Herland quotes

We stopped in our tracks. We began to explain, to make signs pointing away toward the big forest—indicating that we would go back to it—at once.

It makes me laugh, knowing all I do now, to think of us three boys⁠—nothing else; three audacious impertinent boys⁠—butting into an unknown country without any sort of a guard or defense.

We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only women—why, they would be no obstacles at all.

“Oh, yes, birds and bugs,” Terry said, “but not among animals—have you no animals?”

“We have cats,” she said. “The father is not very useful.”

“Have you no cattle—sheep—horses?” I drew some rough outlines of these beasts and showed them to her.

There were no adventures because there was nothing to fight. There were no wild beasts in the country and very few tame ones. Of these I might as well stop to describe the one common pet of the country. Cats, of course. But such cats!

What do you suppose these Lady Burbanks had done with their cats? By the most prolonged and careful selection and exclusion they had developed a race of cats that did not sing!

That’s a fact. The most those poor dumb brutes could do was to make a kind of squeak when they were hungry or wanted the door open, and, of course, to purr, and make the various mother-noises to their kittens.

We told them of how people thought it repugnant to have their loved ones burn, and they asked if it was less repugnant to have them decay.

They were inconveniently reasonable, those women.

Well—that original bunch of girls set to work to clean up the place and make their living as best they could. Some of the remaining slave women rendered invaluable service, teaching such trades as they knew.

As to Terry’s criticism, it was true. These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call “femininity.”

This led me very promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity⁠—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.

But Terry came to no such conclusion.

Jeff—he was getting as bad as they were—solemnly replied that, on the contrary, the poorer they were, the more children they had. That too, he explained, was a law of nature: “Reproduction is in inverse proportion to individuation.”

“These ‘laws of nature,’ ” Zava gently asked, “are they all the laws you have?”

“I should say not!” protested Terry. “We have systems of law that go back thousands and thousands of years—just as you do, no doubt,” he finished politely.

She smiled that little smile again, and asked:

“Are ‘gentlemen’ always safe?”

“You surely do not think that any of us,” he said it with a good deal of emphasis on the “us,” “would hurt your young girls?”

“Oh no,” she said quickly, in real surprise. “The danger is quite the other way. They might hurt you.

If, by any accident, you did harm any one of us, you would have to face a million mothers.

”

You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.

Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere “instinct,” a wholly personal feeling; it was⁠—a religion.

It included that limitless feeling of sisterhood, that wide unity in service, which was so difficult for us to grasp. And it was National, Racial, Human—oh, I don’t know how to say it.

We are used to seeing what we call “a mother” completely wrapped up in her own pink bundle of fascinating babyhood, and taking but the faintest theoretic interest in anybody else’s bundle, to say nothing of the common needs of all the bundles.

But these women were working all together at the grandest of tasks⁠—they were Making People⁠—and they made them well.

There followed a period of “negative eugenics” which must have been an appalling sacrifice. We are commonly willing to “lay down our lives” for our country, but they had to forego motherhood for their country—and it was precisely the hardest thing for them to do.

“We soon grew to see that mother-love has more than one channel of expression.

I think the reason our children are so⁠—so fully loved, by all of us, is that we never⁠—any of us⁠—have enough of our own.

”

That was what they did, anyhow.

When a woman chose to be a mother, she allowed the child-longing to grow within her till it worked its natural miracle.

When she did not so choose she put the whole thing out of her mind, and fed her heart with the other babies.

With this wide, deep, thorough knowledge, they had met and solved the problems of education in ways some of which I hope to make clear later.

Those nation-loved children of theirs compared with the average in our country as the most perfectly cultivated, richly developed roses compare with⁠—tumbleweeds.

Yet they did not seem “cultivated” at all—it had all become a natural condition.

He never seemed to recognize that quiet background of superiority.

When she dropped an argument he always thought he had silenced her; when she laughed he thought it tribute to his wit.

I hated to admit to myself how much Terry had sunk in my esteem. Jeff felt it too, I am sure; but neither of us admitted it to the other.

“But acquired traits are not transmissible,” Terry declared. “Weissman has proved that.”

They never disputed our absolute statements, only made notes of them.

“If that is so, then our improvement must be due either to mutation, or solely to education,” she gravely pursued. “We certainly have improved.

We had expected a dull submissive monotony, and found a daring social inventiveness far beyond our own, and a mechanical and scientific development fully equal to ours.

We had expected pettiness, and found a social consciousness besides which our nations looked like quarreling children⁠—feebleminded ones at that.

We had expected jealousy, and found a broad sisterly affection, a fair-minded intelligence, to which we could produce no parallel.

We had expected pettiness, and found a social consciousness besides which our nations looked like quarreling children—feebleminded ones at that.

We had expected jealousy, and found a broad sisterly affection, a fair-minded intelligence, to which we could produce no parallel.

We had expected hysteria, and found a standard of health and vigor, a calmness of temper, to which the habit of profanity, for instance, was impossible to explain—we tried it.

We had expected jealousy, and found a broad sisterly affection, a fair-minded intelligence, to which we could produce no parallel.

We had expected hysteria, and found a standard of health and vigor, a calmness of temper, to which the habit of profanity, for instance, was impossible to explain⁠—we tried it.

All these things even Terry had to admit, but he still insisted that we should find out the other side pretty soon.

“

Does mother-love urge mothers⁠—with you⁠—to fill their own children’s teeth? Or to wish to?

”

Even then, with all those eager young things waiting to talk to us, a sudden question crossed my mind: “What was their point of view? What did they think of us?” We learned that later.

Terry plunged in among those young creatures with a sort of rapture, somewhat as a glad swimmer takes to the sea.

Jeff, with a rapt look on his high-bred face, approached as to a sacrament. But I was a little chilled by that last thought of mine, and kept my eyes open.

Here was poor old Terry fondly imagining that at last he was free to stray in “a rosebud garden of girls”—and behold! the rosebuds were all with keen appraising eye, studying us.

They were interested, profoundly interested, but it was not the kind of interest we were looking for.

To get an idea of their attitude you have to hold in mind their extremely high sense of solidarity. They were not each choosing a lover; they hadn’t the faintest idea of love—sex-love, that is.

Terry’s jewels and trinkets they prized as curios; handed them about, asking questions as to workmanship, not in the least as to value; and discussed not ownership, but which museum to put them in.

When a man has nothing to give a woman, is dependent wholly on his personal attraction, his courtship is under limitations.

They were considering these two things: the advisability of making the Great Change; and the degree of personal adaptability which would best serve that end.

When Jeff said, taking the fruit basket from his adored one, “A woman should not carry anything,” Celis said, “Why?” with the frankest amazement. He could not look that fleet-footed, deep-chested young forester in the face and say, “Because she is weaker.” She wasn’t.

One does not call a race horse weak because it is visibly not a cart horse.

He said, rather lamely, that women were not built for heavy work.

Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness.

Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.

This country had no other country to measure itself by—save the few poor savages far below, with whom they had no contact.

“Wish they had!” Terry persisted.

“They’ve neither the vices of men, nor the virtues of women⁠—they’re neuters!”

“You know better than that. Don’t talk nonsense,” said I, severely.

“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.

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?”

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.

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.

I had. The children seemed always playing something; or else, sometimes, engaged in peaceful researches of their own. I had wondered at first when they went to school, but soon found that they never did—to their knowledge.

It was all education but no schooling.

“We have been working for some sixteen hundred years, devising better and better games for children,” continued Somel.

This was a lesson to me.

No wonder this whole nation of women was peaceful and sweet in expression⁠—they had no horrible ideas.

“Surely you had some when you began,” I suggested.

“Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone.

They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them⁠—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.

”

“Oh, no,” she insisted, smiling, shaking her soft brown hair. “

We do things from our mothers⁠—not for them.

We don’t have to do things for them—they don’t need it, you know. But we have to live on—splendidly—because of them; and that’s the way we feel about God.”

“How could we?” she asked, fairly enough. “

We have no punishments in life, you see, so we don’t imagine them after death.

”

“

Do you punish a person for a broken leg or a fever?

We have preventive measures, and cures; sometimes we have to ‘send the patient to bed,’ as it were; but that’s not a punishment—it’s only part of the treatment,” she explained.

Then studying my point of view more closely, she added: “You see, we recognize, in our human motherhood, a great tender limitless uplifting force—patience and wisdom and all subtlety of delicate method. We credit God—our idea of God—with all that and more.

Our mothers are not angry with us⁠—why should God be?

”

“

Whiskers? Oh yes⁠—because you have them! Or do you wear them because He does?

”

They applied their minds to the thought of God, and worked out the theory that such an inner power demanded outward expression.

They lived as if God was real and at work within them.

As for those little temples everywhere—some of the women were more skilled, more temperamentally inclined, in this direction, than others.

“You couldn’t be anything else,” I said, half gladly and half a little sorry. The transparent honesty of these women was a never-ending astonishment to me.

“It seems to me a singularly foolish idea,” she said calmly. “And if true, most disagreeable.”

Now I had always accepted the doctrine of personal immortality as a thing established. The efforts of inquiring spiritualists, always seeking to woo their beloved ghosts back again, never seemed to me necessary.

This female ant might regard him with intense personal affection, but her ideas of parentage and economic management would be on a very different scale from his.

Now, of course, if she was a stray female in a country of pairing ants, he might have had his way with her; but if he was a stray male in an anthill⁠—!

For the higher one, try to imagine a devoted and impassioned man trying to set up housekeeping with a lady angel, a real wings-and-harp-and-halo angel, accustomed to fulfilling divine missions all over interstellar space.

“We are alone, dear,” Ellador explained to me with gentle patience. “We are alone in these great forests; we may go and eat in any little summerhouse—just we two, or have a separate table anywhere—or even have a separate meal in our own rooms.

How could we be aloner?

”

Among your people do you find high and lasting affection appearing in proportion to this indulgence?”

It is a very awkward thing, sometimes, to have a logical mind.

Of course I knew about those monogamous birds and beasts too, that mate for life and show every sign of mutual affection, without ever having stretched the sex relationship beyond its original range. But what of it?

partly a growing sense of common ground between us, a pleasant rested calm feeling, which I had imagined could only be attained in one way; and partly a bewildered resentment because what I found was not what I had looked for.

It was their confounded psychology!

Here they were with this profound highly developed system of education so bred into them that even if they were not teachers by profession they all had a general proficiency in it—it was second nature to them.

It was their confounded psychology! Here they were with this profound highly developed system of education so bred into them that even if they were not teachers by profession they all had a general proficiency in it—it was second nature to them.

And no child, stormily demanding a cookie “between meals,” was ever more subtly diverted into an interest in house-building than was I when I found an apparently imperative demand had disappeared without my noticing it.

And all the time those tender mother eyes, those keen scientific eyes, noting every condition and circumstance, and learning how to “take time by the forelock” and avoid discussion before occasion arose.

Even with my own Ellador, my wife, who had for a time unveiled a woman’s heart and faced the strange new hope and joy of dual parentage, she afterward withdrew again into the same good comrade she had been at first.

They were women, plus, and so much plus that when they did not choose to let the womanness appear, you could not find it anywhere.

I don’t say it was easy for me; it wasn’t. But when I made appeal to her sympathies I came up against another immovable wall.

You would not have a mere submission, would you? That is not the kind of high romantic love you spoke of, surely? It is a pity, of course, that you should have to adjust your highly specialized faculties to our unspecialized ones.”

Confound it! I hadn’t married the nation, and I told her so.

But she only smiled at her own limitations and explained that she had to “think in we’s.”

Only—when I had had her with me in her de-feminine capacity for a sixteen-hour day, I could go to my own room and sleep without dreaming about her.

The witch! If ever anybody worked to woo and win and hold a human soul, she did, great superwoman that she was.

I couldn’t then half comprehend the skill of it, the wonder. But this I soon began to find:

Terry had his own ideas, as I’ve tried to show. I daresay he thought he had a right to do as he did. Perhaps he even convinced himself that it would be better for her. Anyhow, he hid himself in her bedroom one night …

The women of Herland have no fear of men. Why should they have?

They are not timid in any sense. They are not weak; and they all have strong trained athletic bodies. Othello could not have extinguished Alima with a pillow, as if she were a mouse.

The women of Herland have no fear of men. Why should they have? They are not timid in any sense. They are not weak; and they all have strong trained athletic bodies.

Othello could not have extinguished Alima with a pillow, as if she were a mouse.

Terry put in practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman.

and it made no more impression on her than it would to tell a South Sea Islander about the temperature of the Arctic Circle.

She could intellectually see that it was bad to have those things; but she could not feel it.

We had quite easily come to accept the Herland life as normal, because it was normal—none of us make any outcry over mere health and peace and happy industry. And the abnormal, to which we are all so sadly well acclimated, she had never seen.

of men everywhere, doing everything—“the world.”

And when we say “Women,” we think “Female”⁠—the sex.

But to these women, in the unbroken sweep of this two-thousand-year-old feminine civilization, the word “woman” called up all that big background, so far as they had gone in social development; and the word “man” meant to them only “male”—the sex.

“I will put you in prison!” said his master. “My body, you mean,” replied Epictetus calmly. “I will cut your head off,” said his master. “Have I said that my head could not be cut off?” A difficult person, Epictetus.

What is this miracle by which a woman, even in your arms, may withdraw herself, utterly disappear till what you hold is as inaccessible as the face of a cliff?

“Be patient with me, dear,” she urged sweetly. “I know it is hard for you. And I begin to see—a little—how Terry was so driven to crime.”