Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“ Every woman of them placed motherhood not only higher than other duties, but so far higher that there were no other duties, one might almost say. All their wide mutual love, all the subtle interplay of mutual friendship and service, the urge of progressive thought and invention, the deepest religious emotion, every feeling and every act was related to this great central Power, to the River of Life pouring through them, which made them the bearers of the very Spirit of God. ”

“ 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.
Of course we could TELL them that in our world men did everything; but that did not alter the background of their minds. That man, "the male," did all these things was to them a statement, making no more change in the point of view than was made in ours when we first faced the astounding fact--to us--that in Herland women were "the world." ”

“ And I was beginning to find that Ellador's friendship, Ellador's comradeship, Ellador's sisterly affection, Ellador's perfectly sincere love--none the less deep that she held it back on a definite line of reserve--were enough to live on very happily.
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 ”

“ Also, I had always accepted certain evils as integral parts of our civilization and never dwelt on them at all. Even when I tried to tell her the worst, I never remembered some things--which, when she came to see them, impressed her at once, as they had never impressed me. Now, in my efforts at explanation, I began to see both ways more keenly than I had before; to see the painful defects of my own land, the marvelous gains of this.
In missing men we three visitors had naturally missed the larger part of life, and had unconsciously assumed that they must miss it too. ”

“ With the lightest touch, different women asking different questions at different times, and putting all our answers together like a picture puzzle, they had figured out a sort of skeleton chart as to the prevalence of disease among us. Even more subtly with no show of horror or condemnation, they had gathered something--far from the truth, but something pretty clear--about poverty, vice, and crime. ”

“ Moadine, grave and strong, as sadly patient as a mother with a degenerate child, kept steady watch on him, with enough other women close at hand to prevent an outbreak. He had no weapons, and well knew that all his strength was of small avail against those grim, quiet women. ”

“ We had learned their limited history, with its straight, smooth, upreaching lines, reaching higher and going faster up to the smooth comfort of their present life. We had learned a little of their psychology, a much wider field than the history, but here we could not follow so readily. We were now well used to seeing women not as females but as people; people of all sorts, doing every kind of work.
This outbreak of Terry's, and the strong reaction against it, gave us a new light on their genuine femininity. This was given me with great clearness by both Ellador and Somel. ”

“ I had told her of the later biological theories of sex, and she was deeply convinced of the superior advantages of having two, the superiority of a world with men in it.
"We have done what we could alone; perhaps we have some things better in a quiet way, but you have the whole world--all the people of the different nations--all the long rich history behind you--all the wonderful new knowledge. ”

“ It was the more difficult to explain to her, because we three, in our constant talks and lectures about the rest of the world, had naturally avoided the seamy side; not so much from a desire to deceive, but from wishing to put the best foot foremost for our civilization, in the face of the beauty and comfort of theirs. ”

“ To them the one high purpose of motherhood had been for so long the governing law of life, and the contribution of the father, though known to them, so distinctly another method to the same end, that they could not, with all their effort, get the point of view of the male creature whose desires quite ignore parentage and seek only for what we euphoniously term "the joys of love." ”

“ Come to think of it, I do not recall a similar case in all history or fiction. Women have killed themselves rather than submit to outrage; they have killed the outrager; they have escaped; or they have submitted--sometimes seeming to get on very well with the victor afterward. ”

“ He laughed at their chill horror. "Parcel of old maids!" he called them. "They're all old maids--children or not. They don't know the first thing about Sex."
When Terry said SEX, sex with a very large _S_, he meant the male sex, naturally; its special values, its profound conviction of being "the life force," its cheerful ignoring of the true life process, and its interpretation of the other sex solely from its own point of view.
I had learned to see these things very differently since living with Ellador ”

“ And I begin to see--a little--how Terry was so driven to crime."
"Oh, come, that's a pretty hard word for it. After all, Alima was his wife, you know," I urged, feeling at the moment a sudden burst of sympathy for poor Terry. For a man of his temperament --and habits--it must have been an unbearable situation.
But Ellador, for all her wide intellectual grasp, and the broad sympathy in which their religion trained them, could not make allowance for such--to her--sacrilegious brutality. ”

“ It took me a long time to realize--Terry never did realize--how little it meant to them. When we say MEN, MAN, MANLY, MANHOOD, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and all its activities. To grow up and "be a man," to "act like a man"--the meaning and connotation is wide indeed. ”

“ And then when he sought by that supreme conquest whichseems so natural a thing to that type of man, to force her to love him as her master--to have the sturdy athletic furious woman rise up and master him--she and her friends--it was no wonder he raged. ”

“ If Ellador comes back, and we approve her report, it may be done later--but not yet.
"So we have this to ask of you gentlemen [they knew that word was held a title of honor with us] , that you promise not in any way to betray the location of this country until permission --after Ellador's return."
Jeff was perfectly satisfied. He thought they were quite right. He always did. I never saw an alien become naturalized more quickly than that man in Herland. ”

“ Terry, because he must; I, because two were safer for our flyer, and the long boat trip to the coast; Ellador, because she would not let me go without her.
If Jeff had elected to return, Celis would have gone too--they were the most absorbed of lovers; but Jeff had no desire that way.
"Why should I want to go back to all our noise and dirt, our vice and crime, our disease and degeneracy?" he demanded of me privately. We never spoke like that before the women. "I wouldn't take Celis there for anything on earth!" he protested. "She'd die! ”