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.
Toward the end of the novel, in Chapter 12, the men are faced with
expulsion from Herland, thanks to Terry’s attack on Alima. Ellador, eager to
join Van in exile and to see the outside world, imagines that Van must be
homesick. Van tries to explain how different his feelings about men and
women are after a year in Herland, and he realizes that his thinking has
changed in a fundamental way. Now, when he thinks of humanity or “mankind,”
he includes women and womanliness as fully part of the equation, not merely
as a subset of a larger entity. Before his experiences in Herland, Van
unconsciously thought of women as a kind of man—attractive, but weaker and
not representative of the group as a whole. Previously, whenever Van thought
of history and the progress of human achievement, he’d really been thinking
of men and things men had done.
Van can now see that he’d excluded half of humanity from full
membership in the group. The same situation applies in reverse for the women
of Herland. In the absence of men, these women have come to think of men as
a kind of woman, and to assume that the men of the outside world must be as
devoted to reason, cooperation, and children as they are. This assumption,
says Van, is partly why Terry’s attempted rape comes as such a shock to the
women. Terry’s act was a particularly male kind of violence, directed at
another person, not as a person, but as a woman. As they come to understand
the outside world, the women of Herland must expand their definition of
humanity, just as the men have had to. The difference is that the
information they will have to assimilate is not entirely benign.
