I get the creeps in Herland

In this week's online scifi/fantasy class, I read Charlotte Gilman Perkins's "Herland," a First Wave feminist utopian novel that has not aged well now that we're supposedly in the Third Wave of American feminism. "Herland" rejects the physical restrictions of hair and clothing that were forced on women in the 18th and early 20th centuries. It demands that readers accept that women are as intelligent and inventive as men. So far, so good. But "Herland" is a society in which social engineering struck me as oppressive and inhumane in some ways, particularly with its reliance on eugenics. Here's this week's essay:

America enthusiastically embraced the eugenics movement at the time Herland was written (1915), and eugenics is at the heart of the novel's utopian vision.

Some background: Eugenicists sought to improve humankind through selective breeding. In the U.S. national exhibitions encouraged eugenics, and state fairs gave out "fitter families" awards. Philanthropists sponsored eugenics research. But eugenics had a dark side; its proponents feared that undesirables would overbreed and "infect" society with their inferior genes. Some eugenicists advocated involuntary sterilization, abortion, and even euthanasia. 

In Perkins's novel, Herlanders initially embrace eugenics to control overpopulation. Women voluntarily control procreation until it becomes the norm for most women to have only one child. The novel refers to the "unfit" who are not allowed to reproduce. These are women with, among other traits, sexual desires, "atavistic exceptions," whose urges are deemed primitive and dangerous. But the unfit Herlanders are not sterilized; social pressures are strong enough to discourage their procreating. Some women with desirable traits are encouraged to breed more. These women are "Over Mothers" (a term that chillingly anticipates the Nazi "Ubermensch"). Abortion shocks Herlanders but perhaps only because procreation is controlled by strict socialization. Somel, guide to the male visitors in Herland, proudly explains that eugenics has produced "babies ... showing stronger clearer minds, sweeter dispositions, higher capacities." 

Herlanders fear the outside world's "disease, ignorance, and unbridled emotion," its conflict and wars. Herland must not be infected. Terry, Herland's nemesis, plans to reveal its location; the Herlanders calmly determine to anesthetize him (a euphemism for euthanasia?) because it would be "kinder."

Herland is an early feminist utopia. Women are the intellectual and physical equals of men, freed from confining dress and hair. But sexual desire is tamped down through reproductive selection. Breeding women for social conformity leaves them with little self-determination. That the Herlanders are all "Aryans" seems racially chauvinistic. Revolutionary for its time, Herland hardly seems utopian today.