Source identified1
Image design Midnight
Read & copy
“We were now well used to seeing women not as females but as people; people of all sorts, doing every kind of work.”
Meaning & context
Van’s narration marks how sustained contact with Herland has challenged the visitors’ habit of treating sex as the first category through which women must be understood.
Source details
Herland, Chapter 12, “Expelled,” Project Gutenberg #32. Van Jennings narrates that after more than a year in Herland the visitors have become accustomed to seeing women “not as females but as people” across every kind of work. This is retrospective fictional narration inside Gilman’s feminist utopian novel, not a neutral sociological finding.