The Sanctity of Motherhood
The women of Herland have a nearly religious attitude toward
motherhood. The rationality and the constant drive for self-improvement that
mark Herland’s culture are meant to be in service to the overarching ideal
of motherhood. The miraculous ability of the women of Herland to conceive
children on their own leads them to see motherhood as the central aspect of
their beings—their greatest duty and their greatest honor. They think of God
as a sacred mother, a personification of the love that pervades the whole
universe. One of the sharpest contrasts Gilman draws is between the
judgmental, patriarchal male God of Western monotheism and the nurturing,
mothering, female spirit of Herland’s religion.
In addition to being a religious imperative, motherhood in Herland is
the dominant principle of social organization. Each woman in Herland is
allowed, with rare exception, to give birth only once, and she does not
raise her child herself. Instead, children are raised by specialists, as
their education and nurturing are simply too important to society as a whole
to be left in private hands. Each child has a whole country of mothers, and
each woman has millions of objects for her boundless love. In a society that
truly values mothers and children, Gilman suggests, children are not
possessions, and motherhood is not merely incidental to a woman’s sexual
being. One of the major problems for Van and Ellador’s marriage is Ellador’s
inability to grasp the idea that sex has a romantic, pleasurable aspect as
well as a procreative function. Any social arrangement in which children are
not the highest priority seems immoral to the women of Herland, and this
perspective that makes the men unwilling to admit how often children are
neglected in the “civilized” world. The women are horrified when Van
mentions abortion. For Gilman, Somel’s extreme, disbelieving reaction to the
reality of abortion is one more piece of evidence that our society, not
Herland’s, is the truly strange one.
