Herland, Chapter 12: Expelled (Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman)

Herland index

*
We had all meant to go home again. Indeed we had NOT meant
--not by any means--to stay as long as we had. But when it came
to being turned out, dismissed, sent away for bad conduct, we
none of us really liked it.

Terry said he did. He professed great scorn of the penalty and
the trial, as well as all the other characteristics of "this miserable
half-country." But he knew, and we knew, that in any "whole"
country we should never have been as forgivingly treated as we
had been here.

"If the people had come after us according to the directions
we left, there'd have been quite a different story!" said Terry.
We found out later why no reserve party had arrived. All our careful
directions had been destroyed in a fire. We might have all died there
and no one at home have ever known our whereabouts.

Terry was under guard now, all the time, known as unsafe,
convicted of what was to them an unpardonable sin.

He laughed at their chill horror. "Parcel of old maids!" he
called them. "They're all old maids--children or not. They don't
know the first thing about Sex."

When Terry said SEX, sex with a very large _S_, he meant
the male sex, naturally; its special values, its profound conviction of
being "the life force," its cheerful ignoring of the true life process,
and its interpretation of the other sex solely from its own point of view.

I had learned to see these things very differently since living
with Ellador; and as for Jeff, he was so thoroughly Herlandized that
he wasn't fair to Terry, who fretted sharply in his new restraint.

Moadine, grave and strong, as sadly patient as a mother with
a degenerate child, kept steady watch on him, with enough other
women close at hand to prevent an outbreak. He had no weapons,
and well knew that all his strength was of small avail against
those grim, quiet women.

We were allowed to visit him freely, but he had only his
room, and a small high-walled garden to walk in, while the
preparations for our departure were under way.

Three of us were to go: Terry, because he must; I, because two
were safer for our flyer, and the long boat trip to the coast;
Ellador, because she would not let me go without her.

If Jeff had elected to return, Celis would have gone too--they
were the most absorbed of lovers; but Jeff had no desire that way.

"Why should I want to go back to all our noise and dirt,
our vice and crime, our disease and degeneracy?" he demanded
of me privately. We never spoke like that before the women.
"I wouldn't take Celis there for anything on earth!" he protested.
"She'd die! She'd die of horror and shame to see our slums and
hospitals. How can you risk it with Ellador? You'd better break
it to her gently before she really makes up her mind."

Jeff was right. I ought to have told her more fully than I did,
of all the things we had to be ashamed of. But it is very hard to
bridge the gulf of as deep a difference as existed between our life
and theirs. I tried to.

"Look here, my dear," I said to her. "If you are really
going to my country with me, you've got to be prepared for a good
many shocks. It's not as beautiful as this--the cities, I mean,
the civilized parts--of course the wild country is."

"I shall enjoy it all," she said, her eyes starry with hope.
"I understand it's not like ours. I can see how monotonous our quiet
life must seem to you, how much more stirring yours must be.
It must be like the biological change you told me about when the
second sex was introduced--a far greater movement, constant
change, with new possibilities of growth."

I had told her of the later biological theories of sex, and she
was deeply convinced of the superior advantages of having two,
the superiority of a world with men in it.

"We have done what we could alone; perhaps we have some
things better in a quiet way, but you have the whole world--all
the people of the different nations--all the long rich history
behind you--all the wonderful new knowledge. Oh, I just can't
wait to see it!"

What could I do? I told her in so many words that we had our
unsolved problems, that we had dishonesty and corruption, vice
and crime, disease and insanity, prisons and hospitals; and it
made no more impression on her than it would to tell a South Sea
Islander about the temperature of the Arctic Circle. She could
intellectually see that it was bad to have those things; but she
could not FEEL it.

We had quite easily come to accept the Herland life as normal,
because it was normal--none of us make any outcry over mere health
and peace and happy industry. And the abnormal, to which we are
all so sadly well acclimated, she had never seen.

The two things she cared most to hear about, and wanted
most to see, were these: the beautiful relation of marriage and
the lovely women who were mothers and nothing else; beyond these
her keen, active mind hungered eagerly for the world life.

"I'm almost as anxious to go as you are yourself," she insisted,
"and you must be desperately homesick."

I assured her that no one could be homesick in such a paradise
as theirs, but she would have none of it.

"Oh, yes--I know. It's like those little tropical islands you've
told me about, shining like jewels in the big blue sea--I can't wait
to see the sea! The little island may be as perfect as a garden, but
you always want to get back to your own big country, don't you?
Even if it is bad in some ways?"

Ellador was more than willing. But the nearer it came to our
really going, and to my having to take her back to our "civilization,"
after the clean peace and beauty of theirs, the more I began to dread it,
and the more I tried to explain.

Of course I had been homesick at first, while we were prisoners,
before I had Ellador. And of course I had, at first, rather idealized
my country and its ways, in describing it. Also, I had always
accepted certain evils as integral parts of our civilization and
never dwelt on them at all. Even when I tried to tell her the worst,
I never remembered some things--which, when she came to see them,
impressed her at once, as they had never impressed me.
Now, in my efforts at explanation, I began to see both ways
more keenly than I had before; to see the painful defects of
my own land, the marvelous gains of this.

In missing men we three visitors had naturally missed the
larger part of life, and had unconsciously assumed that they must
miss it too. It took me a long time to realize--Terry never did
realize--how little it meant to them. When we say MEN, MAN,
MANLY, MANHOOD, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have
in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture
of the world and all its activities. To grow up and "be a man,"
to "act like a man"--the meaning and connotation is wide indeed.
That vast background is full of marching columns of men,
of changing lines of men, of long processions of men; of men
steering their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains,
breaking horses, herding cattle, ploughing and sowing and reaping,
toiling at the forge and furnace, digging in the mine, building
roads and bridges and high cathedrals, managing great businesses,
teaching in all the colleges, preaching in all the churches;
of men everywhere, doing everything--"the world."

And when we say WOMEN, we think FEMALE--the sex.

But to these women, in the unbroken sweep of this two-
thousand-year-old feminine civilization, the word WOMAN called
up all that big background, so far as they had gone in social
development; and the word MAN meant to them only MALE--the sex.

Of course we could TELL them that in our world men did
everything; but that did not alter the background of their minds.
That man, "the male," did all these things was to them a statement,
making no more change in the point of view than was made in ours
when we first faced the astounding fact--to us--that in Herland
women were "the world."

We had been living there more than a year. We had learned
their limited history, with its straight, smooth, upreaching lines,
reaching higher and going faster up to the smooth comfort of
their present life. We had learned a little of their psychology, a
much wider field than the history, but here we could not follow
so readily. We were now well used to seeing women not as females
but as people; people of all sorts, doing every kind of work.

This outbreak of Terry's, and the strong reaction against it,
gave us a new light on their genuine femininity. This was given
me with great clearness by both Ellador and Somel. The feeling
was the same--sick revulsion and horror, such as would be felt
at some climactic blasphemy.

They had no faintest approach to such a thing in their minds,
knowing nothing of the custom of marital indulgence among us.
To them the one high purpose of motherhood had been for so
long the governing law of life, and the contribution of the father,
though known to them, so distinctly another method to the same end,
that they could not, with all their effort, get the point of
view of the male creature whose desires quite ignore parentage
and seek only for what we euphoniously term "the joys of love."

When I tried to tell Ellador that women too felt so, with us,
she drew away from me, and tried hard to grasp intellectually
what she could in no way sympathize with.

"You mean--that with you--love between man and woman
expresses itself in that way--without regard to motherhood?
To parentage, I mean," she added carefully.

"Yes, surely. It is love we think of--the deep sweet love
between two. Of course we want children, and children come--
but that is not what we think about."

"But--but--it seems so against nature!" she said. "None of
the creatures we know do that. Do other animals--in your country?"

"We are not animals!" I replied with some sharpness.
"At least we are something more--something higher. This is a far
nobler and more beautiful relation, as I have explained before.
Your view seems to us rather--shall I say, practical? Prosaic?
Merely a means to an end! With us--oh, my dear girl--cannot
you see? Cannot you feel? It is the last, sweetest, highest
consummation of mutual love."

She was impressed visibly. She trembled in my arms, as I held
her close, kissing her hungrily. But there rose in her eyes that
look I knew so well, that remote clear look as if she had gone
far away even though I held her beautiful body so close,
and was now on some snowy mountain regarding me from a
distance.

"I feel it quite clearly," she said to me. "It gives me a deep
sympathy with what you feel, no doubt more strongly still. But
what I feel, even what you feel, dearest, does not convince me that it
is right. Until I am sure of that, of course I cannot do as you wish."

Ellador, at times like this, always reminded me of Epictetus.
"I will put you in prison!" said his master. "My body, you mean,"
replied Epictetus calmly. "I will cut your head off," said his
master. "Have I said that my head could not be cut off?" A
difficult person, Epictetus.

What is this miracle by which a woman, even in your arms,
may withdraw herself, utterly disappear till what you hold is as
inaccessible as the face of a cliff?

"Be patient with me, dear," she urged sweetly. "I know it is
hard for you. And I begin to see--a little--how Terry was so
driven to crime."

"Oh, come, that's a pretty hard word for it. After all, Alima
was his wife, you know," I urged, feeling at the moment a sudden
burst of sympathy for poor Terry. For a man of his temperament
--and habits--it must have been an unbearable situation.

But Ellador, for all her wide intellectual grasp, and the broad
sympathy in which their religion trained them, could not make
allowance for such--to her--sacrilegious brutality.

It was the more difficult to explain to her, because we three,
in our constant talks and lectures about the rest of the world, had
naturally avoided the seamy side; not so much from a desire to
deceive, but from wishing to put the best foot foremost for our
civilization, in the face of the beauty and comfort of theirs. Also,
we really thought some things were right, or at least unavoidable,
which we could readily see would be repugnant to them, and
therefore did not discuss. Again there was much of our world's
life which we, being used to it, had not noticed as anything worth
describing. And still further, there was about these women a
colossal innocence upon which many of the things we did say
had made no impression whatever.

I am thus explicit about it because it shows how unexpectedly
strong was the impression made upon Ellador when she at last
entered our civilization.

She urged me to be patient, and I was patient. You see, I loved
her so much that even the restrictions she so firmly established
left me much happiness. We were lovers, and there is surely delight
enough in that.

Do not imagine that these young women utterly refused "the
Great New Hope," as they called it, that of dual parentage. For
that they had agreed to marry us, though the marrying part of
it was a concession to our prejudices rather than theirs. To them
the process was the holy thing--and they meant to keep it holy.

But so far only Celis, her blue eyes swimming in happy tears,
her heart lifted with that tide of race-motherhood which was
their supreme passion, could with ineffable joy and pride announce
that she was to be a mother. "The New Motherhood" they called it,
and the whole country knew. There was no pleasure, no service,
no honor in all the land that Celis might not have had. Almost
like the breathless reverence with which, two thousand years ago,
that dwindling band of women had watched the miracle of virgin birth,
was the deep awe and warm expectancy with which they greeted this
new miracle of union.

All mothers in that land were holy. To them, for long ages,
the approach to motherhood has been by the most intense and exquisite
love and longing, by the Supreme Desire, the overmastering demand for
a child. Every thought they held in connection with the processes
of maternity was open to the day, simple yet sacred. Every woman
of them placed motherhood not only higher than other duties, but so
far higher that there were no other duties, one might almost say.
All their wide mutual love, all the subtle interplay of mutual
friendship and service, the urge of progressive thought and invention,
the deepest religious emotion, every feeling and every act was related
to this great central Power, to the River of Life pouring through them,
which made them the bearers of the very Spirit of God.

Of all this I learned more and more--from their books, from
talk, especially from Ellador. She was at first, for a brief moment,
envious of her friend--a thought she put away from her at once
and forever.

"It is better," she said to me. "It is much better that it has
not come to me yet--to us, that is. For if I am to go with you to
your country, we may have `adventures by sea and land,' as you say
[and as in truth we did], and it might not be at all safe for a baby.
So we won't try again, dear, till it is safe--will we?"

This was a hard saying for a very loving husband.

"Unless," she went on, "if one is coming, you will leave me behind.
You can come back, you know--and I shall have the child."

Then that deep ancient chill of male jealousy of even his own
progeny touched my heart.

"I'd rather have you, Ellador, than all the children in the world.
I'd rather have you with me--on your own terms--than not to have you."

This was a very stupid saying. Of course I would! For if she
wasn't there I should want all of her and have none of her. But
if she went along as a sort of sublimated sister--only much closer
and warmer than that, really--why I should have all of her but that
one thing. And I was beginning to find that Ellador's friendship,
Ellador's comradeship, Ellador's sisterly affection, Ellador's
perfectly sincere love--none the less deep that she held it back
on a definite line of reserve--were enough to live on very happily.

I find it quite beyond me to describe what this woman
was to me. We talk fine things about women, but in our
hearts we know that they are very limited beings--most of them.
We honor them for their functional powers, even while we dishonor
them by our use of it; we honor them for their carefully enforced
virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we
think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the perverted
maternal activities which make our wives the most comfortable
of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our
own decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary
duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our
needs in every way. Oh, we value them, all right, "in their place,"
which place is the home, where they perform that mixture of
duties so ably described by Mrs. Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon,
in which the services of "a mistress" are carefully specified.
She is a very clear writer, Mrs. J. D. D. Bacon, and understands
her subject--from her own point of view. But--that combination
of industries, while convenient, and in a way economical, does
not arouse the kind of emotion commanded by the women of Herland.
These were women one had to love "up," very high up, instead of down.
They were not pets. They were not servants. They were not timid,
inexperienced, weak.

After I got over the jar to my pride (which Jeff, I truly think,
never felt--he was a born worshipper, and which Terry never got
over--he was quite clear in his ideas of "the position of women"),
I found that loving "up" was a very good sensation after all.
It gave me a queer feeling, way down deep, as of the
stirring of some ancient dim prehistoric consciousness, a feeling
that they were right somehow--that this was the way to feel. It
was like--coming home to mother. I don't mean the underflannels-
and-doughnuts mother, the fussy person that waits on you and
spoils you and doesn't really know you. I mean the feeling
that a very little child would have, who had been lost--for ever
so long. It was a sense of getting home; of being clean and rested;
of safety and yet freedom; of love that was always there, warm
like sunshine in May, not hot like a stove or a featherbed--a love
that didn't irritate and didn't smother.

I looked at Ellador as if I hadn't seen her before. "If you
won't go," I said, "I'll get Terry to the coast and come back alone.
You can let me down a rope. And if you will go--why you blessed
wonder-woman--I would rather live with you all my life--like
this--than to have any other woman I ever saw, or any number
of them, to do as I like with. Will you come?"

She was keen for coming. So the plans went on. She'd have
liked to wait for that Marvel of Celis's, but Terry had no such desire.
He was crazy to be out of it all. It made him sick, he said, SICK;
this everlasting mother-mother-mothering. I don't think Terry had
what the phrenologists call "the lump of philoprogenitiveness"
at all well developed.

"Morbid one-sided cripples," he called them, even when
from his window he could see their splendid vigor and beauty;
even while Moadine, as patient and friendly as if she had never
helped Alima to hold and bind him, sat there in the room, the
picture of wisdom and serene strength. "Sexless, epicene,
undeveloped neuters!" he went on bitterly. He sounded like
Sir Almwroth Wright.

Well--it was hard. He was madly in love with Alima, really;
more so than he had ever been before, and their tempestuous
courtship, quarrels, and reconciliations had fanned the flame.
And then when he sought by that supreme conquest whichseems
so natural a thing to that type of man, to force her to love
him as her master--to have the sturdy athletic furious woman rise
up and master him--she and her friends--it was no wonder he raged.

Come to think of it, I do not recall a similar case in all history
or fiction. Women have killed themselves rather than submit to
outrage; they have killed the outrager; they have escaped; or they
have submitted--sometimes seeming to get on very well with the
victor afterward. There was that adventure of "false Sextus," for
instance, who "found Lucrese combing the fleece, under the midnight
lamp." He threatened, as I remember, that if she did not submit
he would slay her, slay a slave and place him beside her and say
he found him there. A poor device, it always seemed to me.
If Mr. Lucretius had asked him how he came to be in his wife's
bedroom overlooking her morals, what could he have said?
But the point is Lucrese submitted, and Alima didn't.

"She kicked me," confided the embittered prisoner--he had
to talk to someone. "I was doubled up with the pain, of course,
and she jumped on me and yelled for this old harpy [Moadine
couldn't hear him] and they had me trussed up in no time.
I believe Alima could have done it alone," he added with
reluctant admiration. "She's as strong as a horse. And of
course a man's helpless when you hit him like that. No woman
with a shade of decency--"

I had to grin at that, and even Terry did, sourly. He wasn't
given to reasoning, but it did strike him that an assault like his
rather waived considerations of decency.

"I'd give a year of my life to have her alone again," he said
slowly, his hands clenched till the knuckles were white.

But he never did. She left our end of the country entirely,
went up into the fir-forest on the highest slopes, and stayed there.
Before we left he quite desperately longed to see her, but she would
not come and he could not go. They watched him like lynxes.
(Do lynxes watch any better than mousing cats, I wonder!)

Well--we had to get the flyer in order, and be sure there was
enough fuel left, though Terry said we could glide all right, down
to that lake, once we got started. We'd have gone gladly in a
week's time, of course, but there was a great to-do all over the
country about Ellador's leaving them. She had interviews with
some of the leading ethicists--wise women with still eyes, and
with the best of the teachers. There was a stir, a thrill, a deep
excitement everywhere.

Our teaching about the rest of the world has given them all
a sense of isolation, of remoteness, of being a little outlying
sample of a country, overlooked and forgotten among the family
of nations. We had called it "the family of nations," and they
liked the phrase immensely.

They were deeply aroused on the subject of evolution; indeed,
the whole field of natural science drew them irresistibly.
Any number of them would have risked everything to go to the
strange unknown lands and study; but we could take only one,
and it had to be Ellador, naturally.

We planned greatly about coming back, about establishing
a connecting route by water; about penetrating those vast
forests and civilizing--or exterminating--the dangerous savages.
That is, we men talked of that last--not with the women.
They had a definite aversion to killing things.

But meanwhile there was high council being held among the
wisest of them all. The students and thinkers who had been gathering
facts from us all this time, collating and relating them, and making
inferences, laid the result of their labors before the council.

Little had we thought that our careful efforts at concealment
had been so easily seen through, with never a word to show us
that they saw. They had followed up words of ours on the
science of optics, asked innocent questions about glasses and the
like, and were aware of the defective eyesight so common among us.

With the lightest touch, different women asking different
questions at different times, and putting all our answers together
like a picture puzzle, they had figured out a sort of skeleton chart
as to the prevalence of disease among us. Even more subtly with
no show of horror or condemnation, they had gathered something--far
from the truth, but something pretty clear--about poverty, vice,
and crime. They even had a goodly number of our dangers all itemized,
from asking us about insurance and innocent things like that.

They were well posted as to the different races, beginning
with their poison-arrow natives down below and widening out
to the broad racial divisions we had told them about. Never a
shocked expression of the face or exclamation of revolt had
warned us; they had been extracting the evidence without our
knowing it all this time, and now were studying with the most
devout earnestness the matter they had prepared.

The result was rather distressing to us. They first explained
the matter fully to Ellador, as she was the one who purposed
visiting the Rest of the World. To Celis they said nothing. She
must not be in any way distressed, while the whole nation waited
on her Great Work.

Finally Jeff and I were called in. Somel and Zava were there,
and Ellador, with many others that we knew.

They had a great globe, quite fairly mapped out from the
small section maps in that compendium of ours. They had the
different peoples of the earth roughly outlined, and their status
in civilization indicated. They had charts and figures and estimates,
based on the facts in that traitorous little book and what they had
learned from us.

Somel explained: "We find that in all your historic period,
so much longer than ours, that with all the interplay of services,
the exchange of inventions and discoveries, and the wonderful
progress we so admire, that in this widespread Other World of yours,
there is still much disease, often contagious."

We admitted this at once.

"Also there is still, in varying degree, ignorance, with
prejudice and unbridled emotion."

This too was admitted.

"We find also that in spite of the advance of democracy and the
increase of wealth, that there is still unrest and sometimes combat."

Yes, yes, we admitted it all. We were used to these things and
saw no reason for so much seriousness.

"All things considered," they said, and they did not say a
hundredth part of the things they were considering, "we are
unwilling to expose our country to free communication with the
rest of the world--as yet. If Ellador comes back, and we approve
her report, it may be done later--but not yet.

"So we have this to ask of you gentlemen [they knew that
word was held a title of honor with us], that you promise not in
any way to betray the location of this country until permission
--after Ellador's return."

Jeff was perfectly satisfied. He thought they were quite right.
He always did. I never saw an alien become naturalized more
quickly than that man in Herland.

I studied it awhile, thinking of the time they'd have if some
of our contagions got loose there, and concluded they were right.
So I agreed.

Terry was the obstacle. "Indeed I won't!" he protested. "The
first thing I'll do is to get an expedition fixed up to force an
entrance into Ma-land."

"Then," they said quite calmly, "he must remain an absolute
prisoner, always."

"Anesthesia would be kinder," urged Moadine.

"And safer," added Zava.

"He will promise, I think," said Ellador.

And he did. With which agreement we at last left Herland.

Herland index

______________________________________

Originally published in Forerunner (1915).

Etext from Project Gutenberg.

This public domain text has been presented as found (with some minor format changes); this website and its owners are not responsible for errors, substantive and/or minor.

Herland, Chapter 11: Our Difficulties (Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman)

Herland index

*
We say, "Marriage is a lottery"; also "Marriages are made in
Heaven"--but this is not so widely accepted as the other.

We have a well-founded theory that it is best to marry "in
one's class," and certain well-grounded suspicions of international
marriages, which seem to persist in the interests of social progress,
rather than in those of the contracting parties.

But no combination of alien races, of color, of caste, or creed,
was ever so basically difficult to establish as that between us,
three modern American men, and these three women of Herland.

It is all very well to say that we should have been frank about
it beforehand. We had been frank. We had discussed--at least
Ellador and I had--the conditions of The Great Adventure, and
thought the path was clear before us. But there are some things
one takes for granted, supposes are mutually understood, and to
which both parties may repeatedly refer without ever meaning
the same thing.

The differences in the education of the average man and
woman are great enough, but the trouble they make is not mostly
for the man; he generally carries out his own views of the case.
The woman may have imagined the conditions of married life to
be different; but what she imagined, was ignorant of, or might
have preferred, did not seriously matter.

I can see clearly and speak calmly about this now, writing
after a lapse of years, years full of growth and education, but at
the time it was rather hard sledding for all of us--especially for
Terry. Poor Terry! You see, in any other imaginable marriage
among the peoples of the earth, whether the woman were black,
red, yellow, brown, or white; whether she were ignorant or educated,
submissive or rebellious, she would have behind her the marriage
tradition of our general history. This tradition relates the woman
to the man. He goes on with his business, and she adapts herself to
him and to it. Even in citizenship, by some strange hocus-pocus,
that fact of birth and geography was waved aside, and the woman
automatically acquired the nationality of her husband.

Well--here were we, three aliens in this land of women. It
was small in area, and the external differences were not so great
as to astound us. We did not yet appreciate the differences between
the race-mind of this people and ours.

In the first place, they were a "pure stock" of two thousand
uninterrupted years. Where we have some long connected lines
of thought and feeling, together with a wide range of differences,
often irreconcilable, these people were smoothly and firmly
agreed on most of the basic principles of their life; and not only
agreed in principle, but accustomed for these sixty-odd generations
to act on those principles.

This is one thing which we did not understand--had made no
allowance for. When in our pre-marital discussions one of those
dear girls had said: "We understand it thus and thus," or "We
hold such and such to be true," we men, in our own deep-seated
convictions of the power of love, and our easy views about
beliefs and principles, fondly imagined that we could convince
them otherwise. What we imagined, before marriage, did not
matter any more than what an average innocent young girl imagines.
We found the facts to be different.

It was not that they did not love us; they did, deeply and
warmly. But there are you again--what they meant by "love"
and what we meant by "love" were so different.

Perhaps it seems rather cold-blooded to say "we" and "they,"
as if we were not separate couples, with our separate joys and
sorrows, but our positions as aliens drove us together constantly.
The whole strange experience had made our friendship more
close and intimate than it would ever have become in a free and
easy lifetime among our own people. Also, as men, with our
masculine tradition of far more than two thousand years, we were a unit,
small but firm, against this far larger unit of feminine tradition.

I think I can make clear the points of difference without a too
painful explicitness. The more external disagreement was in the
matter of "the home," and the housekeeping duties and pleasures
we, by instinct and long education, supposed to be inherently
appropriate to women.

I will give two illustrations, one away up, and the other away
down, to show how completely disappointed we were in this regard.

For the lower one, try to imagine a male ant, coming from
some state of existence where ants live in pairs, endeavoring to
set up housekeeping with a female ant from a highly developed
anthill. This female ant might regard him with intense personal
affection, but her ideas of parentage and economic management
would be on a very different scale from his. Now, of course, if
she was a stray female in a country of pairing ants, he might have
had his way with her; but if he was a stray male in an anthill--!

For the higher one, try to imagine a devoted and impassioned
man trying to set up housekeeping with a lady angel, a real
wings-and-harp-and-halo angel, accustomed to fulfilling divine
missions all over interstellar space. This angel might love the man
with an affection quite beyond his power of return or even of
appreciation, but her ideas of service and duty would be on a
very different scale from his. Of course, if she was a stray angel
in a country of men, he might have had his way with her; but
if he was a stray man among angels--!

Terry, at his worst, in a black fury for which, as a man, I must
have some sympathy, preferred the ant simile. More of Terry and
his special troubles later. It was hard on Terry.

Jeff--well, Jeff always had a streak that was too good for
this world! He's the kind that would have made a saintly priest in
parentagearlier times. He accepted the angel theory, swallowed it whole,
tried to force it on us--with varying effect. He so worshipped
Celis, and not only Celis, but what she represented; he had
become so deeply convinced of the almost supernatural advantages
of this country and people, that he took his medicine like
a--I cannot say "like a man," but more as if he wasn't one.

Don't misunderstand me for a moment. Dear old Jeff was no
milksop or molly-coddle either. He was a strong, brave, efficient
man, and an excellent fighter when fighting was necessary. But
there was always this angel streak in him. It was rather a wonder,
Terry being so different, that he really loved Jeff as he did; but
it happens so sometimes, in spite of the difference--perhaps
because of it.

As for me, I stood between. I was no such gay Lothario as
Terry, and no such Galahad as Jeff. But for all my limitations I
think I had the habit of using my brains in regard to behavior
rather more frequently than either of them. I had to use brain-
power now, I can tell you.

The big point at issue between us and our wives was, as may
easily be imagined, in the very nature of the relation.

"Wives! Don't talk to me about wives!" stormed Terry. "They
don't know what the word means."

Which is exactly the fact--they didn't. How could they? Back
in their prehistoric records of polygamy and slavery there were
no ideals of wifehood as we know it, and since then no possibility
of forming such.

"The only thing they can think of about a man is FATHERHOOD!"
said Terry in high scorn. "FATHERHOOD!" As if a man was always
wanting to be a FATHER!"

This also was correct. They had their long, wide, deep, rich
experience of Motherhood, and their only perception of the
value of a male creature as such was for Fatherhood.

Aside from that, of course, was the whole range of personal
love, love which as Jeff earnestly phrased it "passeth the love of
women!" It did, too. I can give no idea--either now, after long
and happy experience of it, or as it seemed then, in the first
measureless wonder--of the beauty and power of the love they gave us.

Even Alima--who had a more stormy temperament than either
of the others, and who, heaven knows, had far more provocation--
even Alima was patience and tenderness and wisdom personified
to the man she loved, until he--but I haven't got to that yet.


These, as Terry put it, "alleged or so-called wives" of ours,
went right on with their profession as foresters. We, having no
special learnings, had long since qualified as assistants. We had
to do something, if only to pass the time, and it had to be work
--we couldn't be playing forever.

This kept us out of doors with those dear girls, and more or
less together--too much together sometimes.

These people had, it now became clear to us, the highest,
keenest, most delicate sense of personal privacy, but not the
faintest idea of that SOLITUDE A DEUX we are so fond of. They had,
every one of them, the "two rooms and a bath" theory realized.
From earliest childhood each had a separate bedroom with toilet
conveniences, and one of the marks of coming of age was the
addition of an outer room in which to receive friends.

Long since we had been given our own two rooms apiece, and
as being of a different sex and race, these were in a separate
house. It seemed to be recognized that we should breathe easier
if able to free our minds in real seclusion.

For food we either went to any convenient eating-house,
ordered a meal brought in, or took it with us to the woods,
always and equally good. All this we had become used to and
enjoyed--in our courting days.

After marriage there arose in us a somewhat unexpected urge
of feeling that called for a separate house; but this feeling found
no response in the hearts of those fair ladies.

"We ARE alone, dear," Ellador explained to me with gentle
patience. "We are alone in these great forests; we may go and eat
in any little summer-house--just we two, or have a separate
table anywhere--or even have a separate meal in our own rooms.
How could we be aloner?"

This was all very true. We had our pleasant mutual solitude
about our work, and our pleasant evening talks in their apartments
or ours; we had, as it were, all the pleasures of courtship carried
right on; but we had no sense of--perhaps it may be called possession.

"Might as well not be married at all," growled Terry. "They
only got up that ceremony to please us--please Jeff, mostly.
They've no real idea of being married.

I tried my best to get Ellador's point of view, and naturally
I tried to give her mine. Of course, what we, as men, wanted to
make them see was that there were other, and as we proudly said
"higher," uses in this relation than what Terry called "mere parentage."
In the highest terms I knew I tried to explain this to Ellador.

"Anything higher than for mutual love to hope to give life,
as we did?" she said. "How is it higher?"

"It develops love," I explained. "All the power of beautiful
permanent mated love comes through this higher development."

"Are you sure?" she asked gently. "How do you know that
it was so developed? There are some birds who love each other
so that they mope and pine if separated, and never pair again if
one dies, but they never mate except in the mating season.
Among your people do you find high and lasting affection appearing
in proportion to this indulgence?"

It is a very awkward thing, sometimes, to have a logical mind.

Of course I knew about those monogamous birds and beasts too,
that mate for life and show every sign of mutual affection,
without ever having stretched the sex relationship beyond its
original range. But what of it?

"Those are lower forms of life!" I protested. "They have no
capacity for faithful and affectionate, and apparently happy--
but oh, my dear! my dear!--what can they know of such a love
as draws us together? Why, to touch you--to be near you--to
come closer and closer--to lose myself in you--surely you feel
it too, do you not?"

I came nearer. I seized her hands.

Her eyes were on mine, tender radiant, but steady and
strong. There was something so powerful, so large and changeless,
in those eyes that I could not sweep her off her feet by my
own emotion as I had unconsciously assumed would be the case.

It made me feel as, one might imagine, a man might feel who
loved a goddess--not a Venus, though! She did not resent my
attitude, did not repel it, did not in the least fear it, evidently.
There was not a shade of that timid withdrawal or pretty resistance
which are so--provocative.

"You see, dearest," she said, "you have to be patient with us.
We are not like the women of your country. We are Mothers, and
we are People, but we have not specialized in this line."

"We" and "we" and "we"--it was so hard to get her to be
personal. And, as I thought that, I suddenly remembered how we
were always criticizing OUR women for BEING so personal.

Then I did my earnest best to picture to her the sweet intense joy
of married lovers, and the result in higher stimulus to all creative work.

"Do you mean," she asked quite calmly, as if I was not holding
her cool firm hands in my hot and rather quivering ones, "that with you,
when people marry, they go right on doing this in season and out of season,
with no thought of children at all?"

"They do," I said, with some bitterness. "They are not mere
parents. They are men and women, and they love each other."

"How long?" asked Ellador, rather unexpectedly.

"How long?" I repeated, a little dashed. "Why as long as they live."

"There is something very beautiful in the idea," she admitted,
still as if she were discussing life on Mars. "This climactic
expression, which, in all the other life-forms, has but the one purpose,
has with you become specialized to higher, purer, nobler uses. It has--
I judge from what you tell me--the most ennobling effect on character.
People marry, not only for parentage, but for this exquisite interchange
--and, as a result, you have a world full of continuous lovers, ardent,
happy, mutually devoted, always living on that high tide of supreme
emotion which we had supposed to belong only to one season and one use.
And you say it has other results, stimulating all high creative work.
That must mean floods, oceans of such work, blossoming from this intense
happiness of every married pair! It is a beautiful idea!"

She was silent, thinking.

So was I.

She slipped one hand free, and was stroking my hair with it
in a gentle motherly way. I bowed my hot head on her shoulder and
felt a dim sense of peace, a restfulness which was very pleasant.

"You must take me there someday, darling," she was saying.
"It is not only that I love you so much, I want to see your
country --your people--your mother--" she paused reverently.
"Oh, how I shall love your mother!"

I had not been in love many times--my experience did not
compare with Terry's. But such as I had was so different from this
that I was perplexed, and full of mixed feelings: partly a growing
sense of common ground between us, a pleasant rested calm feeling,
which I had imagined could only be attained in one way; and partly a
bewildered resentment because what I found was not what I had looked for.

It was their confounded psychology! Here they were with this
profound highly developed system of education so bred into
them that even if they were not teachers by profession they all
had a general proficiency in it--it was second nature to them.

And no child, stormily demanding a cookie "between meals,"
was ever more subtly diverted into an interest in house-building
than was I when I found an apparently imperative demand had
disappeared without my noticing it.

And all the time those tender mother eyes, those keen scientific
eyes, noting every condition and circumstance, and learning how to
"take time by the forelock" and avoid discussion before occasion arose.

I was amazed at the results. I found that much, very much,
of what I had honestly supposed to be a physiological necessity
was a psychological necessity--or so believed. I found, after my
ideas of what was essential had changed, that my feelings changed also.
And more than all, I found this--a factor of enormous weight--these
women were not provocative. That made an immense difference.

The thing that Terry had so complained of when we first
came--that they weren't "feminine," they lacked "charm," now
became a great comfort. Their vigorous beauty was an aesthetic
pleasure, not an irritant. Their dress and ornaments had not a
touch of the "come-and-find-me" element.

Even with my own Ellador, my wife, who had for a time
unveiled a woman's heart and faced the strange new hope and
joy of dual parentage, she afterward withdrew again into the
same good comrade she had been at first. They were women, PLUS,
and so much plus that when they did not choose to let the
womanness appear, you could not find it anywhere.

I don't say it was easy for me; it wasn't. But when I made
appeal to her sympathies I came up against another immovable wall.
She was sorry, honestly sorry, for my distresses, and made all manner
of thoughtful suggestions, often quite useful, as well as the wise
foresight I have mentioned above, which often saved all difficulty
before it arose; but her sympathy did not alter her convictions.

"If I thought it was really right and necessary, I could
perhaps bring myself to it, for your sake, dear; but I do not want
to--not at all. You would not have a mere submission, would you?
That is not the kind of high romantic love you spoke of, surely?
It is a pity, of course, that you should have to adjust your highly
specialized faculties to our unspecialized ones."

Confound it! I hadn't married the nation, and I told her so.
But she only smiled at her own limitations and explained that she
had to "think in we's."

Confound it again! Here I'd have all my energies focused on
one wish, and before I knew it she'd have them dissipated in one
direction or another, some subject of discussion that began just
at the point I was talking about and ended miles away.

It must not be imagined that I was just repelled, ignored, left
to cherish a grievance. Not at all. My happiness was in the hands
of a larger, sweeter womanhood than I had ever imagined. Before
our marriage my own ardor had perhaps blinded me to much of this.
I was madly in love with not so much what was there as with
what I supposed to be there. Now I found an endlessly beautiful
undiscovered country to explore, and in it the sweetest wisdom
and understanding. It was as if I had come to some new place
and people, with a desire to eat at all hours, and no other
interests in particular; and as if my hosts, instead of merely
saying, "You shall not eat," had presently aroused in me a lively
desire for music, for pictures, for games, for exercise, for playing
in the water, for running some ingenious machine; and, in the
multitude of my satisfactions, I forgot the one point which was
not satisfied, and got along very well until mealtime.

One of the cleverest and most ingenious of these tricks was
only clear to me many years after, when we were so wholly at one
on this subject that I could laugh at my own predicament then.
It was this: You see, with us, women are kept as different as
possible and as feminine as possible. We men have our own world,
with only men in it; we get tired of our ultra-maleness and
turn gladly to the ultra-femaleness. Also, in keeping our women
as feminine as possible, we see to it that when we turn to them
we find the thing we want always in evidence. Well, the
atmosphere of this place was anything but seductive. The very
numbers of these human women, always in human relation, made
them anything but alluring. When, in spite of this, my hereditary
instincts and race-traditions made me long for the feminine response
in Ellador, instead of withdrawing so that I should want her more,
she deliberately gave me a little too much of her society.
--always de-feminized, as it were. It was awfully funny, really.

Here was I, with an Ideal in mind, for which I hotly longed,
and here was she, deliberately obtruding in the foreground of my
consciousness a Fact--a fact which I coolly enjoyed, but which
actually interfered with what I wanted. I see now clearly enough
why a certain kind of man, like Sir Almroth Wright, resents the
professional development of women. It gets in the way of the sex
ideal; it temporarily covers and excludes femininity.

Of course, in this case, I was so fond of Ellador my friend,
of Ellador my professional companion, that I necessarily enjoyed
her society on any terms. Only--when I had had her with me in
her de-feminine capacity for a sixteen-hour day, I could go to my
own room and sleep without dreaming about her.

The witch! If ever anybody worked to woo and win and hold
a human soul, she did, great superwoman that she was. I couldn't
then half comprehend the skill of it, the wonder. But this I soon
began to find: that under all our cultivated attitude of mind
toward women, there is an older, deeper, more "natural" feeling,
the restful reverence which looks up to the Mother sex.

So we grew together in friendship and happiness, Ellador and
I, and so did Jeff and Celis.

When it comes to Terry's part of it, and Alima's, I'm sorry--
and I'm ashamed. Of course I blame her somewhat. She wasn't
as fine a psychologist as Ellador, and what's more, I think she had
a far-descended atavistic trace of more marked femaleness, never
apparent till Terry called it out. But when all is said, it
doesn't excuse him. I hadn't realized to the full Terry's character
--I couldn't, being a man.

The position was the same as with us, of course, only with
these distinctions. Alima, a shade more alluring, and several
shades less able as a practical psychologist; Terry, a hundredfold
more demanding--and proportionately less reasonable.

Things grew strained very soon between them. I fancy at first,
when they were together, in her great hope of parentage and his
keen joy of conquest--that Terry was inconsiderate. In fact, I know it,
from things he said.

"You needn't talk to me," he snapped at Jeff one day, just
before our weddings. "There never was a woman yet that did not
enjoy being MASTERED. All your pretty talk doesn't amount to a hill
o'beans--I KNOW." And Terry would hum:


I've taken my fun where I found it.
I've rogued and I've ranged in my time,

and


The things that I learned from the yellow and black,
They 'ave helped me a 'eap with the white.


Jeff turned sharply and left him at the time. I was a bit
disquieted myself.

Poor old Terry! The things he'd learned didn't help him a
heap in Herland. His idea was to take--he thought that was the way.
He thought, he honestly believed, that women like it. Not the women
of Herland! Not Alima!

I can see her now--one day in the very first week of their
marriage, setting forth to her day's work with long determined
strides and hard-set mouth, and sticking close to Ellador.
She didn't wish to be alone with Terry--you could see that.

But the more she kept away from him, the more he wanted
her--naturally.

He made a tremendous row about their separate establishments,
tried to keep her in his rooms, tried to stay in hers. But there
she drew the line sharply.

He came away one night, and stamped up and down the
moonlit road, swearing under his breath. I was taking a walk that
night too, but I wasn't in his state of mind. To hear him rage
you'd not have believed that he loved Alima at all--you'd have
thought that she was some quarry he was pursuing, something
to catch and conquer.

I think that, owing to all those differences I spoke of, they
soon lost the common ground they had at first, and were unable
to meet sanely and dispassionately. I fancy too--this is pure
conjecture--that he had succeeded in driving Alima beyond her
best judgment, her real conscience, and that after that her own
sense of shame, the reaction of the thing, made her bitter perhaps.

They quarreled, really quarreled, and after making it up once
or twice, they seemed to come to a real break--she would not be
alone with him at all. And perhaps she was a bit nervous, I don't
know, but she got Moadine to come and stay next door to her. Also,
she had a sturdy assistant detailed to accompany her in her work.

Terry had his own ideas, as I've tried to show. I daresay he
thought he had a right to do as he did. Perhaps he even convinced
himself that it would be better for her. Anyhow, he hid himself
in her bedroom one night . . .

The women of Herland have no fear of men. Why should
they have? They are not timid in any sense. They are not weak;
and they all have strong trained athletic bodies. Othello could
not have extinguished Alima with a pillow, as if she were a mouse.

Terry put in practice his pet conviction that a woman loves
to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and
passion of his intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman.

It did not work. I got a pretty clear account of it later from
Ellador, but what we heard at the time was the noise of a tremendous
struggle, and Alima calling to Moadine. Moadine was close by and came
at once; one or two more strong grave women followed.

Terry dashed about like a madman; he would cheerfully have
killed them--he told me that, himself--but he couldn't. When he
swung a chair over his head one sprang in the air and caught it,
two threw themselves bodily upon him and forced him to the floor;
it was only the work of a few moments to have him tied hand and foot,
and then, in sheer pity for his futile rage, to anesthetize him.


Alima was in a cold fury. She wanted him killed--actually.

There was a trial before the local Over Mother, and this woman,
who did not enjoy being mastered, stated her case.

In a court in our country he would have been held quite
"within his rights," of course. But this was not our country; it
was theirs. They seemed to measure the enormity of the offense
by its effect upon a possible fatherhood, and he scorned even to
reply to this way of putting it.

He did let himself go once, and explained in definite terms
that they were incapable of understanding a man's needs, a man's
desires, a man's point of view. He called them neuters, epicenes,
bloodless, sexless creatures. He said they could of course kill him
--as so many insects could--but that he despised them nonetheless.

And all those stern grave mothers did not seem to mind his
despising them, not in the least.

It was a long trial, and many interesting points were brought
out as to their views of our habits, and after a while Terry had
his sentence. He waited, grim and defiant. The sentence was:
"You must go home!"

Herland index

______________________________________

Originally published in Forerunner (1915).

Etext from Project Gutenberg.

This public domain text has been presented as found (with some minor format changes); this website and its owners are not responsible for errors, substantive and/or minor.

Herland, Chapter 10: Their Religions and Our Marriages (Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman)

Herland index

*
It took me a long time, as a man, a foreigner, and a species
of Christian--I was that as much as anything--to get any clear
understanding of the religion of Herland.

Its deification of motherhood was obvious enough; but
there was far more to it than that; or, at least, than my first
interpretation of that.

I think it was only as I grew to love Ellador more than I
believed anyone could love anybody, as I grew faintly to appreciate
her inner attitude and state of mind, that I began to get some
glimpses of this faith of theirs.

When I asked her about it, she tried at first to tell me, and
then, seeing me flounder, asked for more information about ours.
She soon found that we had many, that they varied widely, but
had some points in common. A clear methodical luminous mind
had my Ellador, not only reasonable, but swiftly perceptive.

She made a sort of chart, superimposing the different
religions as I described them, with a pin run through them all,
as it were; their common basis being a Dominant Power or Powers,
and some Special Behavior, mostly taboos, to please or placate.
There were some common features in certain groups of religions,
but the one always present was this Power, and the things which
must be done or not done because of it. It was not hard to trace
our human imagery of the Divine Force up through successive
stages of bloodthirsty, sensual, proud, and cruel gods of early
times to the conception of a Common Father with its corollary
of a Common Brotherhood.

This pleased her very much, and when I expatiated on the
Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and so on, of our God,
and of the loving kindness taught by his Son, she was much impressed.

The story of the Virgin birth naturally did not astonish her,
but she was greatly puzzled by the Sacrifice, and still more by the
Devil, and the theory of Damnation.

When in an inadvertent moment I said that certain sects had
believed in infant damnation--and explained it--she sat very
still indeed.

"They believed that God was Love--and Wisdom--and Power?"

"Yes--all of that."

Her eyes grew large, her face ghastly pale.

"And yet that such a God could put little new babies to burn
--for eternity?" She fell into a sudden shuddering and left me,
running swiftly to the nearest temple.

Every smallest village had its temple, and in those gracious
retreats sat wise and noble women, quietly busy at some work
of their own until they were wanted, always ready to give comfort,
light, or help, to any applicant.

Ellador told me afterward how easily this grief of hers was
assuaged, and seemed ashamed of not having helped herself out of it.

"You see, we are not accustomed to horrible ideas," she said,
coming back to me rather apologetically. "We haven't any. And
when we get a thing like that into our minds it's like--oh, like
red pepper in your eyes. So I just ran to her, blinded and almost
screaming, and she took it out so quickly--so easily!"

"How?" I asked, very curious.

"`Why, you blessed child,' she said, `you've got the wrong
idea altogether. You do not have to think that there ever was
such a God--for there wasn't. Or such a happening--for there wasn't.
Nor even that this hideous false idea was believed by anybody.
But only this--that people who are utterly ignorant will believe
anything--which you certainly knew before.'"

"Anyhow," pursued Ellador, "she turned pale for a minute
when I first said it."

This was a lesson to me. No wonder this whole nation of women
was peaceful and sweet in expression--they had no horrible ideas.

"Surely you had some when you began," I suggested.

"Oh, yes, no doubt. But as soon as our religion grew to any
height at all we left them out, of course."

From this, as from many other things, I grew to see what I
finally put in words.

"Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and
believed by your foremothers?"

"Why, no," she said. "Why should we? They are all gone.
They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are
unworthy of them--and unworthy of the children who must go
beyond us."

This set me thinking in good earnest. I had always imagined
--simply from hearing it said, I suppose--that women were by
nature conservative. Yet these women, quite unassisted by any
masculine spirit of enterprise, had ignored their past and built
daringly for the future.

Ellador watched me think. She seemed to know pretty much
what was going on in my mind.

"It's because we began in a new way, I suppose. All our folks
were swept away at once, and then, after that time of despair,
came those wonder children--the first. And then the whole
breathless hope of us was for THEIR children--if they should have
them. And they did! Then there was the period of pride and
triumph till we grew too numerous; and after that, when it all
came down to one child apiece, we began to really work--to
make better ones."

"But how does this account for such a radical difference in
your religion?" I persisted.

She said she couldn't talk about the difference very
intelligently, not being familiar with other religions, but that
theirs seemed simple enough. Their great Mother Spirit was to them
what their own motherhood was--only magnified beyond human limits.
That meant that they felt beneath and behind them an upholding,
unfailing, serviceable love--perhaps it was really the
accumulated mother-love of the race they felt--but it was a Power.

"Just what is your theory of worship?" I asked her.

"Worship? What is that?"

I found it singularly difficult to explain. This Divine Love
which they felt so strongly did not seem to ask anything of them
--"any more than our mothers do," she said.

"But surely your mothers expect honor, reverence, obedience,
from you. You have to do things for your mothers, surely?"

"Oh, no," she insisted, smiling, shaking her soft brown hair.
"We do things FROM our mothers--not FOR them. We don't have
to do things FOR them--they don't need it, you know. But we
have to live on--splendidly--because of them; and that's the
way we feel about God."

I meditated again. I thought of that God of Battles of ours,
that Jealous God, that Vengeance-is-mine God. I thought of our
world-nightmare--Hell.

"You have no theory of eternal punishment then, I take it?"

Ellador laughed. Her eyes were as bright as stars, and there
were tears in them, too. She was so sorry for me.

"How could we?" she asked, fairly enough. "We have no
punishments in life, you see, so we don't imagine them after death."

"Have you NO punishments? Neither for children nor criminals--
such mild criminals as you have?" I urged.

"Do you punish a person for a broken leg or a fever? We have
preventive measures, and cures; sometimes we have to `send the
patient to bed,' as it were; but that's not a punishment--it's only
part of the treatment," she explained.

Then studying my point of view more closely, she added:
"You see, we recognize, in our human motherhood, a great tender
limitless uplifting force--patience and wisdom and all subtlety
of delicate method. We credit God--our idea of God--with all that
and more. Our mothers are not angry with us--why should God be?"

"Does God mean a person to you?"

This she thought over a little. "Why--in trying to get close
to it in our minds we personify the idea, naturally; but we
certainly do not assume a Big Woman somewhere, who is God.
What we call God is a Pervading Power, you know, an Indwelling
Spirit, something inside of us that we want more of. Is your God
a Big Man?" she asked innocently.

"Why--yes, to most of us, I think. Of course we call it an
Indwelling Spirit just as you do, but we insist that it is Him, a
Person, and a Man--with whiskers."

"Whiskers? Oh yes--because you have them! Or do you
wear them because He does?"

"On the contrary, we shave them off--because it seems
cleaner and more comfortable."

"Does He wear clothes--in your idea, I mean?"

I was thinking over the pictures of God I had seen--rash
advances of the devout mind of man, representing his Omnipotent
Deity as an old man in a flowing robe, flowing hair, flowing beard,
and in the light of her perfectly frank and innocent questions this
concept seemed rather unsatisfying.

I explained that the God of the Christian world was really the
ancient Hebrew God, and that we had simply taken over the patriarchal
idea--that ancient one which quite inevitably clothed its thought of
God with the attributes of the patriarchal ruler, the grandfather.

"I see," she said eagerly, after I had explained the genesis and
development of our religious ideals. "They lived in separate groups,
with a male head, and he was probably a little--domineering?"

"No doubt of that," I agreed.

"And we live together without any `head,' in that sense--just
our chosen leaders--that DOES make a difference."

"Your difference is deeper than that," I assured her. "It is
in your common motherhood. Your children grow up in a world where
everybody loves them. They find life made rich and happy for them
by the diffused love and wisdom of all mothers. So it is easy for
you to think of God in the terms of a similar diffused and competent
love. I think you are far nearer right than we are."

"What I cannot understand," she pursued carefully, "is your
preservation of such a very ancient state of mind. This patriarchal
idea you tell me is thousands of years old?"

"Oh yes--four, five, six thousand--every so many."

"And you have made wonderful progress in those years--in other things?"

"We certainly have. But religion is different. You see, our
religions come from behind us, and are initiated by some great
teacher who is dead. He is supposed to have known the whole thing
and taught it, finally. All we have to do is believe--and obey."

"Who was the great Hebrew teacher?"

"Oh--there it was different. The Hebrew religion is an
accumulation of extremely ancient traditions, some far older than
their people, and grew by accretion down the ages. We consider
it inspired--`the Word of God.'"

"How do you know it is?"

"Because it says so."

"Does it say so in as many words? Who wrote that in?"

I began to try to recall some text that did say so, and could
not bring it to mind.

"Apart from that," she pursued, "what I cannot understand
is why you keep these early religious ideas so long. You have
changed all your others, haven't you?"

"Pretty generally," I agreed. "But this we call `revealed religion,'
and think it is final. But tell me more about these little temples of yours," I urged.
"And these Temple Mothers you run to."

Then she gave me an extended lesson in applied religion,
which I will endeavor to concentrate.

They developed their central theory of a Loving Power, and
assumed that its relation to them was motherly--that it desired
their welfare and especially their development. Their relation to it,
similarly, was filial, a loving appreciation and a glad fulfillment
of its high purposes. Then, being nothing if not practical, they
set their keen and active minds to discover the kind of conduct
expected of them. This worked out in a most admirable system of ethics.
The principle of Love was universally recognized--and used.

Patience, gentleness, courtesy, all that we call "good breeding,"
was part of their code of conduct. But where they went far
beyond us was in the special application of religious feeling to
every field of life. They had no ritual, no little set of
performances called "divine service," save those religious
pageants I have spoken of, and those were as much educational as
religious, and as much social as either. But they had a clear established
connection between everything they did--and God. Their cleanliness,
their health, their exquisite order, the rich peaceful beauty
of the whole land, the happiness of the children, and above all
the constant progress they made--all this was their religion.

They applied their minds to the thought of God, and worked
out the theory that such an inner power demanded outward expression.
They lived as if God was real and at work within them.

As for those little temples everywhere--some of the women
were more skilled, more temperamentally inclined, in this direction,
than others. These, whatever their work might be, gave
certain hours to the Temple Service, which meant being there
with all their love and wisdom and trained thought, to smooth
out rough places for anyone who needed it. Sometimes it was a
real grief, very rarely a quarrel, most often a perplexity; even in
Herland the human soul had its hours of darkness. But all through
the country their best and wisest were ready to give help.

If the difficulty was unusually profound, the applicant was
directed to someone more specially experienced in that line of thought.

Here was a religion which gave to the searching mind a rational
basis in life, the concept of an immense Loving Power working
steadily out through them, toward good. It gave to the "soul"
that sense of contact with the inmost force, of perception of the
uttermost purpose, which we always crave. It gave to the "heart"
the blessed feeling of being loved, loved and UNDERSTOOD. It gave
clear, simple, rational directions as to how we should live--and why.
And for ritual it gave first those triumphant group demonstrations,
when with a union of all the arts, the revivifying combination of
great multitudes moved rhythmically with march and dance,
song and music, among their own noblest products and the open
beauty of their groves and hills. Second, it gave these numerous
little centers of wisdom where the least wise could go to the most
wise and be helped.

"It is beautiful!" I cried enthusiastically. "It is the most
practical, comforting, progressive religion I ever heard of. You DO
love one another--you DO bear one another's burdens--you DO realize
that a little child is a type of the kingdom of heaven. You are
more Christian than any people I ever saw. But--how about death?
And the life everlasting? What does your religion teach about eternity?"

"Nothing," said Ellador. "What is eternity?"

What indeed? I tried, for the first time in my life, to get a real
hold on the idea.

"It is--never stopping."

"Never stopping?" She looked puzzled.

"Yes, life, going on forever."

"Oh--we see that, of course. Life does go on forever, all about us."

"But eternal life goes on WITHOUT DYING."

"The same person?"

"Yes, the same person, unending, immortal." I was pleased to
think that I had something to teach from our religion, which theirs
had never promulgated.

"Here?" asked Ellador. "Never to die--here?" I could see her
practical mind heaping up the people, and hurriedly reassured her.

"Oh no, indeed, not here--hereafter. We must die here, of course,
but then we `enter into eternal life.' The soul lives forever."

"How do you know?" she inquired.

"I won't attempt to prove it to you," I hastily continued. "Let
us assume it to be so. How does this idea strike you?"

Again she smiled at me, that adorable, dimpling, tender,
mischievous, motherly smile of hers. "Shall I be quite, quite honest?"

"You couldn't be anything else," I said, half gladly and half
a little sorry. The transparent honesty of these women was a
never-ending astonishment to me.

"It seems to me a singularly foolish idea," she said calmly.
"And if true, most disagreeable."

Now I had always accepted the doctrine of personal immortality
as a thing established. The efforts of inquiring spiritualists,
always seeking to woo their beloved ghosts back again, never
seemed to me necessary. I don't say I had ever seriously and
courageously discussed the subject with myself even; I had simply
assumed it to be a fact. And here was the girl I loved, this
creature whose character constantly revealed new heights and
ranges far beyond my own, this superwoman of a superland,
saying she thought immortality foolish! She meant it, too.

"What do you WANT it for?" she asked.

"How can you NOT want it!" I protested. "Do you want to go
out like a candle? Don't you want to go on and on--growing and
--and--being happy, forever?"

"Why, no," she said. "I don't in the least. I want my child--
and my child's child--to go on--and they will. Why should _I_ want to?"

"But it means Heaven!" I insisted. "Peace and Beauty and
Comfort and Love--with God." I had never been so eloquent on
the subject of religion. She could be horrified at Damnation,
and question the justice of Salvation, but Immortality--that was
surely a noble faith.

"Why, Van," she said, holding out her hands to me. "Why
Van--darling! How splendid of you to feel it so keenly. That's
what we all want, of course--Peace and Beauty, and Comfort
and Love--with God! And Progress too, remember; Growth, always
and always. That is what our religion teaches us to want
and to work for, and we do!"

"But that is HERE, I said, "only for this life on earth."

"Well? And do not you in your country, with your beautiful religion
of love and service have it here, too--for this life--on earth?"


None of us were willing to tell the women of Herland about
the evils of our own beloved land. It was all very well for us to
assume them to be necessary and essential, and to criticize--
strictly among ourselves--their all-too-perfect civilization, but
when it came to telling them about the failures and wastes of our
own, we never could bring ourselves to do it.

Moreover, we sought to avoid too much discussion, and to
press the subject of our approaching marriages.

Jeff was the determined one on this score.

"Of course they haven't any marriage ceremony or service,
but we can make it a sort of Quaker wedding, and have it in the
temple--it is the least we can do for them."

It was. There was so little, after all, that we could do for them.
Here we were, penniless guests and strangers, with no chance
even to use our strength and courage--nothing to defend them
from or protect them against.

"We can at least give them our names," Jeff insisted.

They were very sweet about it, quite willing to do whatever
we asked, to please us. As to the names, Alima, frank soul that
she was, asked what good it would do.

Terry, always irritating her, said it was a sign of possession.
"You are going to be Mrs. Nicholson," he said. "Mrs. T. O.
Nicholson. That shows everyone that you are my wife."

"What is a `wife' exactly?" she demanded, a dangerous gleam
in her eye.

"A wife is the woman who belongs to a man," he began.

But Jeff took it up eagerly: "And a husband is the man
who belongs to a woman. It is because we are monogamous,
you know. And marriage is the ceremony, civil and religious,
that joins the two together--`until death do us part,'"
he finished, looking at Celis with unutterable devotion.

"What makes us all feel foolish," I told the girls, "is that
here we have nothing to give you--except, of course, our names."

"Do your women have no names before they are married?"
Celis suddenly demanded.

"Why, yes," Jeff explained. "They have their maiden names
--their father's names, that is."

"And what becomes of them?" asked Alima.

"They change them for their husbands', my dear," Terry
answered her.

"Change them? Do the husbands then take the wives' `maiden names'?"

"Oh, no," he laughed. "The man keeps his own and gives it to her, too."

"Then she just loses hers and takes a new one--how unpleasant!
We won't do that!" Alima said decidedly.

Terry was good-humored about it. "I don't care what you do
or don't do so long as we have that wedding pretty soon," he said,
reaching a strong brown hand after Alima's, quite as brown and
nearly as strong.

"As to giving us things--of course we can see that you'd like to,
but we are glad you can't," Celis continued. "You see, we love you
just for yourselves--we wouldn't want you to--to pay anything.
Isn't it enough to know that you are loved personally--and just as men?"

Enough or not, that was the way we were married. We had
a great triple wedding in the biggest temple of all, and it looked
as if most of the nation was present. It was very solemn and very
beautiful. Someone had written a new song for the occasion,
nobly beautiful, about the New Hope for their people--the New
Tie with other lands--Brotherhood as well as Sisterhood, and,
with evident awe, Fatherhood.

Terry was always restive under their talk of fatherhood.
"Anybody'd think we were High Priests of--of Philoprogenitiveness!"
he protested. "These women think of NOTHING but children, seems to me!
We'll teach 'em!"

He was so certain of what he was going to teach, and Alima
so uncertain in her moods of reception, that Jeff and I feared the
worst. We tried to caution him--much good that did. The big
handsome fellow drew himself up to his full height, lifted that
great chest of his, and laughed.

"There are three separate marriages," he said. "I won't
interfere with yours--nor you with mine."

So the great day came, and the countless crowds of women,
and we three bridegrooms without any supporting "best men," or any
other men to back us up, felt strangely small as we came forward.

Somel and Zava and Moadine were on hand; we were thankful
to have them, too--they seemed almost like relatives.

There was a splendid procession, wreathing dances, the new
anthem I spoke of, and the whole great place pulsed with feeling
--the deep awe, the sweet hope, the wondering expectation of
a new miracle.

"There has been nothing like this in the country since our
Motherhood began!" Somel said softly to me, while we watched
the symbolic marches. "You see, it is the dawn of a new era. You
don't know how much you mean to us. It is not only Fatherhood
--that marvelous dual parentage to which we are strangers--the
miracle of union in life-giving--but it is Brotherhood. You are
the rest of the world. You join us to our kind--to all the
strange lands and peoples we have never seen. We hope to know them
--to love and help them--and to learn of them. Ah! You cannot know!"

Thousands of voices rose in the soaring climax of that great
Hymn of The Coming Life. By the great Altar of Motherhood, with
its crown of fruit and flowers, stood a new one, crowned as well.
Before the Great Over Mother of the Land and her ring of
High Temple Counsellors, before that vast multitude of calm-
faced mothers and holy-eyed maidens, came forward our own
three chosen ones, and we, three men alone in all that land,
joined hands with them and made our marriage vows.

Herland index

______________________________________

Originally published in Forerunner (1915).

Etext from Project Gutenberg.

This public domain text has been presented as found (with some minor format changes); this website and its owners are not responsible for errors, substantive and/or minor.

Herland, Chapter 9: Our Relations and Theirs (Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman)

Herland index

*
What I'm trying to show here is that with these women the
whole relationship of life counted in a glad, eager growing-up to
join the ranks of workers in the line best loved; a deep, tender
reverence for one's own mother--too deep for them to speak
of freely--and beyond that, the whole, free, wide range of
sisterhood, the splendid service of the country, and friendships.

To these women we came, filled with the ideas, convictions,
traditions, of our culture, and undertook to rouse in them the
emotions which--to us--seemed proper.

However much, or little, of true sex-feeling there was between us, it
phrased itself in their minds in terms of friendship, the one purely personal
love they knew, and of ultimate parentage. Visibly we were not mothers,
nor children, nor compatriots; so, if they loved us, we must be friends.

That we should pair off together in our courting days was
natural to them; that we three should remain much together, as
they did themselves, was also natural. We had as yet no work,
so we hung about them in their forest tasks; that was natural, too.

But when we began to talk about each couple having
"homes" of our own, they could not understand it.

"Our work takes us all around the country," explained Celis.
"We cannot live in one place all the time."

"We are together now," urged Alima, looking proudly at
Terry's stalwart nearness. (This was one of the times when they
were "on," though presently "off" again.)

"It's not the same thing at all," he insisted. "A man wants a
home of his own, with his wife and family in it."

"Staying in it? All the time?" asked Ellador. "Not imprisoned,
surely!"

"Of course not! Living there--naturally," he answered.

"What does she do there--all the time?" Alima demanded.
"What is her work?"

Then Terry patiently explained again that our women did not
work--with reservations.

"But what do they do--if they have no work?" she persisted.

"They take care of the home--and the children."

"At the same time?" asked Ellador.

"Why yes. The children play about, and the mother has
charge of it all. There are servants, of course."

It seemed so obvious, so natural to Terry, that he always grew
impatient; but the girls were honestly anxious to understand.

"How many children do your women have?" Alima had her
notebook out now, and a rather firm set of lip. Terry began to
dodge.

"There is no set number, my dear," he explained. "Some have
more, some have less."

"Some have none at all," I put in mischievously.

They pounced on this admission and soon wrung from us the general
fact that those women who had the most children had the least servants,
and those who had the most servants had the least children.

"There!" triumphed Alima. "One or two or no children, and
three or four servants. Now what do those women DO?"

We explained as best we might. We talked of "social duties,"
disingenuously banking on their not interpreting the words as we did;
we talked of hospitality, entertainment, and various "interests."
All the time we knew that to these large-minded women whose whole
mental outlook was so collective, the limitations of a wholly personal
life were inconceivable.

"We cannot really understand it," Ellador concluded. "We
are only half a people. We have our woman-ways and they have
their man-ways and their both-ways. We have worked out a
system of living which is, of course, limited. They must have a
broader, richer, better one. I should like to see it."

"You shall, dearest," I whispered.


"There's nothing to smoke," complained Terry. He was in the
midst of a prolonged quarrel with Alima, and needed a sedative.
"There's nothing to drink. These blessed women have no pleasant
vices. I wish we could get out of here!"

This wish was vain. We were always under a certain degree
of watchfulness. When Terry burst forth to tramp the streets at
night he always found a "Colonel" here or there; and when, on
an occasion of fierce though temporary despair, he had plunged
to the cliff edge with some vague view to escape, he found several
of them close by. We were free--but there was a string to it.

"They've no unpleasant ones, either," Jeff reminded him.

"Wish they had!" Terry persisted. "They've neither the vices
of men, nor the virtues of women--they're neuters!"

"You know better than that. Don't talk nonsense," said I,
severely.

I was thinking of Ellador's eyes when they gave me a certain
look, a look she did not at all realize.

Jeff was equally incensed. "I don't know what `virtues of
women' you miss. Seems to me they have all of them."

"They've no modesty," snapped Terry. "No patience, no submissiveness,
none of that natural yielding which is woman's greatest charm."

I shook my head pityingly. "Go and apologize and make
friends again, Terry. You've got a grouch, that's all. These
women have the virtue of humanity, with less of its faults than
any folks I ever saw. As for patience--they'd have pitched us
over the cliffs the first day we lit among 'em, if they hadn't that."

"There are no--distractions," he grumbled. "Nowhere a man
can go and cut loose a bit. It's an everlasting parlor and nursery."

"and workshop," I added. "And school, and office, and laboratory,
and studio, and theater, and--home."

"HOME!" he sneered. "There isn't a home in the whole pitiful place."

"There isn't anything else, and you know it," Jeff retorted
hotly. "I never saw, I never dreamed of, such universal peace and
good will and mutual affection."

"Oh, well, of course, if you like a perpetual Sunday school,
it's all very well. But I like Something Doing. Here it's all done."

There was something to this criticism. The years of pioneering
lay far behind them. Theirs was a civilization in which the
initial difficulties had long since been overcome. The untroubled
peace, the unmeasured plenty, the steady health, the large good
will and smooth management which ordered everything, left
nothing to overcome. It was like a pleasant family in an old
established, perfectly run country place.

I liked it because of my eager and continued interest in the
sociological achievements involved. Jeff liked it as he would have
liked such a family and such a place anywhere.

Terry did not like it because he found nothing to oppose, to
struggle with, to conquer.

"Life is a struggle, has to be," he insisted. "If there is no
struggle, there is no life--that's all."

"You're talking nonsense--masculine nonsense," the peaceful
Jeff replied. He was certainly a warm defender of Herland. "Ants
don't raise their myriads by a struggle, do they? Or the bees?"

"Oh, if you go back to insects--and want to live in an anthill--!
I tell you the higher grades of life are reached only through
struggle--combat. There's no Drama here. Look at their plays!
They make me sick."

He rather had us there. The drama of the country was--to our
taste--rather flat. You see, they lacked the sex motive and, with
it, jealousy. They had no interplay of warring nations, no aristocracy
and its ambitions, no wealth and poverty opposition.

I see I have said little about the economics of the place; it
should have come before, but I'll go on about the drama now.

They had their own kind. There was a most impressive array
of pageantry, of processions, a sort of grand ritual, with their arts
and their religion broadly blended. The very babies joined in it.
To see one of their great annual festivals, with the massed and
marching stateliness of those great mothers, the young women brave
and noble, beautiful and strong; and then the children, taking part
as naturally as ours would frolic round a Christmas tree--it was
overpowering in the impression of joyous, triumphant life.

They had begun at a period when the drama, the dance,
music, religion, and education were all very close together; and
instead of developing them in detached lines, they had kept the
connection. Let me try again to give, if I can, a faint sense of the
difference in the life view--the background and basis on which
their culture rested.

Ellador told me a lot about it. She took me to see the children,
the growing girls, the special teachers. She picked out books for
me to read. She always seemed to understand just what I wanted
to know, and how to give it to me.

While Terry and Alima struck sparks and parted--he always
madly drawn to her and she to him--she must have been, or
she'd never have stood the way he behaved--Ellador and I had
already a deep, restful feeling, as if we'd always had one another.
Jeff and Celis were happy; there was no question of that;
but it didn't seem to me as if they had the good times we did.

Well, here is the Herland child facing life--as Ellador tried
to show it to me. From the first memory, they knew Peace,
Beauty, Order, Safety, Love, Wisdom, Justice, Patience, and Plenty.
By "plenty" I mean that the babies grew up in an environment which
met their needs, just as young fawns might grow up in dewy forest
glades and brook-fed meadows. And they enjoyed it as frankly and
utterly as the fawns would.

They found themselves in a big bright lovely world, full of
the most interesting and enchanting things to learn about and to do.
The people everywhere were friendly and polite. No Herland
child ever met the overbearing rudeness we so commonly show
to children. They were People, too, from the first; the most
precious part of the nation.

In each step of the rich experience of living, they found the
instance they were studying widen out into contact with an endless
range of common interests. The things they learned were RELATED,
from the first; related to one another, and to the national prosperity.

"It was a butterfly that made me a forester," said Ellador.
"I was about eleven years old, and I found a big purple-and-green
butterfly on a low flower. I caught it, very carefully, by the closed
wings, as I had been told to do, and carried it to the nearest insect
teacher"--I made a note there to ask her what on earth an insect
teacher was--"to ask her its name. She took it from me with a
little cry of delight. `Oh, you blessed child,' she said. `Do you like
obernuts?' Of course I liked obernuts, and said so. It is our best
food-nut, you know. `This is a female of the obernut moth,' she
told me. `They are almost gone. We have been trying to exterminate
them for centuries. If you had not caught this one, it might
have laid eggs enough to raise worms enough to destroy thousands
of our nut trees--thousands of bushels of nuts--and make years
and years of trouble for us.'

"Everybody congratulated me. The children all over the
country were told to watch for that moth, if there were any more.
I was shown the history of the creature, and an account of the
damage it used to do and of how long and hard our foremothers
had worked to save that tree for us. I grew a foot, it seemed to
me, and determined then and there to be a forester."

This is but an instance; she showed me many. The big
difference was that whereas our children grow up in private homes
and families, with every effort made to protect and seclude them
from a dangerous world, here they grew up in a wide, friendly
world, and knew it for theirs, from the first.

Their child-literature was a wonderful thing. I could have
spent years following the delicate subtleties, the smooth simplicities
with which they had bent that great art to the service of the child mind.

We have two life cycles: the man's and the woman's. To the man
there is growth, struggle, conquest, the establishment of his family,
and as much further success in gain or ambition as he can achieve.

To the woman, growth, the securing of a husband, the subordinate
activities of family life, and afterward such "social" or charitable
interests as her position allows.

Here was but one cycle, and that a large one.

The child entered upon a broad open field of life, in which
motherhood was the one great personal contribution to the national
life, and all the rest the individual share in their common activities.
Every girl I talked to, at any age above babyhood, had her cheerful
determination as to what she was going to be when she grew up.

What Terry meant by saying they had no "modesty" was that this
great life-view had no shady places; they had a high sense of personal
decorum, but no shame--no knowledge of anything to be ashamed of.

Even their shortcomings and misdeeds in childhood never
were presented to them as sins; merely as errors and misplays--
as in a game. Some of them, who were palpably less agreeable
than others or who had a real weakness or fault, were treated
with cheerful allowance, as a friendly group at whist would treat
a poor player.

Their religion, you see, was maternal; and their ethics, based
on the full perception of evolution, showed the principle of
growth and the beauty of wise culture. They had no theory of
the essential opposition of good and evil; life to them was
growth; their pleasure was in growing, and their duty also.

With this background, with their sublimated mother-love,
expressed in terms of widest social activity, every phase of their
work was modified by its effect on the national growth. The
language itself they had deliberately clarified, simplified, made
easy and beautiful, for the sake of the children.

This seemed to us a wholly incredible thing: first, that any
nation should have the foresight, the strength, and the persistence
to plan and fulfill such a task; and second, that women should have
had so much initiative. We have assumed, as a matter of course,
that women had none; that only the man, with his natural energy
and impatience of restriction, would ever invent anything.

Here we found that the pressure of life upon the environment
develops in the human mind its inventive reactions, regardless of sex;
and further, that a fully awakened motherhood plans and works without limit,
for the good of the child.

That the children might be most nobly born, and reared in an
environment calculated to allow the richest, freest growth, they
had deliberately remodeled and improved the whole state.

I do not mean in the least that they stopped at that, any more
than a child stops at childhood. The most impressive part of their
whole culture beyond this perfect system of child-rearing was
the range of interests and associations open to them all, for life.
But in the field of literature I was most struck, at first, by the
child-motive.

They had the same gradation of simple repetitive verse and story
that we are familiar with, and the most exquisite, imaginative tales;
but where, with us, these are the dribbled remnants of ancient folk
myths and primitive lullabies, theirs were the exquisite work of great
artists; not only simple and unfailing in appeal to the child-mind,
but TRUE, true to the living world about them.

To sit in one of their nurseries for a day was to change one's
views forever as to babyhood. The youngest ones, rosy fatlings
in their mothers' arms, or sleeping lightly in the flower-sweet air,
seemed natural enough, save that they never cried. I never heard a
child cry in Herland, save once or twice at a bad fall; and then people
ran to help, as we would at a scream of agony from a grown person.

Each mother had her year of glory; the time to love and learn,
living closely with her child, nursing it proudly, often for two years
or more. This perhaps was one reason for their wonderful vigor.

But after the baby-year the mother was not so constantly in
attendance, unless, indeed, her work was among the little ones.
She was never far off, however, and her attitude toward the
co-mothers, whose proud child-service was direct and continuous,
was lovely to see.

As for the babies--a group of those naked darlings playing on
short velvet grass, clean-swept; or rugs as soft; or in shallow pools
of bright water; tumbling over with bubbling joyous baby laughter--
it was a view of infant happiness such as I had never dreamed.

The babies were reared in the warmer part of the country, and
gradually acclimated to the cooler heights as they grew older.

Sturdy children of ten and twelve played in the snow as
joyfully as ours do; there were continuous excursions of them,
from one part of the land to another, so that to each child the
whole country might be home.

It was all theirs, waiting for them to learn, to love, to use, to
serve; as our own little boys plan to be "a big soldier," or "a
cowboy," or whatever pleases their fancy; and our little girls plan
for the kind of home they mean to have, or how many children;
these planned, freely and gaily with much happy chattering,
of what they would do for the country when they were grown.

It was the eager happiness of the children and young people
which first made me see the folly of that common notion of ours
--that if life was smooth and happy, people would not enjoy it.

As I studied these youngsters, vigorous, joyous, eager little
creatures, and their voracious appetite for life, it shook my previous
ideas so thoroughly that they have never been re-established.
The steady level of good health gave them all that natural stimulus
we used to call "animal spirits"--an odd contradiction in terms.
They found themselves in an immediate environment which was
agreeable and interesting, and before them stretched the years of
learning and discovery, the fascinating, endless process of education.

As I looked into these methods and compared them with our
own, my strange uncomfortable sense of race-humility grew apace.

Ellador could not understand my astonishment. She explained
things kindly and sweetly, but with some amazement that they needed
explaining, and with sudden questions as to how we did it that left
me meeker than ever.

I betook myself to Somel one day, carefully not taking Ellador.
I did not mind seeming foolish to Somel--she was used to it.

"I want a chapter of explanation," I told her. "You know my
stupidities by heart, and I do not want to show them to Ellador
--she thinks me so wise!"

She smiled delightedly. "It is beautiful to see," she told me,
"this new wonderful love between you. The whole country is interested,
you know--how can we help it!"

I had not thought of that. We say: "All the world loves a lover,"
but to have a couple of million people watching one's courtship--and
that a difficult one--was rather embarrassing.

"Tell me about your theory of education," I said. "Make it
short and easy. And, to show you what puzzles me, I'll tell you
that in our theory great stress is laid on the forced exertion of the
child's mind; we think it is good for him to overcome obstacles."

"Of course it is," she unexpectedly agreed. "All our children
do that--they love to."

That puzzled me again. If they loved to do it, how could it be
educational?

"Our theory is this," she went on carefully. "Here is a young
human being. The mind is as natural a thing as the body, a thing
that grows, a thing to use and enjoy. We seek to nourish, to
stimulate, to exercise the mind of a child as we do the body.
There are the two main divisions in education--you have those
of course?--the things it is necessary to know, and the things it
is necessary to do."

"To do? Mental exercises, you mean?"

"Yes. Our general plan is this: In the matter of feeding the
mind, of furnishing information, we use our best powers to meet
the natural appetite of a healthy young brain; not to overfeed it,
to provide such amount and variety of impressions as seem most
welcome to each child. That is the easiest part. The other division
is in arranging a properly graduated series of exercises which
will best develop each mind; the common faculties we all have,
and most carefully, the especial faculties some of us have.
You do this also, do you not?"

"In a way," I said rather lamely. "We have not so subtle and
highly developed a system as you, not approaching it; but tell me more.
As to the information--how do you manage? It appears that all of you
know pretty much everything--is that right?"

This she laughingly disclaimed. "By no means. We are, as you
soon found out, extremely limited in knowledge. I wish you
could realize what a ferment the country is in over the new things
you have told us; the passionate eagerness among thousands of
us to go to your country and learn--learn--learn! But what we
do know is readily divisible into common knowledge and special
knowledge. The common knowledge we have long since learned
to feed into the minds of our little ones with no waste of time
or strength; the special knowledge is open to all, as they desire
it. Some of us specialize in one line only. But most take up several
--some for their regular work, some to grow with."

"To grow with?"

"Yes. When one settles too close in one kind of work there
is a tendency to atrophy in the disused portions of the brain.
We like to keep on learning, always."

"What do you study?"

"As much as we know of the different sciences. We have,
within our limits, a good deal of knowledge of anatomy, physiology,
nutrition--all that pertains to a full and beautiful personal life.
We have our botany and chemistry, and so on--very rudimentary, but
interesting; our own history, with its accumulating psychology."

"You put psychology with history--not with personal life?"

"Of course. It is ours; it is among and between us, and it
changes with the succeeding and improving generations. We are at work,
slowly and carefully, developing our whole people along these lines.
It is glorious work--splendid! To see the thousands of babies improving,
showing stronger clearer minds, sweeter dispositions, higher capacities--
don't you find it so in your country?"

This I evaded flatly. I remembered the cheerless claim that the
human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery,
only better informed--a statement I had never believed.

"We try most earnestly for two powers," Somel continued.
"The two that seem to us basically necessary for all noble life:
a clear, far-reaching judgment, and a strong well-used will. We
spend our best efforts, all through childhood and youth, in
developing these faculties, individual judgment and will."

"As part of your system of education, you mean?"

"Exactly. As the most valuable part. With the babies,
as you may have noticed, we first provide an environment which
feeds the mind without tiring it; all manner of simple and interesting
things to do, as soon as they are old enough to do them; physical
properties, of course, come first. But as early as possible, going
very carefully, not to tax the mind, we provide choices, simple choices,
with very obvious causes and consequences. You've noticed the games?"

I had. The children seemed always playing something; or else,
sometimes, engaged in peaceful researches of their own. I had wondered
at first when they went to school, but soon found that they never did--
to their knowledge. It was all education but no schooling.

"We have been working for some sixteen hundred years,
devising better and better games for children," continued Somel.

I sat aghast. "Devising games?" I protested. "Making up new
ones, you mean?"

"Exactly," she answered. "Don't you?"

Then I remembered the kindergarten, and the "material"
devised by Signora Montessori, and guardedly replied: "To some
extent." But most of our games, I told her, were very old--came
down from child to child, along the ages, from the remote past.

"And what is their effect?" she asked. "Do they develop the
faculties you wish to encourage?"

Again I remembered the claims made by the advocates of "sports,"
and again replied guardedly that that was, in part, the theory.

"But do the children LIKE it?" I asked. "Having things made
up and set before them that way? Don't they want the old games?"

"You can see the children," she answered. "Are yours more
contented--more interested--happier?"

Then I thought, as in truth I never had thought before, of the
dull, bored children I had seen, whining; "What can I do now?";
of the little groups and gangs hanging about; of the value of some
one strong spirit who possessed initiative and would "start something";
of the children's parties and the onerous duties of the older people
set to "amuse the children"; also of that troubled ocean of
misdirected activity we call "mischief," the foolish, destructive,
sometimes evil things done by unoccupied children.

"No," said I grimly. "I don't think they are."

The Herland child was born not only into a world carefully prepared,
full of the most fascinating materials and opportunities to learn,
but into the society of plentiful numbers of teachers, teachers born
and trained, whose business it was to accompany the children along that,
to us, impossible thing--the royal road to learning.

There was no mystery in their methods. Being adapted to
children it was at least comprehensible to adults. I spent many
days with the little ones, sometimes with Ellador, sometimes
without, and began to feel a crushing pity for my own childhood,
and for all others that I had known.

The houses and gardens planned for babies had in them nothing
to hurt--no stairs, no corners, no small loose objects to swallow,
no fire--just a babies' paradise. They were taught, as rapidly
as feasible, to use and control their own bodies, and never did I
see such sure-footed, steady-handed, clear-headed little things.
It was a joy to watch a row of toddlers learning to walk, not only
on a level floor, but, a little later, on a sort of rubber rail raised
an inch or two above the soft turf or heavy rugs, and falling off
with shrieks of infant joy, to rush back to the end of the line and
try again. Surely we have noticed how children love to get up on
something and walk along it! But we have never thought to
provide that simple and inexhaustible form of amusement and
physical education for the young.

Water they had, of course, and could swim even before they
walked. If I feared at first the effects of a too intensive system of
culture, that fear was dissipated by seeing the long sunny days
of pure physical merriment and natural sleep in which these
heavenly babies passed their first years. They never knew they
were being educated. They did not dream that in this association
of hilarious experiment and achievement they were laying the
foundation for that close beautiful group feeling into which they
grew so firmly with the years. This was education for citizenship.

Herland index

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Originally published in Forerunner (1915).

Etext from Project Gutenberg.

This public domain text has been presented as found (with some minor format changes); this website and its owners are not responsible for errors, substantive and/or minor.