Charlotte Perkins Gilman serialized Herland across twelve monthly instalments in 1915, in a magazine she wrote, edited, and published entirely by herself. The Forerunner (1909–1916) was her mouthpiece for socialism, humanism, and social reform — and this was its centrepiece: a novel about a country of women sealed off at the top of a South American mountain for two thousand years.

Gilman’s Greeks knew the Amazons, a society of women that was simply the world of men turned over — women warriors, women kings, war and strife intact. Herland is not that. It is a country where:

  • There has been no war, no competition, no jealousy, no covetousness
  • Even the pets have been liberated
  • Reproduction happens by parthenogenesis, so the one thing men were thought to be for is obsolete

Three men arrive on a colonial-cum-scientific expedition — Terry the brute, Jeff the dork, Van the narrator — and are cautiously welcomed as the first men since the disaster that cut Herland off. They spend the book learning how much better a world could be without men like them.

The companion piece is “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Gilman’s account of a post-partum woman forced into a rest cure by her husband, drawn from the treatment Gilman herself underwent. Herland reads as the answer to it: a society that treats the raising of children as the focus of all thought — “You see, we are Mothers,” says one of the men’s minders, as if that said it all — while freeing motherhood from the constraints the story dramatized. Children are raised collectively, the bond to one’s biological child is deliberately weakened, and most women work in forestry, agriculture, and art. Everyone is a mother because everyone is building a society where children can thrive, not because everyone does the daily childcare. Sophie Lewis’s call to abolish the family has a nineteenth-century ancestor.

The PDR essay does not tidy the book up. Gilman’s maternalism keeps the reproductive body at the centre of the utopia, her eugenics is stated outright — her founders “made it our first business to train out, to breed out, when possible, the lowest types” — and there are uncomfortable lines about Aryanism and the “savages down below.” The most surprising feature, given Gilman’s own relationships with women, is that Herland before the men arrive is entirely sexless: firmly collectivized, no intimacy between individuals, no lesbianism in view. The men introduce their partners to sex, and Van’s later companionate marriage to Ellador in the 1916 sequel With Her in Ourland may carry a trace of Gilman’s own late marriage to her cousin Houghton.

Read as a document, Herland is a reminder that the utopian imagination is not inherently emancipatory — the freed country and the breeding program arrive in the same sentence. Read as literature, it is the sharper half of a pair: the story that diagnosed the rest cure, and the fantasy that answered it.