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Rating:  - Not Deserving of its Clout
I know that "Herland" receives quite a bit of praise and is highly regarded. In my opinion, the work doesn't bear up under these accolades. The story is down right boring, which is disappointing considering how engaging Gilman's short stories and other works are. The plot is odd and the message that Gilman is trying to convey is lost. I saw another reviewer call this work a satire, but I would strongly disagree. Gilman did not intend "Herland" to be a satire. She was attempting to show that women were more adept at "social housekeeping" than men were.
Unless you have to read it, there are many other and better Gilman pieces to absorb your attention with.
Rating:  - Feminist Utopia
The premise is interesting enough: after a combination of man-made and natural catastrophes in a remote area, only a handful of women remain alive. Through some miracle, one woman becomes parthenogenetically pregnant - without normal fertilization - and civilization is rebuilt.
But without men.
The story opens 2000 years later, after the culture has flourished and stabilized, when three men of very different temperaments arrive. This brief story sketches the Edenic society. The women have their entire country under the most intense cultivation, and it is lush and productive. The women have a stable population, and a rich culture built around progress, peace, and single-minded devotion to the creation and care of the next generation. That is the cental axis of Gilman's world. Religion and everything else revolve around that.
The women themselves, through Lamarckian and social evolution, have become strong, wise, happy, and oddly sexless. They seem not to have discovered the happiness of physical affection, especially when separated from procreation. I find it odd that there is not even a hint of that physical intimacy in this otherwise attractive world, even though the women could easily share it between themselves.
Of course, one of the men commits an outrage, and they are banished back to the evil outer world - Eve casting Adam out of the garden, this time. Nearly nothing is said about the economy of this world, and just a little about their system of justice. As utopias go, it's a bit one-sided and bland, with one chilling exception. In the very last sentences of the book, there is a hint that their justice can include capital punishment. It would be carried out by overdose of anesthesia, a 1915 prediction of today's "lethal injection."
//wiredweird
Rating: - Fantasy masking as Utopian Lit
I am a fan of utopian literature. It is a great measure of the human soul that we have these books. The spur us on to better ideals. Sadly, we have abandoned these, replacing them with the ugly dystopian literature, and are worse of.
"Herland" is unique in that it is feminist utopianism. It is so off-beast that I was excited to read it. All of the classical cannon of Utopian Lit is all male: Plato, Moore, Bellamy, and so forth. I was curious about what insights Gilman would have.
Sadly, I felt left down.
First of all, having so many expectation for a book, and then being let down forced me to look deeper at what was going on. I had to reexamine my assumptions and expectations.
I realized that so much Utopian Lit is the same: people getting together, decided to stop being fools (in the Biblical sense of the word), and actually doing what then should be doing. Part of templette involves uniform clothing, large mess halls, centralized planning, and the un-Biblical open marriages.
Gilman covers all of theses, except the open marriages, which I will later cover. In fact, there was nothing really new in this book. This is not to discredit it, but to to convey the epiphany I had while reading it. The utopias all have common elements, with minor modifications.
The problem with Gilman's book is in the virgin births to perpetuate her Amazon society. This dues ex machina fatally shifts the story form Utopian Lit to mere fantasy. All Utopian Lit must, of necessity, be atheistic. Otherwise, it becomes religious social philosophy.
There are some other problems, some of which come from outdated science. For example, genetically, all the women would be identical, and the environmental conditioning would not change them. Gilman has them with different features (p. 76, 78), a genetic impossibility.
Another problem is the centralized planning without omniscience and omnipotence. "The best laid plans of mice and men . . ." We cannot control nature, predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or predict hurricanes. Herland has none of these. It is a peach of an Eden, but detached from the real world.
Centralized planning never works. We have limited knowledge. And even if we know something, we have limited capacity to change things. We have Murphy's Law, entropy, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Couple all of these with the Butterfly Effect of our ignorance and impotence, and it is a wonder that anything gets done at all.
I so not want to get into Praeto's 80-20 Law, except to mention that all utopianists, except the American Founders, completely ignore this principle, Gilman not excluded.
Most confusing is the birth control alluded to in Chapter 6 (p. 60). If pregnancies are virgin, are they spontaneous, and if so, how does one control them? This all comes back to the fact that this book is essentially fantasy, and not utopian.
Sometimes Gilman gets downright ridiculous, as in mentioning that babies do not cry (p, 88). I understand the miracle eugenics and "negative eugenics" (p. 59), but this is ridiculous. Crying is not an annoyance, but serves several purposes, and is the root of communication.
The religion is a disappointment. It is just Social Gospel, but no power. It has virgin births, but no Virgin Mary.
Another problem is the nature of evil. Gilman notes that "They had no theory of the opposition of good and evil" (p. 87). That smacks of Nietzscheism, and is fundamentally at variance not only with the Laws of Logic, but also common-day experience.
By virtue of creating a Herland, she is setting women in opposition to men. That is , she believes that society of Amazons is good, and mixing it with men is evil.
Aristotle said,
"There are some, however, as we have said, who both state themselves that the same thing can be and not be, and say that it is possible to hold this view. Many even of the physicists adopt this theory. But we have just assumed that it is impossible at once to be and not to be, and by this means we have proved that this is the most certain of all principles . . ."
"If all contradictory predications of the same subject at the same time are true, clearly all things will be one. For if it is equally possible either to affirm or deny anything of anything, the same thing will be a trireme and a wall and a man; which is what necessarily follows for those who hold the theory of Protagoras. For if anyone thinks that a man is not a trireme, he is clearly not a trireme; and so he also is a trireme if the contradictory statement is true. And the result is the dictum of Anaxagoras, "all things mixed together""(Metaphysics, Book IV.4)
Herland is not Eden-it is a Fool's Paradise. It is not practical, relies on a dues ex machine to function, and naive. The most corrosive ideas is that men are not only unnecessary, but the chief cause of the problems in the world. This is unabashed sexism, and ignored the fact that men are out there, and have things to contribute. This is as radical as any male chauvinistic nonsense. Changing the genders does not confuse anyone.
If we were to implement Herland, what would be Gilman's final solution to the Man question? She does not say-perhaps for the better.
Gilman is a pseudo-utopian. This book is not utopian, but more of feminist fantasy, which is just as bad a the male fantasies seen on cable TV. I recommend this book merely as a literary curiosity, and not as a blueprint.
Rating:  - Wonderful feminist novel
This is a great, imaginative book, one of my favorites. I highly recommend it.
Rating: - Gilman's biting 1915 social satire on an all-female utopia
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was arguably the most important American author of the women's movement in the early 20th-century. In addition to editing a newspaper, "The Forerunner," she wrote "Women and Economics," one of the first studies of the role of women in the economic system. Gilman also wrote a number of utopias: "Moving the Mountain" in 1911, "With Her in Ourland" (1916), and her best-known, "Herstory" in 1915. In "Herstory" Gilman creates a homosocial (one-sex) utopian society made up entirely of women in which the culture, political system, and families are the result of having women as the basis (instead of merely stemming from the absence of men). However, while other American utopian novels, most notably Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward 2000-1888," were standard reading for decades, Gilman's "Herland" was pretty much forgotten until it was rediscovered in the 1970s. Even after four decades Gilman's satire was seen as still speaking to the conditions faced by American women.
Following the conceit first used by Sir Thomas More in writing his "Utopia," Gilman's "Herstory" tells of three American explorers (male, of course), stumbling upon an all-female society in an isolated mountain valley in a land far away on the even of the first World War. Since they find this strange land to be civilized the explorers are convinced there must be some men hiding someplace, and set out to find them. As they search high and low for the male of the species they learn about the history of the country, the religion of motherhood, and the other unique customs, while trying to seduce its inhabitants. Many generations earlier the women had found themselves separated from the human race, with the men dying off. The society evolved, organizing itself around raising children and living in harmony with their surroundings. In the end, the three mail visitors end up falling in love with three of the women and are essentially converted as naturalized aliens.
"Herstory" is less science fiction than many of the utopian novels written during this period, and clearly its primary value is in terms of its provocative commentary on gender roles in the United States in the early 20th-century. Not surprisingly, Gilman questions the roles assumed by men and women in the "bi-sexual" society by showing the relative perfection achieved in Herland with its uni-sexual society. What Gilman sidesteps, of course, are the issues of sexuality: the women of "Herstory" are asexual beings, although they are capable of parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). Also, by talking about these women as being descended from good Aryan stock she raises the specter of racism as well. But clearly Gilman's purpose is to provide a critique of the social order of the day, using humor as a way to mask her telling barbs and to provide her unorthodox views of gender roles, motherhood, individuality, privacy, and other issues. Then there are the parts where the inhabitants of "Herstory" are amused and horrified to learn about the conventional aspects of courtship, marriage, families, warfare, labor relations and even animal husbandry in the "real" world.
Because "Herland" is essentially a novella, running only 124 pages in this unabridged Dover Thrift Edition, it is fairly easy to work it into a class looking at 20th century American utopian literature or the women's movement. In many ways, although it is not as well written, "Herland" is a much more provocative critique of women in American society than Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" or Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time." "Herstory" also stands out because it is a true utopian novel, written at a time when the dystopian emphasis was about to redefine the genre of utopian literature.
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