Title Herland Series --- Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing 1915 Category --- Warnings None Website --- Main Characters Vandyck Jennings, Jeff Margrave, Terry O. Nicholson, Ellador, Celis, Alima Main Elements ---

An all-female society is discovered somewhere in the distant reaches of the earth by three male explorers who are now forced to re-examine their assumptions about women's roles in society.

This book is available free to download from Project Gutenberg and presents a "what-if" scenario of a land populated by only women who reproduce through parthenogenesis (i.e. females produce young automatically without requiring a male, something certain animals species on our planet are quite capable of though I am unconvinced humans would spontaneously develop this skill, but then that's the "what-if" that makes this science fiction). This was written in the early 1900's and three men from the United States discover this land of women and as they learn about their world, they try to teach them about theirs. Of course, seeing as Herland is a kind of utopia, it's a bit hard to defend our society's structure and repression of women. On the other hand, being a woman, I'm not entirely convinced all the world's ills will be solved by removing men from the equation, I know some pretty nasty women, I think the reality is, if we stopped enforcing differences on the sexes, we'd be more similar than we realize...

But whether it's a realistic society or not, it is definitely a uptopian one and makes for good food for thought, perhaps not in how we can achieve this ideal world, but to contrast it with ours and question things we take for granted about the way we live our lives. For example, are poverty, crime and disease a natural and necessary part of life? Do we really need to struggle to improve, the survival of the fitest? The women of Herland are not only harmony with each other, but also with nature...in a way, achieving this by wiping out anything that would affect the balance, eradicating entire species to protect their trees. But at the same time, it's at least a directed action and not just randomly pumping toxins into the environment with no concerns to the consequences.

There are also many interesting ideas on the topic of education, and how we might be able to improve our own children by not trying to cram a pile of useless information down their throats but rather let them learn by doing, and gaining useful experience. And finally, their overwhelming Motherhood, not in the sense of the glory of having children, but in being the mothers of an entire people, that each generation must strive to improve so that the next generation will do better, not so that the current one can benefit in the short term. Children aren't just vessels to keep a bloodline going, they are born so they can create the future.

The funny thing was, as I was reading it, the writing style was so similar to Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the Barsoom and Tarzan series) that I could almost imagine it was written by him, not that his women tended to be anything other than damsels in distress, but clearly there was a certain style of language and tone in stories written at the time. In fact, just imagining evolution working in different ways seems to be a theme of the time, what with Burroughs having written the Caspak trilogy. Herland itself is the second book in a trilogy as well, but I've been unable to find the other two.