I Am Me

Herland is by far my favorite reading we’ve been assigned all semester.  Perhaps it’s the three fold perspective given to the reader or the fact that it is simply a revolutionary piece for its time; but either way, I enjoyed it. 

It’s never easy for me to be able to pinpoint my favorite line or scene in a book, but for Herland there is no question.  In chapter nine (page 88), when Van speaks about the “perfect system of child-rearing,” he makes a very important observation, one that changes the meaning of the book entirely.

“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 [Herland children] 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 the young people which first made me see the folly of that common notion of ours…”

This one passage is what changed the whole course of the novel for me.  Herland isn’t simply the idea of an all-woman society.  It goes so much deeper than that; challenging the reader to think about our society and the way in which we assign gender roles. 

It’s so easy for us to look back at our childhood and see the blatant significance of gender in our daily lives.  In kindergarten, the boys would be off running around the playground imagining themselves to be cops, cowboys, Indians, pirates, anything that showed itself to have a masculine identity.  The girls would then be off cradling their baby dolls, playing house or dress up, fighting over who gets to play the mother role, essentially preparing themselves for a future responsibility that they think they must conform to. 

Our society has made gender such an apparent obsession, that we begin to lose sight of who we are as people in the midst of conformity.  That is exactly the point that Charlotte Perkins Gilman is trying to make.

In a society comprised of only women, the children aren’t faced with the assignment of gender roles.  Instead they grow up with the encouraged principle that they are all simply people, not women.  Instead of playing house, they play games that spark independent thinking and inspire them to be whoever they want to be and to strive to one day make a difference in their country.

It is a revolutionary thought for its time, a thought that Gilman wanted to plant in her reader’s head.  Herland isn’t considered Utopian because it’s run by women.  It’s Utopian because Herland citizens are freed from a gender role that has forced women into submission for centuries.  Herland is Gilman’s demand for change in America.