Herland
us--save for our escape fiasco. I don’t suppose Terry had ever lived so
long with neither Love, Combat, nor Danger to employ his superabundant
energies, and he was irritable. Neither Jeff nor I found it so wearing.
I was so much interested intellectually that our confinement did not
wear on me; and as for Jeff, bless his heart!--he enjoyed the society of
that tutor of his almost as much as if she had been a girl--I don’t know
but more.
As to Terry’s criticism, it was true. These women, whose essential
distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture,
were strikingly deficient in what we call “femininity.” This led me very
promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond
of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity--developed to
please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to
the real fulfillment of their great process. But Terry came to no such
conclusion.
“Just you wait till I get out!” he muttered.
Then we both cautioned him. “Look here, Terry, my boy! You be careful!
They’ve been mighty good to us--but do you remember the anesthesia? If
you do any mischief in this virgin land, beware of the vengeance of the
Maiden Aunts! Come, be a man! It won’t be forever.”
To return to the history:
They began at once to plan and built for their children, all the
strength and intelligence of the whole of them devoted to that one
thing. Each girl, of course, was reared in full knowledge of her
Crowning Office, and they had, even then, very high ideas of the molding
powers of the mother, as well as those of education.
Such high ideals as they had! Beauty, Health, Strength, Intellect,
Goodness--for those they prayed and worked.
They had no enemies; they themselves were all sisters and friends. The
land was fair before them, and a great future began to form itself in
their minds.
The religion they had to begin with was much like that of old Greece--a
number of gods and goddesses; but they lost all interest in deities
of war and plunder, and gradually centered on their Mother Goddess
altogether. Then, as they grew more intelligent, this had turned into a
sort of Maternal Pantheism.
Here was Mother Earth, bearing fruit. All that they ate was fruit of
motherhood, from seed or egg or their product. By motherhood they were
born and by motherhood they lived--life was, to them, just the long
cycle of motherhood.
But very early they recognized the need of improvement as well as
of mere repetition, and devoted their combined intelligence to that
problem--how to make the best kind of people. First this was merely the
hope of bearing better ones, and then they recognized that however
the children differed at birth, the real growth lay later--through
education.
Then things began to hum.
As I learned more and more to appreciate what these women had
accomplished, the less proud I was of what we, with all our manhood, had
done.
You see, they had had no wars. They had had no kings, and no priests,
and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew
together--not by competition, but by united action.
We tried to put in a good word for competition, and they were keenly
interested. Indeed, we soon found from their earnest questions of us
that they were prepared to believe our world must be better than theirs.
They were not sure; they wanted to know; but there was no such arrogance
about them as might have been expected.
We rather spread ourselves, telling of the advantages of competition:
how it developed fine qualities; that without it there would be “no
stimulus to industry.” Terry was very strong on that point.
“No stimulus to industry,” they repeated, with that puzzled look we had
learned to know so well. “_Stimulus? To Industry?_ But don’t you _like_
to work?”
“No man would work unless he had to,” Terry declared.
“Oh, no _man!_ You mean that is one of your sex distinctions?”
“No, indeed!” he said hastily. “No one, I mean, man or woman, would work
without incentive. Competition is the--the motor power, you see.”
“It is not with us,” they explained gently, “so it is hard for us to
understand. Do you mean, for instance, that with you no mother would
work for her children without the stimulus of competition?”
No, he admitted that he did not mean that. Mothers, he supposed, would
of course work for their children in the home; but the world’s work
was different--that had to be done by men, and required the competitive
element.
All our teachers were eagerly interested.
“We want so much to know--you have the whole world to tell us of, and we
have only our little land! And there are two of you--the two sexes--to
love and help one another. It must be a rich and wonderful world. Tell
us--what is the work of the world, that men do--which we have not here?”
“Oh, everything,” Terry said grandly. “The men do everything, with us.”
He squared his broad shoulders and lifted his chest. “We do not allow
our women to work. Women are loved--idolized--honored--kept in the home
to care for the children.”
“What is ‘the home’?” asked Somel a little wistfully.
But Zava begged: “Tell me first, do _no_ women work, really?”
“Why, yes,” Terry admitted. “Some have to, of the poorer sort.”
“About how many--in your country?”
“About seven or eight million,” said Jeff, as mischievous as ever.
CHAPTER 6.
Comparisons Are Odious
I had always been proud of my country, of course. Everyone is. Compared
with the other lands and other races I knew, the United States of
America had always seemed to me, speaking modestly, as good as the best
of them.
But just as a clear-eyed, intelligent, perfectly honest, and
well-meaning child will frequently jar one’s self-esteem by innocent
questions, so did these women, without the slightest appearance of
malice or satire, continually bring up points of discussion which we
spent our best efforts in evading.
Now that we were fairly proficient in their language, had read a lot
about their history, and had given them the general outlines of ours,
they were able to press their questions closer.
So when Jeff admitted the number of “women wage earners” we had, they
instantly asked for the total population, for the proportion of adult
women, and found that there were but twenty million or so at the
outside.
“Then at least a third of your women are--what is it you call them--wage
earners? And they are all _poor_. What is _poor_, exactly?”
“Ours is the best country in the world as to poverty,” Terry told them.
“We do not have the wretched paupers and beggars of the older countries,
I assure you. Why, European visitors tell us, we don’t know what poverty
is.”
“Neither do we,” answered Zava. “Won’t you tell us?”
Terry put it up to me, saying I was the sociologist, and I explained
that the laws of nature require a struggle for existence, and that in
the struggle the fittest survive, and the unfit perish. In our economic
struggle, I continued, there was always plenty of opportunity for the
fittest to reach the top, which they did, in great numbers, particularly
in our country; that where there was severe economic pressure the lowest
classes of course felt it the worst, and that among the poorest of all
the women were driven into the labor market by necessity.
They listened closely, with the usual note-taking.
“About one-third, then, belong to the poorest class,” observed Moadine
gravely. “And two-thirds are the ones who are--how was it you so
beautifully put it?--‘loved, honored, kept in the home to care for the
children.’ This inferior one-third have no children, I suppose?”
Jeff--he was getting as bad as they were--solemnly replied that, on the
contrary, the poorer they were, the more children they had. That too, he
explained, was a law of nature: “Reproduction is in inverse proportion
to individuation.”
“These ‘laws of nature,’” Zava gently asked, “are they all the laws you
have?”
“I should say not!” protested Terry. “We have systems of law that go
back thousands and thousands of years--just as you do, no doubt,” he
finished politely.
“Oh no,” Moadine told him. “We have no laws over a hundred years old,
and most of them are under twenty. In a few weeks more,” she continued,
“we are going to have the pleasure of showing you over our little land
and explaining everything you care to know about. We want you to see our
people.”
“And I assure you,” Somel added, “that our people want to see you.”
Terry brightened up immensely at this news, and reconciled himself to
the renewed demands upon our capacity as teachers. It was lucky that we
knew so little, really, and had no books to refer to, else, I fancy we
might all be there yet, teaching those eager-minded women about the rest
of the world.
As to geography, they had the tradition of the Great Sea, beyond the
mountains; and they could see for themselves the endless thick-forested
plains below them--that was all. But from the few records of their
ancient condition--not “before the flood” with them, but before that
mighty quake which had cut them off so completely--they were aware that
there were other peoples and other countries.
In geology they were quite ignorant.
As to anthropology, they had those same remnants of information about
other peoples, and the knowledge of the savagery of the occupants of
those dim forests below. Nevertheless, they had inferred (marvelously
keen on inference and deduction their minds were!) the existence and
development of civilization in other places, much as we infer it on
other planets.
When our biplane came whirring over their heads in that first scouting
flight of ours, they had instantly accepted it as proof of the high
development of Some Where Else, and had prepared to receive us as
cautiously and eagerly as we might prepare to welcome visitors who came
“by meteor” from Mars.
Of history--outside their own--they knew nothing, of course, save for
their ancient traditions.
Of astronomy they had a fair working knowledge--that is a very old
science; and with it, a surprising range and facility in mathematics.
Physiology they were quite familiar with. Indeed, when it came to the
simpler and more concrete sciences, wherein the subject matter was at
hand and they had but to exercise their minds upon it, the results were
surprising. They had worked out a chemistry, a botany, a physics,
with all the blends where a science touches an art, or merges into
an industry, to such fullness of knowledge as made us feel like
schoolchildren.
Also we found this out--as soon as we were free of the country, and
by further study and question--that what one knew, all knew, to a very
considerable extent.
I talked later with little mountain girls from the fir-dark valleys
away up at their highest part, and with sunburned plains-women and agile
foresters, all over the country, as well as those in the towns, and
everywhere there was the same high level of intelligence. Some knew far
more than others about one thing--they were specialized, of course; but
all of them knew more about everything--that is, about everything the
country was acquainted with--than is the case with us.
We boast a good deal of our “high level of general intelligence” and our
“compulsory public education,” but in proportion to their opportunities
they were far better educated than our people.
With what we told them, from what sketches and models we were able to
prepare, they constructed a sort of working outline to fill in as they
learned more.
A big globe was made, and our uncertain maps, helped out by those in
that precious yearbook thing I had, were tentatively indicated upon it.
They sat in eager groups, masses of them who came for the purpose, and