An omnibus edition.
- Moving the Mountain
- Herland
- With Her in Ourland
Moving the Mountain is the first book in Charlotte Perkins Stetson
Gilman's well known trilogy. The second book in the trilogy is her land
mark classic Herland. Moving Mountain delivers Gilman's program for
reforming society. She concentrates on measures of rationality and
efficiency that could be instituted in her own time, largely with
greater social cooperation - equal education and treatment for girls and boys, day-care centers for working women, and other issues still
relevant a century later. Yet Gilman also allows for technological
progress: electric power is the motive force in industry and urban
society, power generated largely by the tides, wind-mills, water mills,
and solar engines.
Herland is a utopian novel written by feminist
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society
composed entirely of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis. The result is an ideal social order, free of war, conflict and domination. The
story is told from the perspective of Van Jennings, a student of
sociology who, along with two friends, Terry O. Nicholson and Jeff
Margrave, forms an expedition party to explore an area of unchartered
land where it is rumored lives a society consisting entirely of women.
The three friends do not really believe the rumors as they are unable to conceive of how human reproduction could occur without males. The men
speculate about what a society of women would be like, each guessing
differently based on the stereotype of women which he holds most dear.
With Her in Ourland is the third book in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
utopian trilogy which begins where Moving the Mountain and Herland left
off. Gilman masterfully compares our real modern male dominated world
with an imaginary perfect society comprised of only woman. Gilman was a
well known and deeply respected sociologist and this trilogy holds an
important place in feminist fiction.
