Herland

Three American adventurers set out to verify a rumor of a land where only women live — and find, to their astonishment, that the legend is true. Cut off from the world for two thousand years, the women of Herland reproduce by parthenogenesis, bearing daughters without fathers, and have built a country with no war, no poverty, no crime, and no waste: clean, forested, ordered, and quietly rational.

The narrator, the open-minded sociologist Van, has brought two companions who carry between them every assumption their century held about women — Terry, who means to conquer them, and Jeff, who means to worship them. One by one the women of Herland, patient, humorous, and intellectually formidable, take those assumptions apart, and the comedy and the argument of the novel alike turn on how three twentieth-century men fare in a world arranged on entirely different terms from their own.

First serialized in 1915 in the magazine Gilman wrote and published herself, Herland was not issued as a book until 1979 — and arrived as if written for the moment it was finally published. Beneath its wit it carries the whole of Gilman's social thought: that a civilization built around the raising of children rather than the contests of men might be the saner one, and that much of what her age called human nature was only the nature of a world men had made.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the novel's strange publication history, its satire, and its place beside The Yellow Wall-Paper, together with a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.