Browse books

Herland

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Cover of Herland

Cover: Young Women Picking Fruit (1891-92) by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) · Wikimedia Commons (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh) · Public domain

Herland is a 1915 feminist utopian novel written by American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who bear children without men (parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. It was first published in monthly installments as a serial in 1915 in The Forerunner, a magazine edited and written by Gilman between 1909 and 1916, with its sequel, With Her in Ourland beginning immediately thereafter in the January 1916 issue. The book is often considered to be the middle volume in her utopian trilogy, preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911).

Summary source: Wikipedia: Herland (novel) · CC BY-SA 4.0

Start reading

Table of contents

  1. 1: A Not Unnatural Enterprise
  2. 2: Rash Advances
  3. 3: A Peculiar Imprisonment
  4. 4: Our Venture
  5. 5: A Unique History
  6. 6: Comparisons Are Odious
  7. 7: Our Growing Modesty
  8. 8: The Girls of Herland
  9. 9: Our Relations and Theirs
  10. 10: Their Religions and Our Marriages
  11. 11: Our Difficulties
  12. 12: Expelled