and it became the model for subsequent exploitation. That subordination stunted the growth of women and thus dehumanized the whole female sex. What we call masculine traits are simply human traits, which have been denied to women and are thereby assumed to belong to men: traits such as courage, strength, creativity, generosity, and integrity. To be “virtuous” a woman needs but one “virtue”—chastity. “Women are not undeveloped men,” said Gilman, “but the feminine half of humanity is undeveloped humans.”

The most important fact about the sexes, men and women, is the common humanity we share, not the differences that distinguish us, Gilman said repeatedly. But women are denied autonomy and thus are not provided the environment in which to develop. Men, too, suffer from personalities distorted by their habits of dominance and power. A healthy social organism for both men and women, therefore, requires the autonomy of women. That autonomy can be achieved only by women’s collective political action. Just as most women have been socialized to accede to their own subordination, implied Gilman, so can they be moved to lead the struggle for a humanized-socialized world. She saw the first step toward resolving the world’s predicament in the ideological sphere, and she saw herself engaged in a fierce struggle for the minds of women.

Gilman was determined to package her social vision in terms attractive to the mass of the population and at the same time to make socialism a legitimate, appealing, and reasonable idea. The literary genre she selected was the Utopian novel, and she wrote three of them:
Moving the Mountain
, 1911;
Herland
, 1915; and its sequel,
With Her in Ourland
, 1916, all of them appearing in
The Forerunner
. Although
Moving the Mountain
and
With Her in Ourland
are more earth-bound, a look at them can nonetheless provide the reader with a deeper sense of the texture and meaning of the world of Herland.

Moving the Mountain
is set in the United States in 1940. John Robertson, traveling in Tibet in 1910, falls over a precipice and loses all memory until he is found by his sister thirty years later. During the long trip home and afterward, he studies the enormous changes that have taken place in his country. He finds, in Gilman’s words, “a short-distance Utopia, a baby Utopia,” a society brought about by “no other change than a change of mind, the mere awakening of people, especially the women, to existing possibilities.” Just as one man can change his life in thirty years, “so can the world.” Acknowledging that most of us cannot imagine what we have not seen, Gilman creates a world for her audience to experience, a world that is, in its material and technological sense, very familiar. It is the people who are different, a reversal of Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
, for example, where the world looks different but the people in it are traditional Victorians.

Instead of Warren Harding, the American people chose socialism in 1920; and in the subsequent twenty years they went beyond socialism to a New Religion, described as “Living and Life.” The new world is revealed through conversations between skeptical John Robertson and his brother-in-law, Owen Montrose, who feels perfect contentment, as a man, in a humanist-socialist society. It is not a feminist community, we are reminded; it is a human one. The old world was “masculinist.”

The transition to socialism was achieved, Robertson is told, through the leadership of women, who used the organizational skills and political knowledge accumulated during the earlier decades of struggle for their rights. The powerful rulers of the old society gave up because they had no choice: the soldiers would not fight, and the workers would not work. All had been persuaded of the superiority of a humanist-socialist world.

The uprising of half the adult world, which led to a new social consciousness, occurred when women realized that civilization had been made by constructive industry, not by warfare and aggression, and that it was women who had developed agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the nurturing cultures associated with the rearing of the young. Women reclaimed the leadership they had once had, and the world returned to its natural, balanced state.

“We make a new kind of people now,” John Robertson is told over and over. The mothering and educating of the children, carried out by trained specialists who are not necessarily mothers but who always are women, is crucial to the creation of a new people with a new consciousness. Gilman seems to assume that the desire for motherhood, though not the ability to be a good mother, is inherent in the female condition.

Men long had the power to create their own kind of women—fragile, dependent, passive, timid—by not marrying those who deviated. Now women select from competing males, as is common in most other species, and are able to breed out the destructive male qualities inherited from a historic past when combat and aggression were necessary for progress. Once evolution had been a long and slow process, but now change can be made rapidly because we understand how to aid nature in the interests of human need.

In
Moving the Mountain
men and women learn to live together in a humanist-socialist world. In
Herland
women have created a utopia without men at all. Again this world is unfolded through male eyes and a male consciousness, not in the traditional manner of a dialogue, but through the dramatic confrontation that occurs when three American men stumble on an all-female society. Most utopias create worlds that are elevating but bland, a paradise without sparkle.
Moving the Mountain
creates such a place, but
Herland
soars. Gilman romps through the game of what is feminine and what is masculine, what is manly and what is womanly, what is culturally learned and what is biologically determined male-female behavior. Her belief in the power of humans to alter their societies and to control nature in their own interest is carried out literally in
Herland
, where parthenogenic births producing only girl children demonstrate that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

The focus of the new society is the New Motherhood, children being the central most important fact. As in
Moving the Mountain
, child-rearing is an honored profession permitted only highly trained specialists. Women like Gilman herself, who had difficulty with mothering (though she loved her daughter), could live comfortably in such a place. In the mother-daughter relationship, as it is examined in
Herland
, Gilman demonstrates how the marketplace notions of individualism distort the most intimate human relationships; she offers instead a world in which a genuine sense of community triumphs and is expressed in richer, more gratifying human relations. The women of Herland have such an all-encompassing community that the “limitations of a wholly personal life were inconceivable.” Their children do not have surnames, for example. (In the transitional state in
Moving the Mountain
, the daughters take their mothers’ names, the boys their fathers’.) Artists sign their works of art but not their children because “the finished product is not a private one.”

The sentimentalized home, which Gilman saw as a prison from which children and women must flee, is blithely eliminated in Herland. Instead, there is real privacy for the individual, and there is genuine community. (Gilman’s views on home as the socializer of inequity and inhumanity still elicit more fury than any of her other heretical ideas.)

Herland
opens with its three male adventurers in full agreement that such a superior society inevitably presupposes men. With a characteristic mischievousness, Gilman makes the man of reason, Vandyck Jennings, a sociologist by profession. Van uses his scientific knowledge to argue “learnedly” about the well-known physiological limitations of women. It is Van who says, at the start, “This is a
civilized
country …. There must be men.” Noting the agility of the women scampering up trees, he establishes the absolute truth: “inhabitants evidently arboreal.” So much for Gilman’s belief in both the neutrality and the wisdom of science. Van’s conversion is almost complete by the end of the story, when he admits that he is now “well used to seeing women not as females, but as people; people of all sorts, doing every kind of work.”

The women of Herland have no way of relating to the men other than as friends. They do not understand the words “lover” or “home” or “wife,” and the process by which they learn the meanings of these concepts is filled with good humor. Three women become deeply fond of these men and agree to “marry” them, though they have no sense of sexual love or passion. “Two thousand years of disuse had left very little of the instinct …. ‘We are not like the women of your country,’ the men are told. ‘We are Mothers, and we are People, but we have not specialized in this line.’” Indeed, the women have no interest in the men sexually except as potential fathers, which distresses the men. Sexuality is subjected to the same treatment as are all other social values, as part of our primarily cultural, not biological, package.

With wide-eyed innocence and simple reason, the Herland women expose the hideousness of much that to us is commonplace. The possibilities for cavorting are unending, and Gilman delightfully ridicules much conventional wisdom through the twelve chapters. The women of Herland do not understand why someone else’s name should be taken after marriage; why dead bodies should be put in the ground to decay; why long hair is considered womanly by men when only male lions and male buffaloes have manes and only men in China wear queues; why loved pets are imprisoned on a leash and why they are allowed to bite children and why they are permitted to leave their wastes on streets where people walk; what women in the outside world do all day long if they do not work; why women with the fewest children seem to have the most servants; why a God of love and wisdom has left a legacy of sacrifice, the devil, and damnation; why God is personalized at all—they do not believe in a Big Woman somewhere but rather a Pervading Power, an Indwelling Spirit, a Maternal Pantheism; why people who are emotionally ill, such as criminals, are punished, when people who are physically ill are not; why ideas from thousands of years ago should be cherished and honored.