Charlotte Stetson Gilman was known as a crusading feminist intellectual, concerned especially with gender inequality within marriage. Most married women of her time had little chance of participating in any creative or professional career - an enforced domestic slavery that was, for Gilman, not only patently unjust, but made neither partner happy or content. In 'Herland', Gilman weaves these themes into an adventure story of three young men, schooled in the then-current view of women as weak and timid creatures. They discover Herland, an all-female society of rationality, equality and compassion composed solely of strong, athletic women, where even reproduction requires no male input! Gilman uses this utopian fantasy with skill and humour, gradually bringing the three male adventurers from an initial arrogant confidence in their own culture, to a realization that life in Herland is infinitely preferable to the war-torn, poverty-stricken male-dominated nations they have left. And that the supposed inferiority of the weaker sex is, in fact, nothing more than a product of cultural indoctrination.
Charlotte Stetson Gilman was known as a crusading feminist intellectual, concerned especially with gender inequality within marriage. Most married women of her time had little chance of participating in any creative or professional career - an enforced domestic slavery that was, for Gilman, not only patently unjust, but made neither partner happy or content. In 'Herland', Gilman weaves these themes into an adventure story of three young men, schooled in the then-current view of women as weak and timid creatures. They discover Herland, an all-female society of rationality, equality and compassion composed solely of strong, athletic women, where even reproduction requires no male input! Gilman uses this utopian fantasy with skill and humour, gradually bringing the three male adventurers from an initial arrogant confidence in their own culture, to a realization that life in Herland is infinitely preferable to the war-torn, poverty-stricken male-dominated nations they have left. And that the supposed inferiority of the weaker sex is, in fact, nothing more than a product of cultural indoctrination.
Über den Autor
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American writer, lecturer, social critic, and feminist thinker whose work helped shape modern discussions of women's labour, domestic life, economic dependence, mental health, gender roles, and social reform. Born in 1860, Gilman became one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her nonfiction study Women and Economics argued that women's social and economic dependence was not natural but produced by social arrangements, domestic convention, and restricted access to meaningful public work. Her fiction often gave imaginative form to those arguments.Gilman is best known today for The Yellow Wallpaper, one of the most important American short stories about women's confinement, medical authority, and mental distress, but Herland is equally central to her legacy. First published in The Forerunner, the magazine she wrote and edited, the novel uses utopian fiction to test assumptions about gender, motherhood, education, work, violence, and civilisation. Her writing remains important to readers of feminist literature, American realism and reform fiction, early science fiction, utopian literature, women's studies, and recovered classics by women writers.
