Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (bts book recommendations .txt) 📕

Then that deep ancient chill of male jealousy of even his own progeny touched my heart.

“I’d rather have you, Ellador, than all the children in the world. I’d rather have you with me⁠—on your own terms⁠—than not to have you.”

This was a very stupid saying. Of course I would! For if she wasn’t there I should want all of her and have none of her. But if she went along as a sort of sublimated sister⁠—only much closer and warmer than that, really⁠—why I should have all of her but that one thing. 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; 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, where they perform that mixture of duties so ably described by Mrs. Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon, in which the services of “a mistress” are carefully specified. She is a very clear writer, Mrs. J. D. D. Bacon, and understands her subject⁠—from her own point of view. But⁠—that combination of industries, while convenient, and in a way economical, does not arouse the kind of emotion commanded by the women of Herland. These were women one had to love “up,” very high up, instead of down. They were not pets. They were not servants. They were not timid, inexperienced, weak.

After I got over the jar to my pride (which Jeff, I truly think, never felt⁠—he was a born worshipper, and which Terry never got over⁠—he was quite clear in his ideas of “the position of women”), I found that loving “up” was a very good sensation after all. 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. It was like⁠—coming home to mother. I don’t mean the underflannels-and-doughnuts mother, the fussy person that waits on you and spoils you and doesn’t really know you. I mean the feeling that a very little child would have, who had been lost⁠—for ever so long. It was a sense of getting home; of being clean and rested; of safety and yet freedom; of love that was always there, warm like sunshine in May, not hot like a stove or a featherbed⁠—a love that didn’t irritate and didn’t smother.

I looked at Ellador as if I hadn’t seen her before. “If you won’t go,” I said, “I’ll get Terry to the coast and come back alone. You can let me down a rope. And if you will go⁠—why you blessed wonder-woman⁠—I would rather live with you all my life⁠—like this⁠—than to have any other woman I ever saw, or any number of them, to do as I like with. Will you come?”

She was keen for coming. So the plans went on. She’d have liked to wait for that Marvel of Celis’s, but Terry had no such desire. He was crazy to be out of it all. It made him sick, he said, sick; this everlasting mother-mother-mothering. I don’t think Terry had what the phrenologists call “the lump of philoprogenitiveness” at all well developed.

“Morbid one-sided cripples,” he called them, even when from his window he could see their splendid vigor and beauty; even while Moadine, as patient and friendly as if she had never helped Alima to hold and bind him, sat there in the room, the picture of wisdom and serene strength. “Sexless, epicene, undeveloped neuters!” he went on bitterly. He sounded like Sir Almroth Wright.

Well⁠—it was hard. He was madly in love with Alima, really; more so than he had ever been before, and their tempestuous courtship, quarrels, and reconciliations had fanned the flame. And then when he sought by that supreme conquest which seems 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.

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. There was that adventure of “false Sextus,” for instance, who “found Lucrese combing the fleece, under the midnight lamp.” He threatened, as I remember, that if she did not submit he would slay her, slay a slave and place him beside her and say he found him there. A poor device, it always seemed to me. If Mr. Lucretius had asked him how he came to be in his wife’s bedroom overlooking her morals, what could he have said? But the point is Lucrese submitted, and Alima didn’t.

“She kicked me,” confided the embittered prisoner⁠—he had to talk to someone. “I was doubled up with the pain, of course, and she jumped on me and yelled for this old harpy [Moadine couldn’t hear him] and they had me trussed up in no time.