When the Ancient Greeks wrote of the Amazons, that mysterious society of women who lived either in Libya or the Caucasus or Central Asia (accounts vary), they imagined a world quite like their own, only inverted. There were warriors — but they were women. There were kings — but they were women. There was war and strife and everything else, except it was women doing it all.

When Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) wrote of a mysterious society of women — who lived this time in South America — she imagined a world that could not be more different from hers. The women of Herland are not Amazons; in fact, they know nothing of war. For 2,000 years they have been cut off from the outside world at the top of a mountain. And the society they have made there is perfect: a place where even pets have been liberated. The removal of men has meant the removal of competition, jealousy, covetousness… And that one thing men are good for, reproduction? Parthenogenesis can replace that too.

Herland was serialized in 1915 in The Frontrunner, a monthly magazine single-handedly written, edited, and published by Gilman from 1909 to 1916. Our guides to this mysterious world are three men (Terry, a brute; Jeff, a dork; and Van, our narrator, the happy mean) who find the society while on a colonial-cum-scientific expedition. They are the first men to arrive since the great disaster that cut Herland off from the outside world, and they are — cautiously — welcomed. Over the course of the book, they learn about Herland, and see how much better the world could be without men like them.

The Frontrunner was Gilman’s great life work, her mouthpiece for socialism, humanism, and social reform, but she is better known for her 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Its account of a post-partum woman being forced into a “rest cure” by her husband — Gilman also underwent such a treatment, directed by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell — became a mainstay of feminist fiction not long after its publication.

Herland is in some ways an unusual companion to the story. The depiction of motherhood in “The Yellow Wallpaper” can hardly be considered glowing; and yet Herland is a paean to the supreme importance of motherhood as an identity and a practice. As Moadine, one of the men’s minders, explains to them:

“I do not think you quite understand yet. You are but men, three men, in a country where the whole population are mothers — or are going to be. Motherhood means to us something which I cannot yet discover in any of the countries of which you tell us. . . . The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them — on the race. You see, we are Mothers,” she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.

Yet one can feel in Gilman’s construction of Herland the depth of her revulsion with Victorian motherhood. More than a century before Sophie Lewis called for us to “abolish the family”, Gilman was calling for a kind of motherhood freed of precisely the constraints which she dramatized so vividly in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The mothers of Herland raise their children collectively, such that the ties between each woman and her biological child are weakened; although the entire society is oriented toward the raising of children, most of the women work in other fields: forestry, agriculture, art… That everyone in Herland is a mother is not because everyone does the daily work of childcare, but because everyone is building a society where children can thrive.

The radicalism of this vision of motherhood nevertheless keeps the reproductive body at the center, in a way that can be hard for a contemporary reader to stomach. It also betrays Gilman’s interest in eugenics: one of the utopian features of Herland is that its founders “made it our first business to train out, to breed out, when possible, the lowest types.” (There are also, it must be said, some rather uncomfortable comments about Aryanism and the “savages down below”.)

Perhaps most surprising, however, especially given Gilman’s own romantic entanglements with women, is that before the men arrive, Herland is entirely sexless. There is no hint of lesbianism here: the citizens of Herland are firmly collectivized, with no intimacy between individuals. It is the men who introduce their partners to the very idea of sex. In 1900, Gilman had remarried to her first cousin, Houghton Gilman, with whom she lived — it seems happily — until his death in 1934. There’s perhaps something of that later, companionate, familial marriage in Van’s relationship with Ellador, the woman he falls in love with and then takes back home with him in the sequel With Her in Ourland, which appeared the following year.

Van learns a lot about education and forestry and agriculture and clothing design in Herland, but mostly he learns about a love free from the pressure of sex:

I find it quite beyond me to describe what this woman was to me. We talk fine things about women, but in our hearts we know that they are very limited beings—most of them. We honor them for their functional powers, even while we dishonor them by our use of it; we honor them for their carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the perverted maternal activities which make our wives the most comfortable of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our own decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way. Oh, we value them, all right, “in their place,” which place is the home. . . . [The women of Herland] were women one had to love “up,” very high up, instead of down. . . . It gave me a queer feeling, way down deep, as of the stirring of some ancient dim prehistoric consciousness, a feeling that they were right somehow—that this was the way to feel.