Rating: 
Summary: Masterful, engaging, and meaningful.
Review: A beautiful and thorough examination of utopia populated entirely by women, through the prism of an intelligent and educated young man. The writing is engaging and entertaining while managing to present the philosophy of the author convincingly. The only shortcoming to the ideas presented in the book is that no reason is given as to why such a utopian civilization would develop simply due to the lack of any men.Most entertaining is the behavior of the women of Ms. Gilman's utopia. In stark and glaring contrast to contemporary feminism, the women of Herland deify motherhood, adore children, and are shocked to horror at the very idea of abortion; androcide is unthinkable, even as punishment for a crime. Indeed, an important book to history and philosophy.
Rating: 
Summary: How Could They Have Possibly Lost This Book?!?
Review: Back in 1915 when HERLAND was written, women were widely considered weak and uncreative and had the sole responsibility of taking care of home, family, and being socialites. So, when 3 young American men in the novel encounter a country comprised entirely of women, they look everywhere to find out where they must have hidden their men. Of course, being emperialist men, they think it should be easy to conquer and subdue a country of women. However, they are looking at these "women" through the eyes of their own culture, not realizing their full potential as "humans". These are women who have such little land to support their people that they've only kept and cultivated food-bearing trees like most people would cultivate a garden and who have learned how to have children without men. Some women! Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this novel after leaving her own husband and home, going off to prove that women are as capable as making a living for themselves as men are. I can only imagine the stir this book must have caused among the feminists of the day. Gilman has written a very interesting book with only one minor flaw. She keeps on building the reader up to this "big thing" that the women of Herland evidently have in store for the men who have dropped by bi-plane into their perfect little world. It turns out to not be such a shocking thing after all and pretty obvious in fact. Despite this slight transgression, the book is superb. HERLAND is a short book that is surprisingly quick-paced and imaginative. It's a gem of a book to add to anyone's collection.
Rating:
Summary: Gilman's biting 1915 social satire on an all-female utopia
Review: Charlotte Perkins Gilman was arguably the most important American author of the women's movement in the early 20th-century. In addition to editing a newspaper, "The Forerunner," she wrote "Women and Economics," one of the first studies of the role of women in the economic system. Gilman also wrote a number of utopias: "Moving the Mountain" in 1911, "With Her in Ourland" (1916), and her best-known, "Herstory" in 1915. In "Herstory" Gilman creates a homosocial (one-sex) utopian society made up entirely of women in which the culture, political system, and families are the result of having women as the basis (instead of merely stemming from the absence of men). However, while other American utopian novels, most notably Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward 2000-1888," were standard reading for decades, Gilman's "Herland" was pretty much forgotten until it was rediscovered in the 1970s. Even after four decades Gilman's satire was seen as still speaking to the conditions faced by American women. Following the conceit first used by Sir Thomas More in writing his "Utopia," Gilman's "Herstory" tells of three American explorers (male, of course), stumbling upon an all-female society in an isolated mountain valley in a land far away on the even of the first World War. Since they find this strange land to be civilized the explorers are convinced there must be some men hiding someplace, and set out to find them. As they search high and low for the male of the species they learn about the history of the country, the religion of motherhood, and the other unique customs, while trying to seduce its inhabitants. Many generations earlier the women had found themselves separated from the human race, with the men dying off. The society evolved, organizing itself around raising children and living in harmony with their surroundings. In the end, the three mail visitors end up falling in love with three of the women and are essentially converted as naturalized aliens. "Herstory" is less science fiction than many of the utopian novels written during this period, and clearly its primary value is in terms of its provocative commentary on gender roles in the United States in the early 20th-century. Not surprisingly, Gilman questions the roles assumed by men and women in the "bi-sexual" society by showing the relative perfection achieved in Herland with its uni-sexual society. What Gilman sidesteps, of course, are the issues of sexuality: the women of "Herstory" are asexual beings, although they are capable of parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). Also, by talking about these women as being descended from good Aryan stock she raises the specter of racism as well. But clearly Gilman's purpose is to provide a critique of the social order of the day, using humor as a way to mask her telling barbs and to provide her unorthodox views of gender roles, motherhood, individuality, privacy, and other issues. Then there are the parts where the inhabitants of "Herstory" are amused and horrified to learn about the conventional aspects of courtship, marriage, families, warfare, labor relations and even animal husbandry in the "real" world. Because "Herland" is essentially a novella, running only 124 pages in this unabridged Dover Thrift Edition, it is fairly easy to work it into a class looking at 20th century American utopian literature or the women's movement. In many ways, although it is not as well written, "Herland" is a much more provocative critique of women in American society than Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" or Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time." "Herstory" also stands out because it is a true utopian novel, written at a time when the dystopian emphasis was about to redefine the genre of utopian literature.
Rating:
Summary: Gilman's biting 1915 social satire on an all-female utopia
Review: Charlotte Perkins Gilman was arguably the most important American author of the women's movement in the early 20th-century. In addition to editing a newspaper, "The Forerunner," she wrote "Women and Economics," one of the first studies of the role of women in the economic system. Gilman also wrote a number of utopias: "Moving the Mountain" in 1911, "With Her in Ourland" (1916), and her best-known, "Herstory" in 1915. In "Herstory" Gilman creates a homosocial (one-sex) utopian society made up entirely of women in which the culture, political system, and families are the result of having women as the basis (instead of merely stemming from the absence of men). However, while other American utopian novels, most notably Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward 2000-1888," were standard reading for decades, Gilman's "Herland" was pretty much forgotten until it was rediscovered in the 1970s. Even after four decades Gilman's satire was seen as still speaking to the conditions faced by American women. Following the conceit first used by Sir Thomas More in writing his "Utopia," Gilman's "Herstory" tells of three American explorers (male, of course), stumbling upon an all-female society in an isolated mountain valley in a land far away on the even of the first World War. Since they find this strange land to be civilized the explorers are convinced there must be some men hiding someplace, and set out to find them. As they search high and low for the male of the species they learn about the history of the country, the religion of motherhood, and the other unique customs, while trying to seduce its inhabitants. Many generations earlier the women had found themselves separated from the human race, with the men dying off. The society evolved, organizing itself around raising children and living in harmony with their surroundings. In the end, the three mail visitors end up falling in love with three of the women and are essentially converted as naturalized aliens. "Herstory" is less science fiction than many of the utopian novels written during this period, and clearly its primary value is in terms of its provocative commentary on gender roles in the United States in the early 20th-century. Not surprisingly, Gilman questions the roles assumed by men and women in the "bi-sexual" society by showing the relative perfection achieved in Herland with its uni-sexual society. What Gilman sidesteps, of course, are the issues of sexuality: the women of "Herstory" are asexual beings, although they are capable of parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). Also, by talking about these women as being descended from good Aryan stock she raises the specter of racism as well. But clearly Gilman's purpose is to provide a critique of the social order of the day, using humor as a way to mask her telling barbs and to provide her unorthodox views of gender roles, motherhood, individuality, privacy, and other issues. Then there are the parts where the inhabitants of "Herstory" are amused and horrified to learn about the conventional aspects of courtship, marriage, families, warfare, labor relations and even animal husbandry in the "real" world. Because "Herland" is essentially a novella, running only 124 pages in this unabridged Dover Thrift Edition, it is fairly easy to work it into a class looking at 20th century American utopian literature or the women's movement. In many ways, although it is not as well written, "Herland" is a much more provocative critique of women in American society than Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" or Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time." "Herstory" also stands out because it is a true utopian novel, written at a time when the dystopian emphasis was about to redefine the genre of utopian literature.
Rating: 
Summary: As usual, the message overwhelms the medium.
Review: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (Dover, 1909) I always found it odd that Gilman, a prolific writer during her life, had become so obscure less than a century later as to be remembered for only a single short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." Now, having had the distinct displeasure of having read a second piece of Gilman's writing, I have to wonder if that obscurity isn't well-deserved. Herland is everything that "The Yellow Wallpaper" is not. It is boring, overly expository, dry as dust, and most importantly, didactic. It is didactic in the same way your history teacher who spoke in a monotone is didactic; you end up hating the delivery so much that whatever's being said gets tuned out along with the noise. It doesn't help that Herland is a vastly inferior knockoff of such nineteenth-century fantastic-journey novels as Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, James DeMille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, or Doyle's The Lost World. All three of those novels had the same generally socially conscious bent as does Herland, and held up a dystopian land to our own to show us where our own civilization is lacking. But all three of them (even Poe, who despised the novel form and never wrote in it again) had a basic understanding of the structure of the adventure novel and how to keep things moving while passing along their message about what's wrong with society. Gilman lacks this facility, and what's worse, she's of that strip of author who feels that, in order to make sure the message is clearly heard by the reader, she must go out of her way and add a clarifying sentence. After all, the reader is far too stupid to pick up on inferences. The popularity of The Yellow Wallpaper and the obscurity of Gilman's other work cannot, of course, be dismissed as understood after reading only one of her other works. But Herland certainly doesn't have me straining at the leash to go looking for anything else Gilman wrote. Uniformly awful. (zero)
Rating:
Summary: Highly civilized and enjoyable!
Review: Having read the book in one sitting, I'm excited about the ideas "Herland" brings to the present world, especially about men's view of women, and even women's view of themselves! A wonderfully written book about three men who enter a strange world populated by women only. The story of how the two sexes view their roles as male/female are intriguing and point out many focal points that theorists argue about: men controlling women, women being mothers, and the power between the two and how they survive in society. I highly recommend this book, it's an smooth read that applies more to today's world than it seems possible!
Rating: 
Summary: Fantasy masking as Utopian Lit
Review: I am a fan of utopian literature. It is a great measure of the human soul that we have these books. The spur us on to better ideals. Sadly, we have abandoned these, replacing them with the ugly dystopian literature, and are worse of.
"Herland" is unique in that it is feminist utopianism. It is so off-beast that I was excited to read it. All of the classical cannon of Utopian Lit is all male: Plato, Moore, Bellamy, and so forth. I was curious about what insights Gilman would have.
Sadly, I felt left down.
First of all, having so many expectation for a book, and then being let down forced me to look deeper at what was going on. I had to reexamine my assumptions and expectations.
I realized that so much Utopian Lit is the same: people getting together, decided to stop being fools (in the Biblical sense of the word), and actually doing what then should be doing. Part of templette involves uniform clothing, large mess halls, centralized planning, and the un-Biblical open marriages.
Gilman covers all of theses, except the open marriages, which I will later cover. In fact, there was nothing really new in this book. This is not to discredit it, but to to convey the epiphany I had while reading it. The utopias all have common elements, with minor modifications.
The problem with Gilman's book is in the virgin births to perpetuate her Amazon society. This dues ex machina fatally shifts the story form Utopian Lit to mere fantasy. All Utopian Lit must, of necessity, be atheistic. Otherwise, it becomes religious social philosophy.
There are some other problems, some of which come from outdated science. For example, genetically, all the women would be identical, and the environmental conditioning would not change them. Gilman has them with different features (p. 76, 78), a genetic impossibility.
Another problem is the centralized planning without omniscience and omnipotence. "The best laid plans of mice and men . . ." We cannot control nature, predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or predict hurricanes. Herland has none of these. It is a peach of an Eden, but detached from the real world.
Centralized planning never works. We have limited knowledge. And even if we know something, we have limited capacity to change things. We have Murphy's Law, entropy, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Couple all of these with the Butterfly Effect of our ignorance and impotence, and it is a wonder that anything gets done at all.
I so not want to get into Praeto's 80-20 Law, except to mention that all utopianists, except the American Founders, completely ignore this principle, Gilman not excluded.
Most confusing is the birth control alluded to in Chapter 6 (p. 60). If pregnancies are virgin, are they spontaneous, and if so, how does one control them? This all comes back to the fact that this book is essentially fantasy, and not utopian.
Sometimes Gilman gets downright ridiculous, as in mentioning that babies do not cry (p, 88). I understand the miracle eugenics and "negative eugenics" (p. 59), but this is ridiculous. Crying is not an annoyance, but serves several purposes, and is the root of communication.
The religion is a disappointment. It is just Social Gospel, but no power. It has virgin births, but no Virgin Mary.
Another problem is the nature of evil. Gilman notes that "They had no theory of the opposition of good and evil" (p. 87). That smacks of Nietzscheism, and is fundamentally at variance not only with the Laws of Logic, but also common-day experience.
By virtue of creating a Herland, she is setting women in opposition to men. That is , she believes that society of Amazons is good, and mixing it with men is evil.
Aristotle said,
"There are some, however, as we have said, who both state themselves that the same thing can be and not be, and say that it is possible to hold this view. Many even of the physicists adopt this theory. But we have just assumed that it is impossible at once to be and not to be, and by this means we have proved that this is the most certain of all principles . . ."
"If all contradictory predications of the same subject at the same time are true, clearly all things will be one. For if it is equally possible either to affirm or deny anything of anything, the same thing will be a trireme and a wall and a man; which is what necessarily follows for those who hold the theory of Protagoras. For if anyone thinks that a man is not a trireme, he is clearly not a trireme; and so he also is a trireme if the contradictory statement is true. And the result is the dictum of Anaxagoras, "all things mixed together""(Metaphysics, Book IV.4)
Herland is not Eden-it is a Fool's Paradise. It is not practical, relies on a dues ex machine to function, and naive. The most corrosive ideas is that men are not only unnecessary, but the chief cause of the problems in the world. This is unabashed sexism, and ignored the fact that men are out there, and have things to contribute. This is as radical as any male chauvinistic nonsense. Changing the genders does not confuse anyone.
If we were to implement Herland, what would be Gilman's final solution to the Man question? She does not say-perhaps for the better.
Gilman is a pseudo-utopian. This book is not utopian, but more of feminist fantasy, which is just as bad a the male fantasies seen on cable TV. I recommend this book merely as a literary curiosity, and not as a blueprint.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderland for feminist utopias!
Review: I came across this work while researching Utopian and Dystopia Lit in college and it was love at first read. It's rare to find a piece of utopian lit, much less feminist utopian lit written in this period. Yes, some have problems the the lack of modern feminist thought found in Herland, but for me, it was refreshing to find a work in which women are portrayed as intelligent, level-headed and, well, portrayed at all. And the added bonus for me was seeing a "lighter, happier" side to Gilman's writing. It is a must read for all fans of utopian lit.
Rating:
Summary: Mostly interesting as a period piece
Review: Like most utopias, Herland hasn't aged well. What sounds like heaven to one generation seems more like hell to another. What makes this book most interesting is its artifact status in the evolution of feminism. Most modern-day feminists would, I believe, be horrified to be plunked down in Herland to spend their lives: a world without coitus, where motherhood is the end-all and be-all of a woman's existence. There is no Sapphic hanky-panky going on among the inhabitants of this uterine utopia; the very concept of sexual pleasure is foreign to these ladies. Where feminists once wanted motherhood without sex, today they are more likely to want sex without motherhood. In addition, Herlanders are unabashedly pro-life and horrified when the idea of abortion is raised. A woman's right to choose is as unthinkable in their world as a topless bar would be. On the other hand, there is plenty of it-takes-a-village-to-raise-a-child; every inhabitant of Herland is a career woman; and when the men raise the issue of their wives taking their names, the brides-to-be scornfully refuse. As a political manifesto, Herland cannot be taken seriously in the modern world, yet it maintains its importance both as historical artifact, illuminating the thought of the early 20th century, and as evidence that -isms are not static but constantly evolving.
Rating:
Summary: Still thinking about it after all these years...
Review: This book was assigned reading for me back in college 12 years ago and I have been thinking about ever since then. Last week I finally broke down and decided to re-read it and see if it was as fascinating now as it was then. It is the story of three male adventurers who discover an unknown land that is virtually impossible to get to inhabited only by women. Scientific and curious by nature they plan a mission to fly over the country in a plane to investigate further only to be captured and held prisioner in "Herland." While captive they are tutored by and taught to speak the language of the inhabitants. Once they have mastered the language they learn that their captors do not mean them any harm, but rather want to learn from them about the outside world as they have been cut off from it for 2000 years by their natural barriers. The men learn from the women and the women learn from the men. We see how different life could be in a society ruled and inhabited only by women. As a utopian or fantasy novel, this one is outstanding. There were parts I liked better and was more appreciative of now that I am older than when I first read it, and others that had me thinking "as if!" If you can get past the whole parthenogenisis premise its an easier pill to swallow, but this time around I wasn't buying it. I also found the over zealous religious tones near the end to make this short novel drag out far too long. All in all I am glad I re-read it and encourage anyone who hasn't to do so.
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