The Herland Trilogy: Moving the Mountain, Herland, With Her in Ourland (Utopian Classic)

Overview

Moving the Mountain is a feminist utopian novel. The book was one element in the major wave of utopian and dystopian literature that marked the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perkins sends a man forward in time to a better world, but gives him deep difficulties in adjusting to it. Herland describes an isolated society composed entirely of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis. The result is an ideal social order, free of war, conflict and domination. The story is told from the perspective of Van Jennings, a student of sociology who, along with two friends, Terry O. Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, forms an expedition party to explore an area of unchartered land where it is rumored lives a society consisting entirely of women. The three friends do not really believe the rumors as they are unable to conceive of how human reproduction could occur without males. The men speculate about what a society of women would be like, each guessing differently based on the stereotype of women which he holds most dear… With Her in Ourland draws a contrast between Gilman's idealized vision of a feminist society in Herland and the darker realities of real, outside, male-dominated world. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform.