Herland
Terry. You’ve got a grouch, that’s all. These women have the virtue
of humanity, with less of its faults than any folks I ever saw. As for
patience--they’d have pitched us over the cliffs the first day we lit
among ’em, if they hadn’t that.”
“There are no--distractions,” he grumbled. “Nowhere a man can go and cut
loose a bit. It’s an everlasting parlor and nursery.”
“And workshop,” I added. “And school, and office, and laboratory, and
studio, and theater, and--home.”
“_Home!_” he sneered. “There isn’t a home in the whole pitiful place.”
“There isn’t anything else, and you know it,” Jeff retorted hotly. “I
never saw, I never dreamed of, such universal peace and good will and
mutual affection.”
“Oh, well, of course, if you like a perpetual Sunday school, it’s all
very well. But I like Something Doing. Here it’s all done.”
There was something to this criticism. The years of pioneering lay far
behind them. Theirs was a civilization in which the initial difficulties
had long since been overcome. The untroubled peace, the unmeasured
plenty, the steady health, the large good will and smooth management
which ordered everything, left nothing to overcome. It was like a
pleasant family in an old established, perfectly run country place.
I liked it because of my eager and continued interest in the
sociological achievements involved. Jeff liked it as he would have liked
such a family and such a place anywhere.
Terry did not like it because he found nothing to oppose, to struggle
with, to conquer.
“Life is a struggle, has to be,” he insisted. “If there is no struggle,
there is no life--that’s all.”
“You’re talking nonsense--masculine nonsense,” the peaceful Jeff
replied. He was certainly a warm defender of Herland. “Ants don’t raise
their myriads by a struggle, do they? Or the bees?”
“Oh, if you go back to insects--and want to live in an anthill--! I tell
you the higher grades of life are reached only through struggle--combat.
There’s no Drama here. Look at their plays! They make me sick.”
He rather had us there. The drama of the country was--to our
taste--rather flat. You see, they lacked the sex motive and, with it,
jealousy. They had no interplay of warring nations, no aristocracy and
its ambitions, no wealth and poverty opposition.
I see I have said little about the economics of the place; it should
have come before, but I’ll go on about the drama now.
They had their own kind. There was a most impressive array of pageantry,
of processions, a sort of grand ritual, with their arts and their
religion broadly blended. The very babies joined in it. To see one of
their great annual festivals, with the massed and marching stateliness
of those great mothers, the young women brave and noble, beautiful and
strong; and then the children, taking part as naturally as ours would
frolic round a Christmas tree--it was overpowering in the impression of
joyous, triumphant life.
They had begun at a period when the drama, the dance, music, religion,
and education were all very close together; and instead of developing
them in detached lines, they had kept the connection. Let me try again
to give, if I can, a faint sense of the difference in the life view--the
background and basis on which their culture rested.
Ellador told me a lot about it. She took me to see the children, the
growing girls, the special teachers. She picked out books for me to
read. She always seemed to understand just what I wanted to know, and
how to give it to me.
While Terry and Alima struck sparks and parted--he always madly drawn
to her and she to him--she must have been, or she’d never have stood the
way he behaved--Ellador and I had already a deep, restful feeling, as
if we’d always had one another. Jeff and Celis were happy; there was no
question of that; but it didn’t seem to me as if they had the good times
we did.
Well, here is the Herland child facing life--as Ellador tried to show
it to me. From the first memory, they knew Peace, Beauty, Order, Safety,
Love, Wisdom, Justice, Patience, and Plenty. By “plenty” I mean that the
babies grew up in an environment which met their needs, just as young
fawns might grow up in dewy forest glades and brook-fed meadows. And
they enjoyed it as frankly and utterly as the fawns would.
They found themselves in a big bright lovely world, full of the most
interesting and enchanting things to learn about and to do. The people
everywhere were friendly and polite. No Herland child ever met the
overbearing rudeness we so commonly show to children. They were People,
too, from the first; the most precious part of the nation.
In each step of the rich experience of living, they found the instance
they were studying widen out into contact with an endless range of
common interests. The things they learned were _related_, from the
first; related to one another, and to the national prosperity.
“It was a butterfly that made me a forester,” said Ellador. “I was about
eleven years old, and I found a big purple-and-green butterfly on a low
flower. I caught it, very carefully, by the closed wings, as I had been
told to do, and carried it to the nearest insect teacher”--I made a note
there to ask her what on earth an insect teacher was--“to ask her its
name. She took it from me with a little cry of delight. ‘Oh, you blessed
child,’ she said. ‘Do you like obernuts?’ Of course I liked obernuts,
and said so. It is our best food-nut, you know. ‘This is a female of the
obernut moth,’ she told me. ‘They are almost gone. We have been trying
to exterminate them for centuries. If you had not caught this one, it
might have laid eggs enough to raise worms enough to destroy thousands
of our nut trees--thousands of bushels of nuts--and make years and years
of trouble for us.’
“Everybody congratulated me. The children all over the country were told
to watch for that moth, if there were any more. I was shown the history
of the creature, and an account of the damage it used to do and of how
long and hard our foremothers had worked to save that tree for us. I
grew a foot, it seemed to me, and determined then and there to be a
forester.”
This is but an instance; she showed me many. The big difference was that
whereas our children grow up in private homes and families, with every
effort made to protect and seclude them from a dangerous world, here
they grew up in a wide, friendly world, and knew it for theirs, from the
first.
Their child-literature was a wonderful thing. I could have spent years
following the delicate subtleties, the smooth simplicities with which
they had bent that great art to the service of the child mind.
We have two life cycles: the man’s and the woman’s. To the man there is
growth, struggle, conquest, the establishment of his family, and as much
further success in gain or ambition as he can achieve.
To the woman, growth, the securing of a husband, the subordinate
activities of family life, and afterward such “social” or charitable
interests as her position allows.
Here was but one cycle, and that a large one.
The child entered upon a broad open field of life, in which motherhood
was the one great personal contribution to the national life, and all
the rest the individual share in their common activities. Every girl I
talked to, at any age above babyhood, had her cheerful determination as
to what she was going to be when she grew up.
What Terry meant by saying they had no “modesty” was that this great
life-view had no shady places; they had a high sense of personal
decorum, but no shame--no knowledge of anything to be ashamed of.
Even their shortcomings and misdeeds in childhood never were presented
to them as sins; merely as errors and misplays--as in a game. Some of
them, who were palpably less agreeable than others or who had a real
weakness or fault, were treated with cheerful allowance, as a friendly
group at whist would treat a poor player.
Their religion, you see, was maternal; and their ethics, based on the
full perception of evolution, showed the principle of growth and the
beauty of wise culture. They had no theory of the essential opposition
of good and evil; life to them was growth; their pleasure was in
growing, and their duty also.
With this background, with their sublimated mother-love, expressed in
terms of widest social activity, every phase of their work was modified
by its effect on the national growth. The language itself they had
deliberately clarified, simplified, made easy and beautiful, for the
sake of the children.
This seemed to us a wholly incredible thing: first, that any nation
should have the foresight, the strength, and the persistence to plan
and fulfill such a task; and second, that women should have had so much
initiative. We have assumed, as a matter of course, that women had
none; that only the man, with his natural energy and impatience of
restriction, would ever invent anything.
Here we found that the pressure of life upon the environment develops in
the human mind its inventive reactions, regardless of sex; and further,
that a fully awakened motherhood plans and works without limit, for the
good of the child.
That the children might be most nobly born, and reared in an environment
calculated to allow the richest, freest growth, they had deliberately
remodeled and improved the whole state.
I do not mean in the least that they stopped at that, any more than
a child stops at childhood. The most impressive part of their whole
culture beyond this perfect system of child-rearing was the range of
interests and associations open to them all, for life. But in the field
of literature I was most struck, at first, by the child-motive.
They had the same gradation of simple repetitive verse and story that we
are familiar with, and the most exquisite, imaginative tales; but where,
with us, these are the dribbled remnants of ancient folk myths and
primitive lullabies, theirs were the exquisite work of great artists;
not only simple and unfailing in appeal to the child-mind, but _true_,
true to the living world about them.
To sit in one of their nurseries for a day was to change one’s views
forever as to babyhood. The youngest ones, rosy fatlings in their
mothers’ arms, or sleeping lightly in the flower-sweet air, seemed
natural enough, save that they never cried. I never heard a child cry in
Herland, save once or twice at a bad fall; and then people ran to help,
as we would at a scream of agony from a grown person.
Each mother had her year of glory; the time to love and learn, living
closely with her child, nursing it proudly, often for two years or more.
This perhaps was one reason for their wonderful vigor.
But after the baby-year the mother was not so constantly in attendance,
unless, indeed, her work was among the little ones. She was never
far off, however, and her attitude toward the co-mothers, whose proud
child-service was direct and continuous, was lovely to see.
As for the babies--a group of those naked darlings playing on short
velvet grass, clean-swept; or rugs as soft; or in shallow pools of
bright water; tumbling over with bubbling joyous baby laughter--it was a
view of infant happiness such as I had never dreamed.
The babies were reared in the warmer part of the country, and gradually
acclimated to the cooler heights as they grew older.
Sturdy children of ten and twelve played in the snow as joyfully as ours
do; there were continuous excursions of them, from one part of the land
to another, so that to each child the whole country might be home.
It was all theirs, waiting for them to learn, to love, to use, to serve;
as our own little boys plan to be “a big soldier,” or “a cowboy,” or
whatever pleases their fancy; and our little girls plan for the kind of