Quotes from Herland

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

     Since Gilman's concern is with changing consciousness, she is free to create a material world that encompasses science and technology, on the one hand, and the beauty and simplicity of a pastoral life, on the other, and to avoid the major errors of both.
           - p xxii

     I tell you, women are the natural cooperators, not men!
           - p 67

     Also, they worked out a system of intensive agriculture surpassing anything I ever heard of, with the very forests all reset with fruit or nut-bearing trees.
           - p 68

     When I dug into the records to follow out any line of development, that was the most astonishing thing--the conscious effort to make it better.
           - p 76

     To them the country was a unit--it was theirs. They themselves were a unit, a conscious group; they thought in terms of the community. As such, their time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an individual life. Therefore, they habitually considered and carried out plans for improvement which might cover centuries.
           - p 79

     They had early on decided that trees were the best food plants, requiring far less labor in tilling the soil, and bearing a larger amount of food for the same ground space; also doing much to preserve and enrich the soil.
           - p 79

[note: page numbers from the Pantheon Books 1979]


Notes From Windward - Index - Vol. 71