Excerpts from Gilman’s With Her in Ourland (1916), Sequel to Herland (1915)

The following passages are mainly dialogues between Terry, Van, and Ellador.  They have returned to "Ourland" following the advertures of Herland.  Van and Ellador are now happily married.  They travel throughout Europe and then go to America, where Ellador interviews men and women from all classes and segments of the American population.  She is a keen (proto-socialist) observer and carefully documents  her observations.  In the final chapters of the book, she pronounces her judgement on the "American Experiment."  She declares it to be a brilliant experiment that has failed miserably.  See below for some of her reasons.

On Social Darwinism and War:

“We have always had war,” Terry explained. “Ever since the world began—at least as far as history goes, we have had war. It is human nature.”

“Human,” asked Ellador?

“Yes,” he said, “human. Bad as it is, it is evidently human nature to do it. Nations advance, the race is improved by fighting. It is the law of nature.”

…

[Ellador asks if women fight in wars, and Terry says of course not, only men fight wars.]

“Then why do you call it ‘human’ nature?” she persisted. “If it was human, wouldn’t they both do it?”

So he tried to explain that it was human necessity, but was done by men because they could do it—and the women could not.

…

“Do you call bearing children ‘human nature’? she asked him.

“It’s woman nature,” he answered. “It’s her work.”

“The nwhy do you not call fighting ‘man nature’—instead of human?”

Terry’s conclusion of an argument with Ellador was the simple one of going somewhere else.

On Christianity

“. . . as I have read and talked and studied all these weeks, I do not find that Christianity has done one thing to stop war, or that Christian countries fight any less than heathen ones—rather more. Also, they fight among themselves. Christianity has not brought peace on earth—not at all.”

Why Christianity Ruined the Great Experiment, Democracy

“I think Jesus was simply wonderful . . . What a pity it was he did not live longer! . . . He is supposed to have been executed at about the age of thirty-three, was he not? . . . Think of it—hardly a grown man! He should have had thirty or forty more years of teaching. It would all have become clearer, more consistent. He would have worked things out, explained them, made people understand. He would have made clear to them what they were to do. It was an awful loss.”

…

“Tell me how you mean that our religion was against democracy,” I [Van] persisted.

“It was so personal,” she said, “and so unjust. There must have crept into it, in early times, a lot of Buddhist philosophy, either direct or filtered, the ‘acquiring merit’ idea, and asceticism. The worst part of all was the idea of sacrifice—that is so ancient. Of course what Jesus meant was social unity, that your neighbor was yourself—that we were all one humanity—‘many gifts, but the same spirit.’ He must have meant that—for that is So.

“What I mean by ‘your religion’ is the grade of Calvinism which dominated young America, with the still older branches, and the various small newer ones. It was all so personal. My soul—my salvation. My conscience—my sins. And here was the great living working truth of democracy carrying you on in spite of yourself—E Pluribus Unum.

“Your economic philosophy was dead against it too—that foolish laissez-faire idea. And your politics, though what was new in it started pretty well, has never been able to make much headway against the highest religious sanction, the increasing economic pressure, and the general drag of custom and tradition—inertia.”

…

“. . . The principles of democracy are wholly right. The law of federation, the method of rotation in office, the stark necessity for general education that the people may understand clearly, the establishment of liberty—that they may act freely—it is splendidly, gloriously right! But why do I say this to an American!”

…

“. . . You started right, for the most part, but those high-minded brave old ancestors of yours did not understand sociology—how should they? It wasn’t even born. They did not know how society worked, or what would hurt it the most. So the preachers went on exhorting the people to save their own souls, or get it done for them by imputed virtues of someone else—and no one understood the needs of the country.

“Why, Van! Vandyke Jennings! As I understand more and more how noble and courageous and high-minded was this Splendid Child, and then see it now, bloated and weak, with unnatural growth, preyed on by all manner of parasites inside and out, attacked by diseases of all kinds, sneered at, criticized, condemned by the older nations, and yet bravely stumbling on, making progress in spite of it all—I’m getting to just love America!”

On National Growth/Immigration/Slavery

“You have stuffed yourself with the most ill-assorted and unassimilable mass of human material that ever that ever was held together by artificial means . . . You go to England, and the people are English. Only three percent or aliens even in London, I understand. And in France the people are French—bless them! And in Italy, Italian. But here—it’s no wonder I was discouraged at first It has taken a lot of study and hard thinking . . . Here you were, a little band of really promising people, of different nations, yet of the same stock, and like-minded—that was the main thing. The real union is the union of idea; without that—no nation. You made settlements, you grew strong and bold, you shook off the old government, you set up a new flag, and then--!”

“Then,” said I proudly,” we opened our arms to all the world, if that is what you are finding fault with. We welcomed other people to our big new country—‘the poor and oppressed of all nations!’” I quoted solemnly.

“That’s what I meant by saying you were ignorant of sociology,” was her cheerful reply. “It never occurred to you that the poor and oppressed were not necessarily good stuff for a democracy.”

…

“About the first awful mistake you made was in loading yourself up with all those reluctant Africans,” Ellador went on. “If it wasn’t so horrible, it would be funny, awfully funny. A beautiful healthy young country, saddling itself with an antique sin every other civilized nation had repudiated. And here they are, by millions and millions, flatly denied citizenship, socially excluded, an enormous alien element in your democracy.”

“They are not aliens,” I persisted stoutly. “They are Americans, loyal Americans; they make admirable soldiers—“

“Yes, and servants. You will let them serve you or fight for you—but that’s all, apparently. Nearly a tenth of the population, and not part of the democracy. And they never asked to come!”

“Well,” I said, rather sullenly. “I admit it—everyone does. It was an enormous costly national mistake, and we paid for it heavily. Also it’s there yet, an unsolved question. I admit it all. Go on please. We are dead wrong on the blacks, and pretty hard on the reds; we may be wrong on the yellows. I guess this is a white man’s country, isn’t it? You’re not objecting to the white immigrants, are you?”

“To legitimate immigrants, able and willing to be American citizens, there can be no objection, unless even they come too fast. But to millions of deliberately imported people, not immigrants at all, but victims, poor ignorant people scraped up by paid agents, deceived by lying advertisements, brought over here by greedy American ship owners and employers of labor—there are objections many and strong.”

…

“. . . I tell you, Van, there are millions of people in your country who do not belong to it at all. . . . I do not mean the immigrants solely. There are Bostonians of Beacon Hill who belong in London; there are New Yorkers of five generations who belong in Paris; there are vast multitudes who belong in Berlin, in Dublin, in Jerusalem; and there are plenty of native Sons and Daughters of the Revolution who are aristocrats, plutocrats, anything but democrats.”

“Why of course there are! [said Van] We believe in having all kinds—there’s room for everybody—this is the ‘melting-pot,’ you know.”

“And do you think that you can put a little of everything into a melting-pot and produce good metal? Well fused and flawless? Gold, silver, copper and iron, lead, radium, pipe clay, coal dust, and plain dirt?”

…

“. . . If you want a prescription—far too late—it is this: Democracy is a psychic relation. It requires the intelligent conscious cooperation of a great many persons all ‘equal’ in the characteristics required to play that kind of game. You could have safely welcomed to your great undertaking people of every race and nation who were individually fitted to assist. Not by any means because they were ‘poor and oppressed,’ nor because of that glittering generality that ‘all men are born free and equal,’ but because the human race is in different stages of development, and only some races—or some individuals in a given race—have reached the democratic stage.”

…

“. . . Legitimate immigration is like the coming of children to you,--new blood for the nation, citizens made, not born. And they should be met like children, with loving welcome, with adequate preparation, with the fullest and wisest education for their new place. Where you have that crowded little filter on Ellis Island, you ought to have Immigration Bureaus on either coast, at ports so specified, with a great additional department to Americanize the newcomers, to teach them the language, spirit, traditions and customs of the country. Talk about offering hospitality to all the world! What kind of hospitality is it to let your guests crowd and pack into the front hall, and to offer them neither bed, bread nor association? That’s what I mean by saying that you are not conscious. You haven’t taken your immigration seriously enough. The consequence is that you are only partially America, an America clogged and confused, weakened and mismanaged, for lack of political compatibility.”

“Is this all” I [Van] asked . . .

“Oh, dear, no! . . . That’s only a beginning of my diagnosis. The patient’s worst disease was the disgraceful out-of-date attack of slavery, only escaped by a surgical operation [i.e., the Civil War], painful, costly, and not by any means wholly successful. The second is the chronic distension from absorbing too much and too varied material, just pumping it in at a wild speed. The third is the most conspicuously foolish of all—to a Herlander.”

“Oh—leaving the women out?”

“Yes, It’s so—so—well, I can’t express to you how ridiculous it looks.”

“We’re getting over it,” I urged. “Eleven states now, you know—it’s getting on.”

…

“A democracy, a real one, means the people socially conscious and doing it themselves—doing it themselves! Not just electing a Ruler and subordinates and submitting to them—transferring the divine right of kings to the divine right of alderman or senators. A democracy is a game everybody has to play—has to—else it is not a democracy. And here you people deliberately left out half!”

“But they never had been ‘in’; you know, in the previous governments.”

“Now, Van—that’s really unworthy of you. As subjects they were the same as men, and as queens they were the same as kings. But you began a new game—the you said must be ‘by the people’—and so on, and left out half.”

“It was—funny,” I admitted, “and unfortunate. But we’re improving. Do go on.”

“That’s three counts, I believe,” she agreed. “Next lamentable mistake,--failure to see that democracy must be economic.”

“Meaning socialism?”

“No, not exactly. Meaning what Socialism means, or ought to mean. . . .”

Democracy, the Family, and Authority

“First you left out half the people—an awful mistake. You only gradually took in the other half. You saw dimly the need of education, but you didn’t know what education was—‘reading, writing, and arithmetic,’ are needed, even in monarchies. You needed special education in the new social process

“Democracy calls for understanding, recognition, and universal practice of social laws,--laws which are ‘natural,’ like those of physics and chemistry; but your religion—and your education, too—taught Authority—not real law. . . . Reverence for and submission to authority are right in monarchies—wrong in democracies. When Demos is king he must learn to act for himself, not to do as he is told.

“And back of your Christian religion is the Hebrew; back of that—The Family. It all comes down to that absurd root error of the proprietary family. . . .

…

“That old Boss Father is behind God,” she went on calmly. The personal concept of God as a father, with special children, his benign patronage, his quick rage, long anger, and eternal vengeance—“ she shivered, it is an ugly picture.

“The things men have thought about God . . . are ghastly proof of the way they have previously behaved. As they have improved, their ideas of God have improved slowly.

“When Kings were established, they crystallized the whole thing, in plain sight, and you had Kings a very long time, you see—have them yet. Kings and Fathers, Bosses, Rulers, Masters, Overlords—it is all such a poor preparation for democracy. Fathers and Kings and the Hebrew Deity are behind you and above you. Democracy is before you, around you; it is a thing to do. * * *

…

“. . . The family relation is the oldest—the democratic relation is the newest. The family relation demands close, interconnected love, authority and service. The democratic relation demands universal justice and good will, the capacity for the widest coordinate action in the common interest, together with a high individual responsibility. People have to be educated fro this—it is not easy. Your homes require the heaviest drain on personal energy, on personal loyalty, and leave small percentage either of feeling or action for the State.”

“You don’t expect everyone to be a statesman, do you?”

“ Why not? Everyone must be—in a democracy.”

…

“. . . Here you are, a democracy—free—the power in the hands of the people. You let that group of conservatives saddle you with a constitution which has so interfered with free action that you’ve forgotten you had it. In this ridiculous helplessness—like poor Gulliver—bound by the Lilliputians—you have sat open-eyed, not moving a finger, and allowed individuals—mere private persons—to help themselves to the biggest, richest, best things in the country. You know what is thought of a housekeeper who lets dishonest servants run the house with waste and robbery, or of a King who is openly preyed upon by extortionate parasites—what can we think of Democracy, a huge, strong, young Democracy, allowing itself to become infested with such parasites as these? Talk of blood-suckers! You have your oil-suckers and coal-suckers, water-suckers and wood-suckers, railroad-suckers and farm-suckers—this splendid young country is crawling with them—and has not the intelligence, the energy, to shake them off.”

…

“. . . All these changes which are so glaringly necessary and so patently easy to make, require this one ability—to think in terms of the community * * * you only think in terms of the family . . . You think Home, you talk Home, you work Home, where you should from earliest childhood be seeing life in terms of the community. * * * You could not get much fleet action from a flotilla of canoes—with every man’s first duty to paddle his own, could you * * *”

“What do you want done?” I asked, after awhile.

“Definite training in democratic thought, feeling and action, from infancy. An economic administration of common resources under which the home would cease to be a burden and become an unconscious source of happiness and comfort. And, of course, the socialization of home industry.”

Democracy and Enforced Belief

“Here is the young new-made country, struggling out of the old ones to escape their worst diseases, breaking loose from monarchy, from aristocracy, and feudalism with its hereditary grip on land and money, on body and soul, and most of all, from that mind-crushing process of Enforced Belief which had kept the whole world back so long.

“Note—[she interpolated] . . . It is easy to see that as man progresses in social relation he needs more and more a free strong agile mind, with sympathetic perception and understanding and the full power of self-chosen action. The Enforced Belief in any religion claiming to be Final Truth cripples the mind along precisely those lines, tending to promote a foolish sense of superiority to other believers or disbelievers; running to extremes of persecution; preventing sympathy, perception, and understanding, and reducing action to mere obedience.

“There,” she said cheerfully. “If America had done nothing but that—establish the freedom of thought and belief—she would have done world-service of the highest order.”

“The Greeks allowed it, didn’t they? And the Romans?” I offered.

“If they did it was ‘a lost art’ afterward,” she replied. “Anyhow you did it later, and you have gone on doing it—splendidly.

“Then, in establishing the beginning of a democracy you performed another great service. This has not progressed as successfully, first because of its only partial application, second because you did not know it needed to be earnestly studied and taught—you thought you had it once and for all by letting men vote, and third because it has been preyed upon by both parasites and diseases. In the matter of religion you threw off an evil restriction and let the mind grow free—a natural process. In the matter of government you established a social process, one requiring the utmost knowledge and skill. So it is no wonder the result has been so poor.

“Prescription as to government:

“A. Enfranchisement of all adult citizens. You have started on this.

“B. Special training—and practice—in the simpler methods and principles of democratic government as far as known, for all children, with higher courses and facilities for experiment and research for special students. You are beginning to do this already.

“C. Careful analysis and reports on the diseases of democracy, with applied remedies, and as careful study of the parasites affecting it—with sharp and thorough treatment. Even this you are beginning.”

…

“You need to transfer to your democracy the devotion you used to have for your kings . . . To kill a common man was murder—to kill a king was regicide. You have got to see that for one man to rob another man is bad enough; for a man to rob the public is worse; but to rob the public through the government is a kind of high treason which—if you still punished by torture—would be deserving of the most excruciating kind.

On the “Problem of the Jews”

“ . . . why don’t people like Jews?”

“ . . . the very general dislike of this people is not due to the religious difference between them and Christians; it was quite as general and strong, apparently, in very ancient times.”

“Do you think it is a race feeling, then, a ‘insuperable, ineradicable,’ etc., antipathy?”

“No . . . there are other Semitic and allied races to whom there is no general objection. . . . I have several explanations to suggest, of varying weight. Here’s one of them. The Jews are the only surviving modern people that have ever tried to preserve the extremely primitive custom of endogenous marriage. Everywhere else, the exogenous habit proved itself best and was generally accepted. This people is the only one which has always assumed itself to be superior to every other people and tried to prevent intermarriage with them.”

“That’s twice you’ve said ‘tried,’” I put in. “Do you mean that they have not succeeded?”

“Of course they haven’t,” she replied, cheerfully. “When people endeavor to live in defiance of natural law, they are not as a rule very successful.”

. . .

“Well, my dear, if it is not religion, nor yet race, what is it?”

“I have two other suggestions, one sociologic, one psychic. The first is this: In the successive steps of social evolution, the Jewish people seem not to have passed the tribal stage. They never made a real nation. Apparently they can’t. They live in other nations perforce.”

“Why perforce?” I interrupted.

“Well, if they don’t die, they have to live somewhere, Van. And unless they go and set up a new nation in a previously uninhabited country, or on the graves of the previous inhabitants, they have to live in other nations, don’t they?”

“But they were a nation once,” I urged.

“In a way, yes. They had a piece of land to live on and they lived on it, as tribes, not as one people. According to their own account, ten out of twelve of these tribes got lost, somehow, and the others didn’t seem to mind. No—they could not maintain the stage of social organization rightly called a nation. Their continuing entity is that of a race, as we see in far lesser instance in gypsies. And the more definitely organized peoples have, not a racial, but a sociological aversion to this alien form of life, which is in them, but not of them.”

“But. Ellador, do not the modern Jews make good citizens in whatever country they are in?”

“They do, in large measure, wherever they are allowed,” she agreed; “and both this difference and the old marriage difference would long ago have been outgrown but for the last one—the psychic one.”

…

“. . . as I see it, people are moving on to a wide and full mutual understanding, with peace, of course, free trade and social intercourse and intermarriage, until everyone is what you call civilized. Against this process stood first total ignorance and separation. Then opposing interests. Then opposing ideas. Today it is ideas that do the most damage. Look at poor Europe. Every interest calls them together but their different mental content holds them apart. Their egregiously false histories, their patriomanias, their long-nursed hatreds and vengeance—oh it is pathetic. . . . what the Jews did was to make their patriomania into a religion. . . . They thought they were ‘the chosen people’—of God.”

…

[Of religion in general] “. . . Naturally, each set of believers holds its own to be the All True, and as naturally that is impossible. But there is enough truth and enough good will in your religions if you would only use them, instead of just believing them.”

“And do you not think, especially considering the time of its development, that the Jewish concept of one God, the Jewish ethical ideal, was a long step upward?” [said Van]

“It was a step, certainly, but, Van, they did not think their God was the only one. He was just Theirs. A private tribal God, openly described as being jealous of the others. And as to their ethics and the behavior of the people—you have only to read their own books to see how bad it was. Van, no religion can be truly good where the initial doctrines are false, or even partly false. That utterly derogatory concept of a God who could curse all humanity because of one man’s doing what he knew he would, a God so petty as to pick out one small people for no better reason than that they gave him some recognition, and to set his face against all the rest of his equally descended ‘children’—can’t you see how unethical, how morally degrading, such a religion must be?”

“It was surely better than others at the time,” I insisted.

“That may be, but the others of that period have mercifully perished. They weren’t so literary. Don’t you see, by means of their tremendous art these people have immortalized their race egotism and their whole record of religious aspirations, mistakes and failures, in literature. That is what has given them their lasting place in the world. But the effect of this primitive religion, immortalized by art, and thrust upon the world so long, has been far from good. It has well-nigh killed Christianity, from its cradle. It has been the foundation of most of those hideous old wars and persecutions. With quotations from that Hebrew ‘voice of God’ the most awful deeds have been committed and sanctioned. I consider it in many ways a most evil religion.”

“But we have, as you say, accepted it; so it does not account for the general dislike for which you were offering explanations.”

“The last explanation was the psychic one,” she went on. “What impresses me here is this: The psychic attitude of this people presents to all the other inhabitants of the world a spirit of concentrated pride. It rests first on the tribal animus, with that old endogenous marriage custom; and then on this tremendous literary-religious structure. One might imagine generations of Egyptians making their chief education a study of the pyramids, sphinxes and so on, or generations of Greeks bringing up their children in the ceaseless contemplation of the Acropolis, or the works of their dramatists; but with the Jews, as a matter of fact, we do see, century after century of education in their ancient language, in their ancient books, and everlasting study and discussion of what remote dead men have written. This has given a peculiar intensity to the Jewish character—a sort of psychic inbreeding; they have a condensed spirit, more and more so as time passes, and it becomes increasingly inimical to the diffused spirit of modern races. Look at the pale recent imitation of such a spirit given in Germany. They have tried in a generation or two to build up and force upon their people an intense national spirit, with, of course, the indwelling egotism essential to such an undertaking. Now, suppose all German national glory rested on a few sacred books; their own early writings imposed upon the modern world; and suppose that German spirit, even now so offensive to other nations, had been concentrated and transmitted for thousands of years. Do you think people would like them?”

. . .

“It looks to me as though your answer to the Jewish question was—leave off being Jews. Is that it?”

“In a measure it is,” she said slowly. “They are world-wide people and can enrich the world with their splendid traits. They will keep, of course, their race qualities, their special talents and virtues, by a chosen, not an enforced selection. Some of the noblest people are Jews, some of the nicest. They can’t be denied. But this long-nursed bunch of ancient mistakes—it is high time they dropped it. What is the use of artificially maintaining characteristics which the whole world dislikes, and then complaining of race prejudice?

Van’s Complete Conversion

“It’s wonderful how clearly you see it,” she said.

“Pretty plain to see,” I went on. “We men, having all human power in our hands, have used it to warp and check the growth of women. We, by choice and selection, by law and religion, by enforced ignorance, by heavy over-cultivation of sex, have made the kind of woman we so made by nature, that that is what it was to be a woman. Then we heaped our scornful abuse upon her, ages and ages of it, the majority of men in all nations still looking down on women. And then, as if that was not enough . . . we, in our superior freedom, in our monopoly of education, with the laws in our hands, both to make and execute, with every conceivable advantage—we have blamed women for the sins of the world!”

. . .

“Don’t be so hard on Mr. Man” [gag, mine] . . . ”What puzzles me most is not at all that background of explanation, but what ails women now. Here, even here in America, now. They have had some education for several generations, numbers of them have time to think, some few have money—I cannot be reconciled to the women, Van!”

. . .

“Put yourself in my place for a moment, Van. Suppose in Herland we had a lot of—subject men. Blame us all you want to for doing it, but look at the men. Little creatures, undersized and generally feeble. Cowardly and not ashamed of it. Kept for sex purposes only or as servants; or both, usually both. I confess I’m asking something difficult of your imagination, but try to think of Herland women, each with a soft man she kept to cook for her, to wait on her and to ‘love’ when she pleased. Ignorant men mostly. Poor men, almost all, having to ask their owners for money and tell what they wanted it for. Some of them utterly degraded creatures, kept in houses for common use—as women are kept here. Some of them quite gay and happy—pet men, with pet names and presents showered upon them. Most of them contented, piously accepting kitchen work as their duty, living by the religion and laws and customs the women made. Some of them left out and made fun of for being left—not owned at all—and envying those who were! Allow for a surprising percentage of mutual love and happiness, even under these conditions; but also for ghastly depths of misery and a general low level of mere submission to the inevitable. Then in this state of degradation fancy these men for the most part quite content to make monkeys of themselves by wearing the most ridiculous clothes. Fancy them, men, with men’s bodies, though enfeebled, wearing open-work lace underclothing, with little ribbons all strung through it; wearing dresses never twice alike and almost always foolish; wearing hats—“ she fixed me with a steady eye in which a growing laughter twinkled—“wearing such hats as your women wear!”

At this I threw up my hands. “I can’t!” I said