Herland is not for Me

I was absolutely annoyed by Herland. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for female empowerment ,but this book was really frustrating. I feel as if the details that would have made the writing of this book better were very vague, such as the description of the women of herland. All that was said about them was that they did not look like girls but they did not look like women either nor did they look like men. What does that even mean! What do these women look like then?! I thought that this book was more boring than the other Utopias that we have read so far because I felt like it was just way to easy to refute everything in this book.

With the other Utopian novels, the author would present a solution for a societal problem and I could argue both sides with them and see whether or not their proposals would fit in our society and the ideas that they would present are reasonable and are a possibility and some of the other ideas  might make one skeptical but with this novel, I felt as if none of the ideas in here were even plausible.  All of these ideas were so farfetched that it was immediately obvious that none of this would work.  A land where there are all women and girls, (but no way for them to reproduce sexually) NO? A land in which they could breed out the unwanted qualities in cats? NO. Throughout the entire time that I was reading this novel the only word that I kept repeating in my head was NO. 

Based off of our class discussion, I think that the women of Herland are completely selfish.  Their whole world centers on motherhood and being a mother and babies. There has to be more to life. My goodness it was so boring! What really got under my skin was the women’s response to everything that the men would ask them. It was always “because we are mothers,” each woman doesn’t need her own baby because we are all mothers” Nobody has to worry about anything in our land because we take care of each other because we are mothers” I hated that because it seemed to be that that was their answer for EVERYTHING!!!  (See clip below).And most of the time, I just thought to myself “okay that doesn’t even answer the question! ” and I know that most people agreed Terry was the jerk in this novel, he was actually my favorite character because when he got frustrated with some of the responses and practices of the women he confronted them about it and he seemed to be annoyed with their repetitive type responses as well, so for me, I liked Terry because it was as if he was a stand in for my voice while I was reading this, he asked all of the questions that I asked, he had some of the same responses that I had, he was just as  frustrated as I was.

I understand that this novel was written in opposition to the restrictions of women during history so this book was written as a way to sort of say “Yaayyy women” and empower them, But I think this was a really bad way to do that because while it satirizes the thought that the only thing that a woman could do was be a mother and raise her children it kind of dwelled on that a little too much. In conclusion, I was not a fan of Herland but I do agree with the idea that the one thing that I could take away from this novel was that when it all comes down to it, it shouldn’t matter if we are men or women and at the end of the day, we are all just people.

 

clip from the movie Coming to America with Eddie Murphy. For those who have never seen the movie, basically he is african prince who has just had an aranged marriage and takes a few minutes to get to know his bride before making the marriage official. Her responses to his questions reminded me alot of the women of Herland's responses whenever the men would ask them questions. You'll see why I f you read the earlier part of this post.