Herland: A Feminist Utopian Novel of Women, Society, and Civilization - Paperback

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Author)

Herland is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's landmark feminist utopian novel, a recovered classic of women's speculative fiction and early twentieth-century social thought. First serialised in 1915 in The Forerunner, the novel follows three male explorers who discover an isolated civilisation made entirely of women. Expecting weakness, disorder, sentimentality, or sexual rivalry, they instead find a highly organised, peaceful, rational, and self-sustaining society that exposes the poverty of their assumptions about gender, power, motherhood, education, and civilisation.

Long unavailable as a standalone book before its late twentieth-century recovery, Herland now stands as one of Gilman's essential works, alongside The Yellow Wallpaper and Women and Economics. Its utopian structure is direct and argumentative, but its literary force lies in the collision between masculine expectation and female social possibility. For readers interested in feminist fiction, utopian literature, women's writing, early science fiction, gender studies, and recovered American classics, Herland remains a sharp and unsettling work whose questions have not gone quiet. Project Gutenberg describes the book as a 1915 feminist utopian novel about an isolated all-female society, which supports that as the cleanest catalogue positioning.