Herland

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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1. They were not young. They were not old. They were not, in the girl sense, beautiful. They were not in the least ferocious. . . . I had the funniest feeling . . . of being hopelessly in the wrong that I had so often felt in early youth when my short legs’ utmost effort failed to overcome the fact that I was late to school.


2. [Terry] squared his broad shoulders and lifted his chest. “We do not allow our women to work. Women are loved—idolized—honored—kept in the home to care for the children.”
   “What is ‘the home’?” asked Somel a little wistfully.
   But Zava begged: “Tell me first, do no women work, really?”
   “Why, yes,” Terry admitted. “Some have to, of the poorer sort.”
   “About how many—in your country?”
   “About seven or eight million,” said Jeff, as mischievous as ever.


3. 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.


4. I found that much, very much, of what I had honestly supposed to be a physiological necessity was a psychological necessity—or so believed. I found, after my ideas of what was essential had changed, that my feelings changed also.


5. 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. . . . And when we say women, we thinkfemale—the sex.
   But to these women . . . 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.


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