With Her In Ourland Book

I'm still undecided as to whether or not I want to join in on the SFF Audio discussion of Herland, but decided that if I do, I wanted to have at least read the sequel.

When Herland ends, the three adventurers are leaving Herland, the female utopian society, to head back home. One of the men (the narrator), marries a woman from Herland, Ellador, who is an arborist. With Her in Ourland starts as they leave the country she has never been outside of.

If you are rating this book as a manifesto of feminist/socialist idealism, I would give it 3-4 stars. As a novel, it... well it is hardly a novel. There is some framework of travel laid out to allow Gilman to organize her thoughts about everything wrong with society. Some ideas/complaints seem still relevant today, others still horrify me. I found the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" to be more effective, probably because I was given more room to interpret the ideas through my own lens. The article in Bitch Magazine, a Portland feminist publication, explains it better than I can. But in With Her in Ourland, it is too didactic to really be called a novel.

The narrator at least seems to be gaining some respect for women who have their own minds and interests through his marriage to a Herlandian. On page two he even remarks, "In our story books we read always of young wives giving up all they have known and enjoyed 'for his sake.' That was by no means Ellador's position. She loved me - that I knew, but by no means with that engrossing absorption so familiar to our novelists and their readers."

Other elements of Herlandia that are admired by the narrator - their method of education, how ideas translate so easily directly to action in their "religion," and a shared social consciousness. This is learned as he observes his wife learning about the lack of cultures worldwide, the tendency toward violence, and the rather glaring problem of inequity.

"Ellador saw human life as a think in the making, with human beings as the makers."

Gilman makes a solid argument for democracy, the idea itself, in a country without a differentiation between people groups based on gender or race. Ellador expresses much of Gilman's exasperation that the USA had such a great opportunity in history and royally fucked it up. Old wine in new bottles - the same ideas, passed down to every generation. Not training children to think, but to parrot. These are not old problems, I'd say!

The part I hate.... the concept that drives me crazy in this and Herland... is the cult of motherhood. Near the end of the book, in a way I believe Gilman meant to be the triumphant finale, Ellador states,

"When your women are really awake and know what they are for, seeing men as the noblest kind of assistants, nature's latest and highest device for the improvement of parentage, then they will talk less of 'sex' and more of children."

I think to Gilman, that is the highest form of life - parenting. I just can't help but think that her imagination was a bit short-sighted, even in the early years of the twentieth century, although it makes me think of a line from "La Vie Boheme" in the musical rent:

"The opposite of war isn't peace; it's creation."

If this is the case, then perhaps it isn't so off base to devise a society where people are focused on furthering and improving the species.