Herland
Glossary
A
- Absence of War, Competition, and Private Property
- A recurring shock to the three men as they learn Herland's history: the country has had no wars, kings, priests, or aristocracy since its founding, and its economy runs on shared, cooperative effort rather than competition. When Terry insists that competition is needed as a "stimulus to industry," the women are honestly puzzled — in their experience, people simply like to work.
- Related: Motherhood, Population Limit, Terry O. Nicholson
- Alima
- The boldest and most physically striking of the three young women from the forest, matched from the start against Terry's forceful courtship. Their relationship is stormy from the beginning, marked by repeated quarrels and reconciliations even as it moves toward marriage.
- Related: Terry O. Nicholson, Ellador, Celis
C
- Cats of Herland
- Herland's one common domestic animal, selectively bred over centuries to suit the women's values: the cats no longer yowl, they leave the country's abundant birds unharmed, and only a small number of "father cats" are kept, living freely and mating just once a year. Van raises the subject to compare it, unfavorably, with how dogs are kept and bred back home.
- Related: Herland, Somel
- Celis
- The youngest and gentlest of the three young women from the forest, paired with Jeff, whose worshipful, old-fashioned devotion suits her temperament well. Of the three, Jeff pursues his courtship with the least friction, treating Celis with a reverence that borders on the religious.
- Related: Jeff Margrave, Ellador, Alima
- Clothing and Hair Customs
- The practical, close-cropped hair and pocket-laden, comfortable clothing the men are issued once they wake as captives, consisting of a light undergarment, a sturdier tunic, and an outer robe as needed. The unfamiliar outfit strikes them at first as unmanly, but all three come to admit it is more comfortable than anything they wore at home.
- Related: Somel, Herland
E
- Education in Herland
- The country's system of raising children without anything the men would recognize as school. Refined over some sixteen hundred years, it teaches babies and young children through carefully designed environments and purpose-built games rather than formal lessons, so that no Herland child grows up feeling that learning is separate from living.
- Related: Specialized Child-Rearing, Ellador
- Ellador
- One of the three young women first glimpsed by the men high in a forest tree, later introduced as a forester with a restless curiosity about the world beyond Herland's mountains. Reasonable and endlessly questioning, she is drawn to Van above the other two men, and their courtship becomes the steadiest and most equal of the three.
- Related: Van Jennings, Alima, Celis
F
- Founding of Herland
- The origin story the women share once the men can follow their language: an ancient war and a catastrophic landslide sealed the country's only mountain pass, trapping its population; the surviving young women overcame the men left to guard them, and years later, in an atmosphere of desperate hope, one woman miraculously bore a child with no father. Her five daughters, and their daughters after them, became the founding line of the entire nation.
- Related: Parthenogenesis, Herland, Over Mother
H
- Herland
- The name Terry coins on impulse as the three men fly over the border of the isolated, all-female country they have chased on rumor for over a year. It replaces his earlier joking suggestion of "Feminisia" from their shipboard debates, and becomes the country's name for the rest of the account.
- Related: Van Jennings, Terry O. Nicholson, Jeff Margrave
- Herland's Forest Agriculture
- The women's centuries-long project of replanting the entire country as a food-bearing forest, choosing trees over field crops because they require less labor, yield more food per acre, and enrich rather than exhaust the soil. One especially admired ornamental tree took nine hundred years of patient selection to be bred into bearing edible seed at all.
- Related: Population Limit, Herland
- Herland's Religion
- Herland's faith, built around a diffuse, motherly "Loving Power" rather than a personal, judging god. It has no hell, no doctrine of inherited sin, and little reverence for the past for its own sake; its closest thing to ritual is the small local temple, staffed by wise counselors, where anyone may bring a private difficulty to be talked through.
- Related: Motherhood, Ellador
J
- Jeff Margrave
- The third of the three explorers, a doctor trained against his own preference for poetry and botany. Where Terry expects conquest, Jeff imagines the country as a gentle land "blossoming with roses and babies," idealizing women with an old-fashioned, chivalrous devotion even before the men have seen a single inhabitant.
- Related: Van Jennings, Terry O. Nicholson, Celis
M
- Moadine
- The tutor assigned to Terry, apparently chosen for her evident physical strength and steadiness. She meets his bluster and flirtation with unfailing, faintly amused patience, a dynamic that quietly signals how little his usual charm accomplishes among the women of Herland.
- Related: Terry O. Nicholson, Somel, Zava
- Motherhood
- The organizing principle of Herland's entire culture — not the private, individual devotion to one's own child that Van's culture understands by the word, but a collective, almost civic devotion extended to every child in the country. Moadine describes it to the men as Herland's realized version of "Human Brotherhood," an ideal she notes their own countries have never actually practiced.
- Related: Over Mother, Population Limit, Herland's Religion
N
- Names in Herland
- Herland's naming custom, which has no surnames or family names at all, since every woman traces her descent back to the same founding mother. A girl sometimes earns a second, descriptive name through notable service, as the country's presiding leader has done twice over, becoming known as O-du-mera, "great and wise thinker."
- Related: Over Mother, Founding of Herland
O
- Over Mother
- The closest thing Herland has to an aristocracy: a woman honored with the rare privilege of bearing more than the single child most women are permitted, in recognition of exceptional service to the country. It functions as a mark of honor rather than a position of power, the only hereditary distinction the nation retains.
- Related: Founding of Herland, Population Limit, Motherhood
P
- Parthenogenesis
- Reproduction from an unfertilized egg — known in some insects, but never before recorded in humans. When the men finally ask outright whether there are any men in the country, Somel answers plainly that there have been none for two thousand years, and Jeff supplies the scientific term for what she is describing.
- Related: Herland, Somel, Founding of Herland
- Population Limit
- Herland's deliberate, centuries-old policy of capping its numbers once the country's land could no longer comfortably support unchecked growth. Rather than compete for scarce resources or expand by force, the women collectively agreed to bear fewer children and devote their combined effort to improving quality of life, generation after generation, instead.
- Related: Over Mother, Motherhood, Herland's Forest Agriculture
S
- Somel
- The tutor assigned to Van once the three men are taken into comfortable captivity in a mountain fortress. Even-tempered and scientifically curious, she becomes his closest friend among the women during their imprisonment and his principal source for understanding Herland's language, customs, and history.
- Related: Van Jennings, Zava, Moadine
- Specialized Child-Rearing
- Herland's practice of entrusting the hands-on care and early education of children to women who have specifically trained for it, rather than leaving the work solely to each child's biological mother. Somel compares it to dentistry: a mother's love does not, by itself, make her the best person to fill a cavity, and it does not automatically make her the best educator either.
- Related: Motherhood, Education in Herland
T
- Terry O. Nicholson
- A wealthy, adventurous member of the expedition, nicknamed "the Old Nick" by his friends, whose money and piloting skill make the private venture into Woman Land possible. From the outset he pictures the rumored country as a "sublimated summer resort" full of admiring girls, and jokes about getting himself "elected king." His confident, proprietary attitude toward women sets him apart from Jeff's idealism and Van's caution.
- Related: Van Jennings, Jeff Margrave, Alima
- Terry's Trial and Expulsion
- The crisis that ends Terry's marriage to Alima and, ultimately, his stay in Herland. Convinced that a wife should be "mastered," he forces his way into her private room one night; Alima and several other women overpower and restrain him, and a council tries him for an offense the country has no real precedent for. His sentence is simple and final: he must leave.
- Related: Terry O. Nicholson, Alima, The Council's Decision
- The Council's Decision
- Herland's formal ruling on how to handle contact with the outside world now that Terry must be sent home. The men are made to promise silence about the country's location, while Ellador — eager to see the wider "family of nations" for herself — is chosen to travel back with Van, the country's leaders reserving judgment on any further contact until she reports what she finds.
- Related: Terry's Trial and Expulsion, Ellador, Herland
V
- Van Jennings
- The story's narrator, formally Vandyck Jennings, a young American sociologist who joins his college friends Terry and Jeff on the expedition that leads them to the rumored Woman Land. He calls himself the middle ground of the three, holding scientific theories about what an all-female country would look like — mostly wrong, as he later admits. His narration frames the entire account of Herland.
- Related: Terry O. Nicholson, Jeff Margrave, Herland
Z
- Zava
- The tutor assigned to Jeff during the men's captivity. Jeff compares her fondly to a favorite aunt, and in the men's early conversations with their captors she is often the one who presses them, gently but pointedly, about the less flattering realities of the world they came from.
- Related: Jeff Margrave, Somel, Moadine