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excluded from the sources of power, they are in an ideal position to create an alternative social vision. By the early twentieth century, women also had decades of sophisticated collective action and a trained leadership to call upon. Most utopias neglect the central role of education in reconstructing their worlds. In Gilman’s work education—not formal education but the process by which values permeate an entire social fabric—evolves as a natural device in the creation of new people, especially the young.
    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. Her technology does not dominate; it serves human needs. In addition, artificial wants are not created by scientific elites, for there are no elites, scientific or otherwise. The pastoral qualities are not linked to a pre-industrial world; nor is man—in this case, woman—re-created in a state of innocence, because to Gilman innocence is the first chain women must discard if they are to be free. Women’s innocence has served only men’s needs.
    Two thirds of all utopias were written in the nineteenth century, when the world was, indeed, in the process of visible and enormous change. Utopias created in the wake of capitalist growth and disorder were often seen as a call to action, both by their creators and their followers. Not only were readers of Theodor Hertzka’s
Freeland
and Etienne Cabet’s
Voyage to Icaria
inspired to establish Utopian settlements, but Cabet himself traveled to the swamps of Missouri in a vain effort to find Icaria in America. Numbers of other visionaries tried to translate the Utopian ideas of Charles Fourier and Robert Owen into communal realities. When the American dream did not work, there was a desperate effort to find the earthly paradise.
    But the roots of utopia are in the literary, not the political, imagination; and it is a strength of
Herland
, and even of the “realistic”
Moving the Mountain
, that they cannot be seen as blueprints. Still, the “ideal of desirable quality” 6 must be recognizable to the reader. The society to be transformed must first be known. In Gilman’s work it is not the scientist, the warrior, the priest, or the craftsman, but the mother, who is the connecting point from present to future. In her utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman transforms the private world of mother-child, isolated in the individual home, into a community of mothers and children in a socialized world. It is a world in which humane social values have been achieved by women in the interest of us all.
    —A NN J. L ANE
November 1978

1
A Not
Unnatural Enterprise
    This is written from memory, unfortunately. If I could have brought with me the material I so carefully prepared, this would be a very different story. Whole books full of notes, carefully copied records, firsthand descriptions, and the pictures—that’s the worst loss. We had some bird’s-eyes of the cities and parks; a lot of lovely views of streets, of buildings, outside and in, and some of those gorgeous gardens, and, most important of all, of the women themselves.
    Nobody will ever believe how they looked. Descriptions aren’t any good when it comes to women, and I never was good at descriptions anyhow. But it’s got to be done somehow; the rest of the world needs to know about that country.
    I haven’t said where it was for fear some self-appointed missionaries, or traders, or land-greedy expansionists, will take it upon themselves to push in. They will not be wanted, I can tell them that, and will fare worse than we did if they do find it.
    It began this way. There were three of us, classmates and friends—Terry O. Nicholson (we used to call him the Old Nick, with good reason), Jeff Margrave, and I, Vandyck Jennings.
    We had known each other years and years,