Eljie Mae Edios Omandam English 147 WFV A.Y.

2018-2019

Student No. 2013-53539 Dr. Maria Lorena “Lorie” Santos

20 May 2019 Final Paper (1774 words)

Two Worlds Apart: Women’s Roles in Herland and

Gilead’s Institutionalized Reproduction of Children

The difficulty in promulgating feminism arises out of its plurality of emphases and

positions, so much so that saying you are a feminist obscures whatever implications this

identification might assert. As Ruth Robbins puts it, there is no one way of ‘doing’ feminism

because the theory itself is not a unified body of beliefs so as to be talking in terms of a single

oeuvre or methodology (49); hence, an understanding of its history (using the metaphorical

waves to represent the different phases of the movement) will prove useful in understanding the

theoretical framework of feminism. At least for the first wave feminists in the United States---

despite their racist tendencies---the object of their collective efforts was clear: political equality

for women translated into the right to vote. Embedded in the women’s suffrage is an outcry for

women to be recognized as individuals who have souls and, therefore, on par with men as human

entities.

For a few decades after the height of its political success (i.e. the 19th amendment in the

US), the first wave’s momentum began to splinter. Another form of the feminist movement

would begin to rise only in 1960s. A seminal proponent credited for the beginning of the second

wave includes Betty Freidan, who in her book The Feminine Mystique identified the “pervasive

problem that had no name”:

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The problem lay buried… For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the

millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by

experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over

women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no

greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. (11)

Socialist feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s works were revisited during this phase for,

although her works were written amidst the first one, much of her propositions are aligned with

the goals of the second wave movement----equality in the workplace and the abolition of a

systemic sexism that exists in the American society. With propositions quite ahead of her time,

Gilman regarded women’s economic freedom as necessary in shaping women’s identities (157).

There is therefore no immediate disparity between how her utopian novel Herland and Margaret

Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale critiques the American society, despite being written in different

feminist political climates. For while Herland proffers complete economic and political

participation of women as a solution to offset Western patriarchal society, the Handmaid’s Tale

suggests that the maintenance of a hierarchical society, denying women civil liberties and

autonomy of their bodies, endangers both their status and purpose.

By brining the three main male characters---Vandyck Jennings, Terry Nicholson, and Jeff

Margrave---to an all-female utopian society called Herland, Gilman simultaneously critiques the

patriarchal contemporary American society and proffers solutions to escape or admonish

patriarchy. I will first discuss here the major contents of this blueprint before examining their

viability and usefulness in preventing (what Atwood cautions) the extreme defects and

consequences of a sustained patriarchy.

The economic structure of Herland resonates with what Gilman sees as instrumental in

shaping women’s identity. Because there are no men in this isolated land, the women are neither
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relegated to the domestic sphere nor are they excluded from the social sphere: they are full

economic and political participants. In other words, these two traditionally separate spheres are

conflated in an imagined world with no inequality and oppression. Terry was quick to point out

the absurdity of this dynamics: “We do not allow our women to work. Women are loved—

idolized—honored—kept in the home to care for the children” (150). This claim, of course,

excludes the working-class women who had to work in and outside their homes.

Their notion of labor also extends to reproduction because, in this feminist utopia, the

common goal of its people is centered on motherhood and collective child rearing. It was the

impetus for all their efforts, towards providing a better quality of life for the generations to come:

… 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. (164)

In subjecting reproduction, not to an individualistic goal, but to an organized system, Charlotte

Perkins Gilman believed that our women could finally enjoy their personal, creative, intellectual,

and economic freedom as the Herlanders did.

Margaret Atwood, incidentally, imagines a totalitarian and theocratic state with a similar

organized system for the production of people. This society is highly reminiscent of Herland in

several ways. First, reproduction is seen as a form of social service, abortion consequently an

abomination (or at least in Herland, unpracticed). There is also an erasure of sexual desires and

pleasures, but this is where the similarities end. While the production of citizens in Herland is

borne in on “motherly” desires to engender a society of free women, the culture of the Republic

of Gilead “operates wholly for the benefit of men” (Kulp 21). It is clear that in order to obliterate

the identities of the women in the novel, the ruling class had to gradually remove their basic civil
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liberties i.e. economic independence, access to information, and autonomy of their bodies. Once

you remove these liberties---and along with it their identities---these women’s purpose were sure

soon reduced as Aunts, Handmaids, Marthas, or Commander’s Wives1, all of which are relegated

for the sake of the other sex.

Herland and Gilead albeit employing a similar institutionalized control of its population

created contradictory results. Which then between these two imagined worlds is nearing to

reality? I posit it is the latter. With the main proposition of Gilman reflected in her socialist

utopia, I share the same opinion: women should be seen as full citizens worthy of the rights to

fully exercise their creativity and intelligence outside the domestic realms. However, I shall

expound here why the changes proffered in Herland, however promising, left me skeptical of its

power to actually effect change. This is because Gilman’s utopia requires a shared cognitive and

cultural model of motherhood (assumed to be inherent to all women):

… Motherhood [is] the highest social service…that is only undertaken once, by the majority of

the population; those that held unfit are not allowed even that; and that to be encourage to bear

more than one child is the very highest reward and honor in the power of the state (147).

This is a rather simplistic solution for surely there is more to this world than the business of

reproduction. Furthermore, this idea of a larger motherhood as the impetus for social change is

questionable given the inevitable conflicts of interests in any given community. The desire for

motherhood is not inherent to all women, and I see no reason that it be imposed. For all of the

shortcomings of Herland, it is still useful in expressing what Robbin calls the position of the

feminist movement: “…the real (by definition) is not ideal, that it should change, and that it

could change” (51).

1 The Aunts are true believers assigned to indoctrinate the handmaids (fertile women) into their new roles,

which is to bear the children for the elite of the regime. Marthas, on the other hand, are domestic servants
of the high-ranking families like the Commanders.
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Consequently, if we treat Atwood’s dystopia as a reactionary tale to the utopian Herland,

it does so by pointing out the conceived dangers of a synergy of politics and reproduction,

especially when the political power is eschewed towards only a few elite. The effect of reading

the Handmaid’s Tale is that of dread and horror; it is unlike any known fear; it is intensified with

an awareness of how much of it is already here. Atwood may not have intended to prognosticate

a Gileadean society in the future, but it nevertheless awakens. For instance, the female body has

long been a subject of political arguments: laws and norms are established to regulate and control

it e.g. abortion laws, infidelity statutes and dress codes or norms. It is already heavily objectified

and soon, Atwood cautioned, it will be fully commodified. While some women from the

“political fringes” are yet to fully enjoy autonomy of one’s body (i.e. freedom to wear clothes

without being objectified or discriminated, freedom to express and experience female pleasure or

desire, freedom to terminate pregnancy regardless of one’s reasons), this is slowly taken away

from women from the inner strata. In this imagined totalitarian world, the fertile female body is

owned by the state, its sole purpose is to conceive, carry, and produce viable babies for the

patriarchal elite. One’s survival (not even worth) is therefore proportional to one’s capacity to

conceive: a female body is simply a tool and a national resource, nothing else. The main

character of the dystopian novel, Offred, reminisce the kind of bodily autonomy she once

enjoyed:

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an

implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or

another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid,

one with me. (73)

Like the way the history of Gilead is slowly revealed to the readers, the contemporary

American society also came to be the Republic of Gilead gradually: “Nothing changes
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instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it”

(56). The process of reaching the ideal---a utopia---is even slower still, requiring stronger

movements and revolutions. It is, however, what we do (or indeed fail to do) in the blank spaces

between now and the future that will decide if that future is either a Herland or a Gilead. Despite

its plurality, this is why feminism exists: to reconcile the fissures between an oppressive world

that exists now and the Ideal. It is important that we know these systemic injustices that continue

to oppress women of all age, backgrounds, and races exist. More importantly, we must choose to

dissent, intervene, and dissent some more.

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Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1986. Print.

Freidan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell, 1974. Print.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1915). Herland [Kindle Edition]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1897). Women and Economics [Kindle Edition]. Retrieved from

Amazon.com

Kulp, Denise. Women’s Books in the Mainstream. Off Our Backs, vol. 16, no. 8, 1986, pp. 20-21.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25795233.

Robbins, Ruth. “Will the Real Feminist Theory Please Stand Up?” Literary Theories: A Reader

and Guide. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: U P, 1999. 49-55. Print.