Books with title Herland

A must-read for fans of utopian science fiction, Herland describes a society comprised solely of female inhabitants. The residents of the isolated community have perfected a form of asexual reproduction, and have constructed a society that is free from all of the ills associated with Western culture, including war, strife, conflict, cruelty, and even pollution. Written by renowned feminist thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland is a thought-provoking and entertaining novel that will engage male and female readers alike.

A must-read for fans of utopian science fiction, Herland describes a society comprised solely of female inhabitants. The residents of the isolated community have perfected a form of asexual reproduction, and have constructed a society that is free from all of the ills associated with Western culture, including war, strife, conflict, cruelty, and even pollution. Written by renowned feminist thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland is a thought-provoking and entertaining novel that will engage male and female readers alike.

A must-read for fans of utopian science fiction, Herland describes a society comprised solely of female inhabitants. The residents of the isolated community have perfected a form of asexual reproduction, and have constructed a society that is free from all of the ills associated with Western culture, including war, strife, conflict, cruelty, and even pollution. Written by renowned feminist thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland is a thought-provoking and entertaining novel that will engage male and female readers alike.

Nobody likes feminists. You know it’s true. Even in 2015, the word feminism still has a chilling effect on most rooms: in certain internet circles, it’s thrown around like a slur; female pop stars and actors bend over backwards to emphasise that they’re into equality and stuff, but not in a scary way. Cultural messaging is powerful, and for decades (centuries?) the message, not coincidentally, has been that being a feminist is profoundly not cool. It’s not “cool” to call out your friend’s racist joke. It’s not “cool” to complain about sexism in the current blockbuster movie. Body positivity is not a “cool” segment of identity politics. “Cool” people let things go. “Cool” girls don’t complain.As a loud, stubborn, happily non-cool girl, I’ve grown accustomed to almost never seeing myself represented in media (except as a hairy, bra-burning punchline). I think that’s what is so deeply, viscerally empowering about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novella Herland, in which three swaggering male explorers discover a lost civilization populated entirely by women. Though it reads like a plucky sci-fi adventure serial, at Herland’s heart is an unapologetically feminist treatise. Gilman goes for it in a way that even some 21st-century progressives shy away from in the name of diplomacy.The narrator, Vandyck “Van” Jennings, and his two companions, Terry O Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, are such perfect, brutal caricatures of masculinity, they feel fresh and relevant enough to populate any sarcastic modern-day feminist blog post. Terry is all puffed-up sexual entitlement; Jeff oozes chivalric “nice guy” condescension; and Van is your bog-standard faux-innocent demanding to be educated.These are tropes that I still see actual human men falling into now, 100 years later, in my social media feeds and in my physical life. Just look at the language they use, speculating about what they might find once they reach Herland – so imperious, so presumptuous:“‘They would fight among themselves,’ Terry insisted. ‘Women always do. We mustn’t look to find any sort of order and organization.’‘You’re dead wrong,’ Jeff told him. ‘It will be like a nunnery under an Abbess – a peaceful, harmonious sisterhood.’I snorted derision at this idea.‘Nuns, indeed! Your peaceful sisterhoods were all celibate, Jeff, and under vows of obedience. These are just women, and mothers, and where there’s motherhood you don’t find sisterhood – not much.’‘No, sir – they’ll scrap,’ agreed Terry. ‘We mustn’t look for inventions and progress; it’ll be awfully primitive.’”What they find, of course, confounds all of those expectations. Herland is a paradise: no war, no crime, no hunger, no waste, no vanity, no jealousy, no heartbreak. The nation functions, essentially, as one cohesive family unit (albeit a family with three million members). Everyone is valued, everyone is cared for, everyone is a vegetarian, and everyone wears flattering but unisex woven tunics. Technology, education and art all flourish. Sisters are doing it for themselves, and they’re doing it better.AdvertisementThe brazen suggestion that a world peopled only with women (men phased out even from procreation) would be not only functional, but a flawless, gleaming, quasi-socialist utopia is an exhilarating bit of constructive hyperbole. It has shades of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s famous comment that the Supreme Court will finally have “enough” female justices “when there are nine”. After all, Ginsburg explained, “For most of the country’s history, there were nine and they were all men. Nobody thought that was strange.” In a culture so circumscribed by male fear (of obsolescence, of loss of power, of girls in the clubhouse) that even something as innocuous as an all-female Ghostbusters reboot caused widespread teeth-gnashing, it’s vital to lodge this message in the public consciousness:

Herland takes the listener on a fascinating journey into a utopian society comprised entirely of women. A society with no men also means no conflict, resulting in a war-free existence. It is a perfect world, but only if you are female. Three men set out on a journey into uncharted territory to discover for themselves if the legend of an all-female society is a myth or actually a reality. Tracking down the mythical realm of women poses plenty of challenges, but what they ultimately find is both enchanting and frightening. In an age when feminism was still considered a fringe concept, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's many works ventured into unfamiliar territory. She was not only a novelist but wrote a number of nonfiction titles, as well as poetry. For feminists of the era, Mrs. Gilman was considered a role model due to her unorthodox and progressive ideas.

Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. It first appeared as a serial in The Forerunner, a magazine edited and written by Gilman between 1909 and 1916. The book is the middle volume in her utopian trilogy; it was preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911), and followed with a sequel, With Her in Ourland (1916). It was not published in book form until 1979.BONUS :• Herland Audiobook.• Biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.