Week 9: Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (5)

Some of the moments in Herland are absolutely hilarious - the boys being asked if virgin is a word applied to men as well is a double standard that still rings true to this day. But Gilman, though visionary, is very much a product of her time, and her 'utopia' reflects that. For starters, that's not actually a utopia - its a monoculture, much like Japan. Everything is homogenous and stable, with no member thereof actually acting under her own agency; it's a fragile culture, where everyone only acts to the benefits of society as a whole and not for themselves. There is no 'individual,' which obviously comes from Gilman's infatuation with socialism as a concept, and her disillusionment with the gender roles of her time. That's fine and all, but not the solution example she actually thinks it is.

 Sometimes when fighting for survival, you're no longer fighting for a right to live but other people who just want to make ends meet. Other people who struggle are not your enemy, and when we stop fighting and help each other, we can overcome what was the problem in the first place. Competition may have it's benefits, but it can also be a very detrimental distraction. On this, I agree with her. However, that doesn't change that Herland is a place completely stagnant from development - they've seemingly solved all their problems and now no longer need to really do anything.

I'm actually with Terry on the incredulity of everyone getting along, not because women are inherently petty or vindictive, but because women are human and fully capable of developing those traits with or without societal pressure. This is where Gilman being a product of her era comes in - she's a woman of the Victorian era who came to awareness of her own agency not as a woman, but as a person. She holds her women country up on this moral pedestal, but she really only serves to reinforce the idea that women are Mothers first and workers or anything else second. That's reductive to her point, since she's not arguing that women can be mothers and whatever else like today's working-mom, but that they only work for the sake of them being a mother. 

Gilman uses motherhood as a counterpoint to the boys' idea of people only ever working due to competition, to implant the idea of selfless work for others not needing such a motivator other than kindness and necessity. But that's weak; people work if they want to eat, and you need to eat to live. People generally fear death, even if they don't like life. The whole of human history has been about reducing competition in order to better access and utilize resources, primarily time, not increasing it. The Dark Ages of Europe are considered one of the least productive times in history and all anyone did was fight and scrape by. Suffice it to say, I was not the least impressed about Gilman making the women queasy at the idea of killing animals to eat, since that plays into the idea of women being 'delicate' common at the time, nor the lack of understanding of animal husbandry she showed regarding milk production. The feasibility of a forest of fruit trees and lack of predators is another thing that sounds nice but has horrifying and horrendous implications as far as ecology goes.

She has no idea what being a woman was like before that era - it's not reflected in her thoughts or histories at all. Her 'utopia' doesn't solve any of the problems because Gilman doesn't think of where the problems are actually coming from, just what they are and how affect her life and the life of other women. She does not acknowledge that women actually had very good opportunity for social mobility and work in the Victorian Era - she does not acknowledge the social and financial independence of the Spinster class of women centuries before the industrial revolution overtook the clothing industry - she does not acknowledge post American Revolution wives being hailed as 'the mothers of the country' as they were shuffled into the home to raise the next generation of Americans. She doesn't even acknowledge the Temperance movement of her era, which had less to do with a high handed view on alcohol and more to do with stopping the rampant abuse of alcoholics in the home by cutting off the source, which was spearheaded by women. She doesn't acknowledge the centuries of continuous witch hunts that erased pre-Christian social roles where man and woman enjoyed equal footing. To actively work to undo prejudice and bias, you need to know where it comes from and why it formed in the first place.

I can appreciate her efforts in Herland to dissect the situation - to pull apart male and female values and discover where they intersect and overlap and expose where something has gotten entangled. But that is too black and white. No, not all men are complicit because they 'benefit' from the subversion of women, just as not all women are kindly and docile because 'that's how women naturally are.' She gets really close to some interesting ideas, but shelves them for her perfect ideal that actually falls flat because it doesn't break actual social roles, only encourages a perception of equal value within an under-appreciated one.