Herland Charlotte Perkins Gilman (ebook and pdf reader TXT) đ
- Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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âWhat makes us all feel foolish,â I told the girls, âis that here we have nothing to give youâ âexcept, of course, our names.â
âDo your women have no names before they are married?â Celis suddenly demanded.
âWhy, yes,â Jeff explained. âThey have their maiden namesâ âtheir fatherâs names, that is.â
âAnd what becomes of them?â asked Alima.
âThey change them for their husbandsâ, my dear,â Terry answered her.
âChange them? Do the husbands then take the wivesâ âmaiden namesâ?â
âOh, no,â he laughed. âThe man keeps his own and gives it to her, too.â
âThen she just loses hers and takes a new oneâ âhow unpleasant! We wonât do that!â Alima said decidedly.
Terry was good-humored about it. âI donât care what you do or donât do so long as we have that wedding pretty soon,â he said, reaching a strong brown hand after Alimaâs, quite as brown and nearly as strong.
âAs to giving us thingsâ âof course we can see that youâd like to, but we are glad you canât,â Celis continued. âYou see, we love you just for yourselvesâ âwe wouldnât want you toâ âto pay anything. Isnât it enough to know that you are loved personallyâ âand just as men?â
Enough or not, that was the way we were married. We had a great triple wedding in the biggest temple of all, and it looked as if most of the nation was present. It was very solemn and very beautiful. Someone had written a new song for the occasion, nobly beautiful, about the New Hope for their peopleâ âthe New Tie with other landsâ âBrotherhood as well as Sisterhood, and, with evident awe, Fatherhood.
Terry was always restive under their talk of fatherhood. âAnybodyâd think we were High Priests ofâ âof Philoprogenitiveness!â he protested. âThese women think of nothing but children, seems to me! Weâll teach âem!â
He was so certain of what he was going to teach, and Alima so uncertain in her moods of reception, that Jeff and I feared the worst. We tried to caution himâ âmuch good that did. The big handsome fellow drew himself up to his full height, lifted that great chest of his, and laughed.
âThere are three separate marriages,â he said. âI wonât interfere with yoursâ ânor you with mine.â
So the great day came, and the countless crowds of women, and we three bridegrooms without any supporting âbest men,â or any other men to back us up, felt strangely small as we came forward.
Somel and Zava and Moadine were on hand; we were thankful to have them, tooâ âthey seemed almost like relatives.
There was a splendid procession, wreathing dances, the new anthem I spoke of, and the whole great place pulsed with feelingâ âthe deep awe, the sweet hope, the wondering expectation of a new miracle.
âThere has been nothing like this in the country since our Motherhood began!â Somel said softly to me, while we watched the symbolic marches. âYou see, it is the dawn of a new era. You donât know how much you mean to us. It is not only Fatherhoodâ âthat marvelous dual parentage to which we are strangersâ âthe miracle of union in life-givingâ âbut it is Brotherhood. You are the rest of the world. You join us to our kindâ âto all the strange lands and peoples we have never seen. We hope to know themâ âto love and help themâ âand to learn of them. Ah! You cannot know!â
Thousands of voices rose in the soaring climax of that great âHymn of the Coming Life.â By the great Altar of Motherhood, with its crown of fruit and flowers, stood a new one, crowned as well. Before the Great Over Mother of the Land and her ring of High Temple Counsellors, before that vast multitude of calm-faced mothers and holy-eyed maidens, came forward our own three chosen ones, and we, three men alone in all that land, joined hands with them and made our marriage vows.
XI Our DifficultiesWe say, âMarriage is a lotteryâ; also âMarriages are made in Heavenââ âbut this is not so widely accepted as the other.
We have a well-founded theory that it is best to marry âin oneâs class,â and certain well-grounded suspicions of international marriages, which seem to persist in the interests of social progress, rather than in those of the contracting parties.
But no combination of alien races, of color, of caste, or creed, was ever so basically difficult to establish as that between us, three modern American men, and these three women of Herland.
It is all very well to say that we should have been frank about it beforehand. We had been frank. We had discussedâ âat least Ellador and I hadâ âthe conditions of The Great Adventure, and thought the path was clear before us. But there are some things one takes for granted, supposes are mutually understood, and to which both parties may repeatedly refer without ever meaning the same thing.
The differences in the education of the average man and woman are great enough, but the trouble they make is not mostly for the man; he generally carries out his own views of the case. The woman may have imagined the conditions of married life to be different; but what she imagined, was ignorant of, or might have preferred, did not seriously matter.
I can see clearly and speak calmly about this now, writing after a lapse of years, years full of growth and education, but at the time it was rather hard sledding for all of usâ âespecially for Terry. Poor Terry! You see, in any other imaginable marriage among the peoples of the earth, whether the woman were black, red, yellow, brown, or white; whether she were ignorant or educated, submissive or rebellious, she would have behind her the marriage tradition of our general history. This tradition relates the woman to the man. He goes on with his business, and she adapts herself to him and to it. Even in citizenship, by some strange hocus-pocus, that fact of birth and geography was waved aside, and the woman automatically acquired the nationality of
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