SOURCE: “Lesbians and Virgins: The New Motherhood in Herland,” in Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, edited by David Seed, Syracuse University Press, 1995, pp. 195-215.

In the following essay, Gough discusses lesbianism as Gilman portrays it in Herland.

We will be the New Mothers of a New World

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In her autobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman relates the significance that the realm of the imagination and fantasy had to her as a child: ‘Of all those childish years the most important step was this. I learned the use of a constructive imagination’.¹ Not only did her ‘brain-building’ provide her with a sense of control which she lacked in her everyday life, closely regulated as it was by her mother, but it afforded an imaginary space for her ‘scheming to improve the world’, reflecting her precocious sense of social responsibility. But Gilman's utopian envisioning, which...