In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote, “In my judgment it is a pretty poor thing to write, to talk, without a purpose.” Gilman undoubtedly dedicated her life to the purpose of women’s rights for the sake of all. Describing herself as a humanist, Gilman spent her life writing and lecturing on the rights of women to share in the totality of the social order.

A prolific writer, Gilman published 2,173 works in her lifetime. These texts encompassed varying genres in the disciplines of sociology, political science, economics, literature, and women’s studies. In her attempt to address women’s relations to patriarchal society, she juxtaposed ideologies of utopianism, such as those espoused by her contemporary Edward Bellamy, with the evolutionary thought of another contemporary, Lester Frank Ward. In her three utopian works, Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland, and its sequel, With Her in Ourland (1916), Gilman dramatizes the theories she espouses in her critical works.

In her critical masterwork, Women and Economics (1898), Gilman addresses her recurring theme of gynocentrism, a theory that dominates the fictionalized country of Herland. A central position in Gilman’s work is given to gynocentric theory, in which women are promoted as the primary and dominant form of the species while men are viewed simply as assistants to the reproductive process. Gilman believed that the displacement of gynocentric thought by what she termed androcentric practices of male domination had forced women into the confining roles that thwarted their development as human beings. Gilman notes that “women are not underdeveloped men, but the feminine half of humanity is underdeveloped humans.”

Gilman believes that widely held societal conventions enforced the patrifocal status, and that these conventions were all the more insidious because they encouraged women to accept their subordination. Men, too, suffered from being taught to dominate. Such conventions dehumanize both women and men, Gilman argues, and limit the potential of human societies. Only by exposing such limiting ideologies could women recognize their subjugation, reach autonomy, and participate in collective political action to reform a limited society into a fully actualized, humanized one.

Gilman’s fictional Herland is a playful dramatization of such beliefs. In the book, Gilman skillfully employs satire to parody late nineteenth century and early twentieth century patriarchy and the confining conventions embedded within its social order. Herland not only is one of the first utopian novels written by a woman about women but also is a work whose progressive message resolutely dismantles widely accepted patriarchal beliefs of the time. In Herland, the focus of society is not male-dominated but guided by birth-centered, womanized New Motherhood. A genuine community operates collectively to nurture, rear, and educate its children. Such communal motherhood eliminates the need for family as agency. Specialists care for the children, creating a new society that shares no remnants of destruction, hierarchy, or aggression. Instead, social consciousness, collective democracy, and the nurturing of citizens and environment becomes the national priority. In Herland, the society’s children are its most important and precious production; the creating of Herlandic children, from self-conception to citizenship, encompasses not only the country’s industry but also its theological and national ideologies.

Employing wit and humor, Gilman uses the principle of negativity to illustrate the nonsensical nature of patriarchal conventions. She denounces Western society by illustrating through the example of Herland what Western society is not. Much of the fiction revolves around displaying the paradox of patrifocal thought and convention. The questions the Herlanders ask, which make up much of the twelve chapters, are innocent enough on the surface, but what the citizens expose by...