Socialism and the Suffragette. Miss E. Barry, B.A. and the Socialist Party. (1912)

From the February 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

To the Editor of the Socialist Standard.

The Poor Male

Sir,

A naturalist who, in noting a change of habit or variation in conduct of a creature under his notice, and about which he had recently written a book, should fly into Poor a rage, abuse the animal, and endeavour, lest the value of bis book be destroyed, to force it back into its old customs, would be regarded with justice as a traitor to science. Yet this is precisely what the male politician does with regard to the new developments among women. Angry that she no longer fits into the little corner be has prepared for her in the social scheme he has built up, entirely without her co-operation, he finds relief in abusing her, and in shouting her down.

Moreover, all politicians, of whatever party colour, use the same methods of vituperation. A touch of originality would at least enliven their recriminations, but with dull, age old, prejudiced invective the bitter war goes on. Who shows the greatest “sex-bias,” to quote F.C.W., in the strife?

We picked up the Socialist Standard and read about the Suffragette. As well might we have picked up the “Daily Mail” or the “Morning Leader” ; for all three on this question speak the same language, breathe the same ignorance, the same sentimental, masculine futilities, the same contemptuous comment on what they fail to understand. We felt after we had begun to read the description of the Suffrage movement as “a pitiful caricature of the male struggle for the franchise,” a trading on "sex-privilege," and after making the allusion to the “cheap glory ” and to that “starvation which has all the charms of novelty” (!), that we should soon chance across the words “morbid," “hysterical,” and “illogical.” and there they were, our dear old friends, without which we should hardly know that a man was describing the sex of the mother who bore him.

Could it have been?
We found, moreover, what we do not often see stated in black and white and with such simple confidence, that “the true woman worships the male" (O fatuous complacency!), that “the professional woman is nerve-racked and overwrought by the very intensity of the effort needed to compete with men” (we have intimate knowledge of men and women working side by side in a profession, sharing everything with rigid equality, except the emoluments, and we have failed to notice these shocking consequences. We have seen the men overwrought and nerve racked quite as frequently as the women. (Could it have been it have that this was the result of the “very intensity of effort needed ” to compete with the women ?)

We are told further that Nature has handicapped the woman in her competition with this superior creature by making “extra demands on her vital force,” that, in short, woman’s place is in the home, doing “crochet, embroidery,” and pursuing “old-time occupations,” and that this loudly emphasised to drown inward qualms — she must be content, in short, to sew on his buttons and nurse the baby.

The writer of the article stops just short of the suggestion inevitably made by the mail in the street to the Suffragette marching in her interminable procession, that “All she is fit for is to have ten children.” O reverence and respect for motherhood in which we are told man believes, here you have your exponent in the voice of the people!

The Socialist is as primitive in his prejudices as is any Liberal or Tory. It is not a question of politics but of masculinity.

“Go home,” says the Tory, “mind the baby, and if it is a bit dull, come to our Primrose League meeting and your well known powers of persuasion—though, of course, your logic is inferior to ours your habit of never getting into rages at people’s front doors while canvassing—though, do not mistake, you are hysterical and we are not—your quickness in seizing the gist of the argument—though your intellect is inferior to ours—will be of great help in getting our logical, sane intelligence into Parliament.

Suspicion
The Liberal offers the Liberal and Radical Association as a means of mental refreshment; the Socialist offers the S.P.G.B. meeting and the prospect of a neat future all arranged for women by men as blind to her needs as is F.C.W.

For, as regards Socialism, the last word for women has not been said when the Declaration of Principles of the S P.G.B. has been accepted. There is still left untouched the whole question of sex relationships. Of this not a word is said in the aforesaid declaration. Yet this matter is at least of equal importance to women as that the means of production of wealth should be owned by the people. Nor can the sex question be settled except as a separate issue. The “people” might very well own the means of production and women yet be enslaved. But women cannot trust men who shriek “morbid!” “illogical!” “hysterical! ” at the woman who is endeavouring to expound her point of view, to settle this tremendous question for them. In this matter she is the protagonist, and must continue to elucidate her own needs in spite of the fact that the man is working or speaking so busily about his point of view of her that he cannot hear or read her view of herself.

I base my right to a hearing on several things: first, as a patient student of the history of women ; secondly, as one who has followed the windings of the Suffrage movement for as many years as there has been a militant section; thirdly, as one who is acquainted with dozens of Suffragettes and who has some intimate friends among them ; but, before all, because I am a woman.

That quality is the first and absolute necessity for understanding the present feminist movement and its political indications.

A Drop in the Ocean
The Suffrage movement is merely a drop in the wave of doubt on the part in the of women that men have ever or will ever understand their needs. This wave in sweeping over the whole civilised world of women. From Turkey to America, from Japan to Moscow, women are raising their eyes and seeing how things are with them. They are realising, what F.C.W. does not, that, in contradiction to his statement, men’s and women's interests are not by any means always one. What of the prostitute? What of the woman forced into the artificially unequal competition of the labour market ? in which not “woman’s inferior labour-power” obtains a lower wage— for when she takes his place at the same work ; and produces identical results she is paid less.

No, it is her sex which is penalised. She is paid less because she is a woman. Astounding to relate, F C.W. seems to imply that this is just, since she is supposed to have no encumbrance and the man a family to maintain Has F.C W. ever noticed a case where a widow with six children to support has been paid more than the bachelor on that account ?

But not one trifling thing or another can account for the woman's movement. Woman’s ears are full of the voice of Evolution. She cannot hear the man’s exhortations, futile ragings and vain prohibitions. This is her hour. She has arisen to build a future for herself.

Before this great conception of the Feminist movement such writers as F.C.W. appear as flies on the wheel of Fate. Their efforts to cause it to cease turning are as valueless as a fly's efforts. His destiny is to watch and wait. Woman can no longer be legislated for. The honest woman has ceased her pretence of “worshipping the male.” Man must stand by and see her work out her own salvation, for assuredly she cannot, if she would, accept the ready made systems which he is offering her.

Cleaning the Slate.
Not only is F.C.W. ignorant of the psychology of this greatest issue of the present day, but also of that small, though meaningful part of it, the Suffrage movement. Of its actual history he is staggeringly unaware. Thus he says that “its adherents do not lose a living by their farcical bravado.” I know at least a dozen women who have lost their sole means of livelihood by taking part in the movement. I know intimately two who have had no work except of the most casual kind for a year. I know three women, all self-supporting, who are the complete invalids for life from treatment received at the hands of policemen and male opponents. I know of nurses, teachers, and mill girls forced to quit their work. That F.C.W. does not know these things completely wipes out his indictments that these women make “a hubbub” about their ill treatment and that they get much out of “sex- privilege.” If he wishes I can supply him privately with names and addresses.

I cannot say I know any Suffragette whose “robes” are taken off and put on by servants, but I do know women who prefer to work in the world rather than bring up their own children, and I applaud the woman who realises that her vocation does not lie in the direction of training the young. Since I know that all fathers do not possess the necessary qualities, I see that we can not expect all women, who are just as much individuals, to possess them either.

On the purely political side F.C.W. errs unpardonably. He should at least acquaint himself with facts. What women want, he says, is a property vote. He is wrong They ask for the vote on the same terms as men. If F.C.W. can effect an alteration in the old, bad laws his sex have produced, and find a more democratic basis for the vote, woman would still demand the vote on the same terms as men, and his plaint will perforce be bushed. But women are not going to set about agitating for the reform of man's own suffrage laws until they have got a weapon with which to strike at them. They have done enough spade work for men. Thus if F.C.W. secures manhood suffrage, women will advocate womanhood suffrage, and there is his adult suffrage bill complete.

In these words: “On the same terms as men,” lies woman’s just and natural indignation at the prospect of more men—working or otherwise— having the vote while sex still excludes herself. It is another insult to her as a woman.

F.C.W.’s attitude to the “superficial and amusing" Mrs. Gilman, of a fame which has spread over two continents, I shall not speak of, except to comment upon it as an example of the way in which a man will speak contemptuously of a great woman, qua woman. Hence, knowing that common respect for sincere research and patient intellectual effort is merely decent and good form, I am inclined to echo F.C.W.’s statement that as for man, “there is little that is Godlike in the poor worm.” But otherwise F.C.W.’s article is of errors all compact. A complete answer would take a whole Socialist Standard. As rhetoric we applaud it, but of knowledge it has not a syllable. Yet, however, there is a hint that at the bottom of F.C W.’s heart he has doubts about woman’s happiness in the home, with the crochet and the embroidery, to which he, in common with the Tory and the Liberal, so forcefully consigns her, for he says uneasily that this life may be “deadly monotonous” for her. However, he has no remedy except crochet and a vague recommendation to her to wait for the time when “the dawn” is ushered in and men will “no longer resemble cave animals,” etc. We cannot heed him. We women have to build a future system for ourselves. We are not satisfied with the place assigned to us by the “hysterical! - illogical !—morbid ! ’’-crying Tory, Liberal, and Socialist. We have our livings to get, our own and our children’s future to watch over — a future made to our wishes, suited to our natures, conforming to our intellects, allowing for our individualities and for the strength of nerve and endurance of body which have perpetuated the human race.

Elizabeth Barry, B.A.

Reply:
The above typically illustrates how the Suffragettes always avoid the vital issue.

The article in question described the factors giving rise to the Suffragette movement, and showed it to be capitalistic. It exposed the fraud in the present “votes for women” agitation, and pointed out that the emancipation of working men and women from economic bondage, drudgery, and poverty could only be hindered by giving more votes to property. That is why we oppose the Suffragettes, it said. Only through Socialism could the women (as well as the men) be emancipated ; and to that supreme end all working-class efforts should be directed.

And how does Miss Barry meet this? By making a man of straw. She treats the issue as being one of sex, when it is one of class. She endeavours to identify our case with that of the “Daily Mail” ; and, desiring to saddle me with some particularly foolish view, she says that I “stopped short” of it, and proceeds as though I had uttered it. She quotes the contemptible attitude of an imaginary Tory toward his women folk, and says “So speaks the Socialist and offers the S.P.G.B. meeting''! But that is not all. She says that in my article "we are told further that . . . in short, woman’s place is in the home, doing 'crochet, embroidery,’ and pursuing 'old time occupations,’ and that — this loudly emphasised to drown inward qualms — she must be content to sew on his buttons and nurse the baby.” All of which is nothing less than deliberate falsehood, being contradicted both in the letter and the spirit of the article in question.

Moreover, in practically every case Miss Barry has re-arranged the words of her “quotations’’ to suit her convenience, while retaining the inverted commas—a thing inadmissible in honest journalism. For example, she “quotes” with regard to the Suffragettes, that “its adherents do not lose a living by their farcical bravado.” Here, apart from a re-arrangement of the words, she has, to suit her case and enable her to talk plausibly of secret addresses, carefully omitted a vital phrase from the very midst of the “quotation”. But even were this not so, the matter does not turn on rare cases. One swallow does not make a summer. And no misquotation, no subterfuge, can hide the obvious fact (which Miss Barry dare not openly deny) that the Suffragette movement is not working class. It is a movement of the well to-do and their hangers-on. Its society weddings, receptions, huge collections, and titled adherents, all proclaim its capitalist nature. To the workers this class issue is of supreme importance. It is clearly stamped on the Suffragette demands, for it is futile to deny that they mean “votes for property irrespective of the sex of the owner.”

As already stated (and it has not been denied) the Suffragettes oppose adult suffrage. The vote to women on the same terms as men as at present would exclude the mass of working-class women (or their husbands) because of their lack of property. It would permit the doubling of the voting strength of property by enabling the wealthy to provide their women with the requisite qualifications. It would deal a blow at the whole working class, and set back the hour of emancipation.

It is actually suggested that I consider the lower remuneration of women to be just! This is an absurdity so obvious that only the direst poverty of argument could have induced Miss Barry to utter it. The laws which determine wages are the consequence of the wages system, and can only cease to be true when that system is abolished. We are endeavouring to overthrow that system; my critic is labouring, consciously or unconsciously, to perpetuate it. The misery of the sweated widow, equally with the sale of women’s bodies for a living, demonstrates, above all, the pressing need for Socialism—not for more votes for property !

And how nauseating is the hypocritical sentimentality, characteristic of the Suffragettes of both sexes, which repeatedly apostrophises the “reverence and respect for motherhood,” when they treat motherhood as a curse and applaud those who renounce it!

It is, it appears, sex bias to pillory the absurdities in a book written by a woman. We must surrender our honest judgment to Mrs. Gilman because the Suffragettes consider her great! A book, whether by man or woman, is entitled to our respect as Socialists, not for its meretricious brilliance, but for its truth and usefulness. Mrs. Gilman’s book signally failed at the test. It is our duty to brand errors which are pernicious to our class. These are questions of fact, not of “good form” or “respect.” They can only be met by questions of fact; and Miss Barry has wisely refrained from defending in this way her heroine’s manifest absurdities.

However, it is not necessary to be as verbose as my critic. Her letter is a good example of Suffragette “logic.” It shows yet again that the only weapons against the Socialist case are misrepresentation and evasion. Miss Barry has been unable to dispose of the Socialist contention that the interests of working men and working women are identical, and that Socialism alone can provide the economic foundation for the full and free development of men and women. In face of this fact how childish is her assertion, put forth oracularly on behalf of all women, that they cannot wait for Socialism, they are going to “ build up a future system for themselves” !

Truly the futures of working men and women are inseparable As stated in the Declaration of Principles of this party, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex. And the task before proletarian men and women is the exposure of the capitalist nature of the “votes for property” campaign, and the organisation of their class in the struggle against all sections of the capitalists and their sycophants, irrespective of sex.

F. C. Watts

Editorial: Clones for sale (2003)

Editorial from the February 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In her utopian novel Herland that was first published in 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes a society in which there have been no men for generations. Naturally, she had to assume that reproduction had become possible without the intervention of men.

In a work of literature this is of course quite acceptable but as late as 1994 her book was being criticised, somewhat humourlessly, on this point for not realising “that without the fertilisation by the male, the human race would atrophy and disappear”. As it has turned out that Gilman was not talking biological nonsense, not that in a work of utopian literature she was required to be entirely realistic: an all-woman society lasting generations is theoretically possible (whether it's desirable or likely are of course completely different matters).

In fact even in 1994 biologists knew that it was theoretically possible to reproduce a mammal asexually: by taking a cell from some of part of a body and substituting it for the nucleus of an egg cell. However, this method meant that the new individual would have exactly the same biological make-up as the individual from which the cell was taken, i.e. would be a clone. After a sheep was reproduced asexually in 1997 it was only a matter of time before a human would too. Now, allegedly, this has been done, by a clinic linked to a New Age sect.

Although there can be no objection in principle to the procedure involved – it's not playing god (since there is no god; life, including human life, wasn't created, it just evolved) – the question arises: what's the point? Why do it?

The Raelian sect say they are doing it because they believe that human life was introduced on Earth 25,000 years ago by aliens from outer space and that this is what these aliens want us to have done before they return. Obviously, this is complete nonsense, though not quite so nonsensical as the more widespread belief that some supernatural being created all life on Earth some 6,000 years ago. Others are trying to do it for more down-to-earth reasons: to make money. And that's the point under capitalism. If there's a profit to be made from something some “enterprising” person will come along and try to do it – and there is a market in providing babies for childless couples.

A fair number of commercial “fertility clinics” are already in the market and cloning might be a more acceptable procedure for some couples than those currently marketed. Hence the race to get there first and make above normal profits before others join in. The irony is that the commercially-motivated clinics may have been beaten to it by a group moved by other considerations. In fact, some of the criticism of the Raelians sounds like sour grapes as well as concern that they might have queered the pitch by provoking a backlash that will make not just commercial cloning but already marketed procedures more difficult.

Normally the media – whose aim is to make money from advertising – feign to believe that there might be something in the “paranormal” – UFOs, ghosts and other strange tales – as this has proved a good way to attract an audience and so advertising revenue. But when something serious is at issue they drop this pretence and admit, as their ridiculing of the Raelian beliefs shows, that they no more believe all this guff than do most of the rest of us.

Having said this, genetic engineering does raise problems of choice – ethical problems, as they are called – that would persist even in a socialist society. Which particular genetic disorders should be corrected, and how? How far can choosing the sex of a child go? Since there seems to be no point in it, will human cloning continue?

But the point is that in a socialist society these matters will be able to be debated and decided in a serene atmosphere, free from contamination by commercial considerations. For socialism will be a completely non-market, non-commercial society whose guiding principle will be human welfare and nothing but human welfare, not profit and money-making as is the case today.

Letter: Herland (1994)

Letter in the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

While I would agree wholeheartedly with Kerima Mohideen that the gender roles we are expected to play in property society are injurious to the great majority of men and women, there were several aspects of the article "Herland" (Socialist Standard, March) which I found confusing as a contribution to a class-based analysis of the problems and potential of humanity.

1. Semantically a matriarchy ("form of social organisation in which the mother is the governing head") cannot be egalitarian and I was unable to gather from the context which of these characteristics the writer regarded as more desirable.

2. I was under the impression that, as socialists advocating the abolition of the wages system we were not merely suspicious of "wages for housework" but hostile to such campaigns and had recently debated a group with the precise title.

3. It is, frankly, outrageous to claim that a fable which sidesteps an inconvenient reality by positing a biological impossibility (asexual reproduction) is "firmly rooted in material possibility". Such literary devices are perfectly valid to make a point but the article sheds very little light on what point is being made. It is clearly sterile to argue that if things weren't as they are they'd be different so we must assume some point is being made about female potential: I cannot but suspect that here we have the extremely dubious contention that there is something intrinsically female about the more positive aspects of humanity. In fact in the course of capitalism women have developed their potential for being every bit as destructive as men; real flesh-and-blood women (as opposed to fictional characters) have become active participants in military carnage, fervent spouters of superstitious nonsense from pulpits and avid consumers of pornographic displays - all activities which are not only profoundly negative but were once almost exclusively masculine. In other words, the prospect which is truly "rooted in material possibility" is that of the female of this species becoming as brutalised as the male. To say that "women should always be able to organise as women as well as with men" is to say nothing: unless working class women and men choose to organise together for the overthrow of the system which threatens to dehumanise us both, it seems to me far more likely that the negative trends will continue than that the utopian ideal will be realised.

John Usher, 

London

Reply:

1. Perhaps "matriarchy" ought logically to be the exact opposite of "patriarchy" and therefore incompatible with an egalitarian society, but this is not the way the concept has been used in anthropology. The 19th century pioneers of anthropology believed that the first human societies had been matriarchal in the sense of tracing descent through the female line. Engels took this up in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State arguing that originally society had been communistic as well as matrilinear and that the switch to descent through the male line (which he described as "the world-historic defeat of the female sex") was part of the same process that led to the replacement of egalitarian "primitive communism" by class-divided, state-rule society. In other words, in the socialist tradition matriarchy has been seen as a feature of the egalitarian, communistic conditions in which humans originally lived while patriarchy was the form the family took in the unequal, class societies which have followed. Although later anthropological research did not bear out a one-to-one link between matrilinear and non-property societies as some unequal property societies were found to be matrilinear, it remains a fact that societies where  women were not oppressed have existed.

2. It was to this past existence of societies where women were not oppressed that the article was referring when it said that the Utopias of writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin were "firmly rooted in material possibility". Obviously, this wasn't a reference to the mode of reproduction (without men) in Gilman's Herland but to the fact that societies in which women were the equals of men had existed and so could exist again. Gilman used the literary fiction of a long-established all-woman society, as a society in which literally every task was performed by women, to make the point that women were just as capable as men of being architects, engineers, scientists, decision-makers and the like. Socialists have never doubted this, but many people used to especially in 1915 when Herland was written.

3. The article did not say that Socialists advocate wages for housework, which is really a demand for bigger payments to be made to women by the capitalist state so as to make them less economically dependent on men, less of "a slave of a slave". Maybe it would be in the unlikely event of it being achieved (where's the capitalist state going to find the money to finance it when it's already cutting back on its existing social security payments?), but this would still leave women economically dependent - on the capitalist state instead of on a wage - or salary-earning man. Socialists want an end to the economic and social dependence of women on men, i.e. women's liberation, but the way to achieve this is to establish Socialism, a society of common ownership and production solely for use, not profit, where everyone - men, women, children - would have free access without money to what they require to satisfy their needs.

4. Nor did the article say that women are somehow better than men. What it did was to re-iterate Gilamn's elementary point that women are just as capable of running society as men, concluding with the additional socialist point that women have an important role to play in the movement to establish socialism and that in fact an all-male or male-dominated socialist revolution is a contradiction in terms. The Socialist Party has always said that the majority class must actively participate in their own emancipation, so, since half are women, how could this happen if women did not participate just as actively and as massively as men, with all that this implies about the relationship between men and women?

Editors.

Herland (1994)

From the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have always been fascinated by accounts of societies that are different from ours, whether they be real or imagined. They serve as a reminder that things need not be as they are in our world today and that our lives need not be one endless round of compromise with the grim and confusing reality that surrounds us. Women's Utopias such as Herland and the more recent Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy describe forms of social organization that historical and anthropological research has shown to be possible. They also respresent a development of the ideas of Marx and Engels but as is the case with much that women have to say, and perhaps because it is not expressed in the dry, pseudo-scientific style of political philosophers, these Utopian visions, firmly rooted in material possibility, are vastly underrated. Herland was written in 1915, twenty-five years after William Morris published his News from Nowhere. Both novels describe a world where private property and class privilege no longer exist. News from Nowhere however barely explores the role and status of women in its Utopia and, in failing to do so, throws little insight into a deeply-engrained power relationship of present-day society. As a consequence, it is limited in exploring how people can bring about social change. In that respect, Herland is a less comfortable read than News from Nowhere as it reminds us of how deeply crippled most of us are by social conditioning and how much there is to overcome in order to bring about the necessary fundamental changes in society if we are to survive on this planet. Fortunately, what could be profoundly depressing is leavened by sparkling wit, and the book is a really entertaining read. Personal is Political For the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the personal was also political and her own life and ideas were intimately connected. Like William Morris, she was familiar with the ideas of Marx and Engels and other prevailing political and economic theories of the time. She was involved in the American Socialist Movement and saw herself as a socialist-humanist. She always brought her own experiences to bear on her work and studied ideas in order to understand her own insecure and intensely unhappy early life and first marriage and to gain control of her own destiny. She had little time for the psychological leadership of experts and the detached, academic and so-called scientific approach to understanding human behaviour, in particular that of women. In Herland, she exposes the fallibility of the sociologist who makes assumptions about the society he is about to experience on the basis of observing a single fact. He notices some women climbing trees and deduces thereby that the inhabitants of the society he us about to involve himself in must be arboreal. In fact they are not, and all his scientific insight and his role as commentator on human behaviour is about to be rendered useless as he is gently drawn into ways of living and relating that are completely new to him. The author after coming close to losing her mind, herself rejected the authority of the psychiatrist who attempted to cure her depression by advising her to rest, to live as domestic a life as possible, to limit her intellectual life to two hours a day and to never touch pen, brush or pencil. Instead, she faced the fact that she was not happy in her marriage or in her role as a mother, left home and divorced her husband. He promptly married her best friend and the couple took on the care of Charlotte's child. Charlotte, from a position of great financial insecurity launched herself into a career as a writer. The three adults remained close friends for the rest of their lives but Charlotte was severely censured by the press for divorcing her husband amicably and for no apparent reason, for maintaining a warm relationship with his new wife and for, as the media saw it, abandoning her child. This very honest working out of relationships finds a different interpretation in Herland. The community of Herland is characterized by sisterly solidarity and friendship which is not destroyed even when the men appear. In their world it is also recognized that while every woman may at some point feel the urge to be a mother, not every woman is either interested in or suited to bringing up children and children are better off with those who are. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's experience as a woman under capitalism forced her to recognize that our society is not merely class divided but patriarchal in nature as well. For her, the subordination of women dehumanized half of the human race and retarded all human progress and this has important implications for how we organize for change. In order to make our society truly human, women need to regain power over their minds and bodies and challenge the centuries of dominance that men have become used to. This is the central theme of Herland. Unlike News from Nowhere, Herland is not a static Utopia that we arrive at after a period of social upheaval - it is a society that has spent generations perfecting itself and remains always open to change. It is both a strategy for change and a complete way of life. Amazon Jungle Herland is written in the style of a Boys' Own adventure story. Deep in the Amazon jungle, three amateur explorers, men of course, find their way into a world inhabited only by women. Instead of meeting with exciting adventures in which they can display their superior macho skills - one man even has notions of ending up King of all the women - they are gently disarmed of all their prejudices and pre-conceptions about women and two of them are re-educated into new ways of thinking and relating to women. This is altogether a much more painful and demanding experience. far from behaving like detached and culturally-superior observers of an alien culture as did many of the anthropologists of Charlotte's day, all three of the men become heavily involved in the lives of the Herlanders and learn to adjust to their ways. Herland is a matriarchal society. A matriarchy is not simply a refelction of a patriarchal society which is also hierarchical in nature. It is an egalitarian society, a sisterhood in which women's capacity to bear children is of central importance and held in high regard. The anthropologist Evelyn Reed in her book Woman's Evolution has shown that many of the earliest human societies are likely to have been matriarchal and such societies continue to exist - just about - to this day. There have been no men in Herland for centuries. This has given the women the much-needed personal and social space to recover their automony as women. Every woman needs that space for herself. Women should always be able to organize as women as well as with men. In Aboriginal society, individual members of a group might express their need for personal space by going on a walkabout. Men and women retained control over separate spaces for themselves as two distinct and autonomous groups. They often led much more separate lives than we understand in our society and Aboriginal women tend not to be impressed with women who are dependent on the views and approval of men. Biological Urge The women of Herland reproduce simply by responding to the urge to be a mother. This biological urge is the driving force behind all their creative activity. Indeed in the interests of population control, collectively agreed by the community, the women restrict themselves to one child each and channel their mother urge into other activities. They are not at the mercy of their childbearing capacity although the idea of abortion is abhorrent to them. In many of the matriarchal societies described by Evelyn Reed, it would appear that women had similar control over their fertility. They knew about contraceptive medicines and practised periods of abstention from sexual intercourse. It is possible that they had a better sense of their biological rhythms than we do and knew when they were most likely to be fertile. Travelers noted that women in some Native American communities only had three or four children and they were shocked to hear that women in our society sometimes had ten or more children. All the women of Herland are single mothers - like many lesbian mothers today, they are not dependent on a relationship with a man for their sexual pleasure or in order to become mothers. Unlike for most women in our society there is no tension between their responsibilities as mothers and fulfilling a socially-useful and challenging role in the community. This is because in matriarchal societies, child-rearing is a communal and public activity. No mother is separated from other members of the society with solitary responsibility for her children. The women of Herland have managed to fulfill their need for food, shelter and transport in ways that are technologically developed as well as ecologically-sustainable. As far as food production is concerned, they are gatherers and cultivators. But there are no farms on Herland and virtually no domesticated animals, apart from a few cats left over from a previous era. The idea of eating meat and drinking the milk of animals other than themselves strikes the women of Herland as a rather cruel and abhorrent idea. Instead, they live on the rich variety of fruits and nuts which they have gathered from the forest which surrounds their dwellings. The trees bear the marks of cultivation. Their branches are trained so as to make the fruits easily accessible and species have been bred so as to obtain a high yield. While Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision of food production might seem a little twee by comparison with real-life examples, it is not dissimilar from the way some forest-dwelling peoples use their environment even to this day. In fact, the destruction of the forests by large-scale capitalist development projects such as dams and mines has particular implications for the lives of women among indigenous forest dwelling communities around the world. For the women who used the forest as a source of food, fuel, as a hygienic place to relieve calls of nature and a place of spiritual retreat, it represented social and economic independence. The impact of capitalism on their lives has thrust them into dependence on the wage-slavery of the men in a matter of months in some instances. There are no schools in Herland but learning as an ongoing process is of central importance in the women's lives. They are all open-minded and critically receptive to new ideas and fail to understand how religious beliefs going back thousands of years continue to hold such a powerful grip on the minds of people in our society. They set out to teach the men about Herland by enquiring about the world they have come from. Teaching for them is about sharing ideas and experiences, a much more egalitarian process than we experience in our schools and colleges. They meet the most conservative and sexist views of the men with patience and respect and draw them gently away from their prejudices and preconceptions with questions and information that might open their minds to alternative ways of thinking. Having captured the three explorers, the women of Herland decide that it is in their interests to allow this contact with men to develop. Nevertheless, they continue to retain their material and intellectual independence. Three of the women form intimate relationships with the men. Two of the couples marry but retain independent living quarters. Their relationships, particularly that of Ellador who marries the former sociologist who is perhaps the most receptive to the women's culture without feeling either that he has to challenge it or lose his own cultural and sexual identity in the process, are not dogged by the possessiveness and insecurity that so dogs relationships in our society today. Instead, they have an easy-going friendship based on shared interests, a meeting of minds, mutual trust and pleasure in each other's company. As far as Ellador is concerned, sex does not figure very highly in the relationship. It is an aspect of our culture, which she says she has yet to understand but she treats their different sexual needs with honesty and sensitivity and her partner finds himself being drawn into a calm and and deeply-rewarding understanding such as he has never experienced with a woman before. Terry on the other hand who is the most macho of the three men attempts to impose his desires on his partner during a much more stormy relationship. Unlike in our society where rape within marriage and date rapes are only just beginning to be recognized as such, the whole community of Herland responds to this attempted rape and Terry is asked to leave with no hope of reconciliation with his partner. Even the other two men recognize that they have a responsibility to deal with this man who they liked at the beginning of the book and whose behaviour they tolerated as long long as it did not implicate their own wives, sisters and daughters. Continued Relevance Although it was written nearly eighty years ago, Herland continues to have relevance today. In News from Nowhere there is a chapter on "How the Change Came About". We read of much that is familiar, of workers organizations, of mass demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and much more. In Herland the author reminds us of the central role that women have to play in bringing about a revolution. We should bear in mind that during the period when Charlotte Perkins Gilman and William Morris were writing, women had already made an enormous contribution to the working-class movement. Yet that is barely acknowledged today. In the early days of the trade union movement, their role as workers as dependent on a wage as the men was not recognized by those who advocated the family wage as opposed to equal pay. The enormous amount of unpaid work that women do continues to remain largely unrecognized and the women who do it largely unorganized. Any efforts to organize by such groups of women such as the wages for housework campaign is viewed with suspicion even by many of the male-dominated organizations on the left. The women who so staunchly supported the Miners' strike of 1984 were denied membership of the NUM. These are just a few symptoms of the deep-rooted sexism in our society that continues to exclude women from political action by failing to recognize the particular ways in which capitalism affects their lives. Herland demonstrates how class conscious women in full control of their minds and their bodies can organize themselves in peaceful co-operation and overcome this sexism and how they must play an important role in bringing about and maintaining the revolution. Men, deprived of their patriarchal role, will find for themselves a much more meaningful existence in the process. Kerima Mohideen The article elicited the following response in a later issue of the Socialist Standard.