time to realize--Terry never did realize--how little it
meant to them. When we say MEN, MAN, MANLY, MANHOOD, and all the other
masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge
vague crowded picture of the world and all its activities. To grow up
and "be a man," to "act like a man"--the meaning and connotation is
wide indeed. That vast background is full of marching columns of men, of
changing lines of men, of long processions of men; of men steering
their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains, breaking horses,
herding cattle, ploughing and sowing and reaping, toiling at the forge
and furnace, digging in the mine, building roads and bridges and high
cathedrals, managing great businesses, teaching in all the colleges,
preaching in all the churches; of men everywhere, doing everything--"the
world."

And when we say WOMEN, we think FEMALE--the sex.

But to these women, in the unbroken sweep of this two-thousand-year-old
feminine civilization, the word WOMAN called up all that big background,
so far as they had gone in social development; and the word MAN meant to
them only MALE--the sex.

Of course we could TELL them that in our world men did everything; but
that did not alter the background of their minds. That man, "the male,"
did all these things was to them a statement, making no more change
in the point of view than was made in ours when we first faced the
astounding fact--to us--that in Herland women were "the world."

We had been living there more than a year. We had learned their limited
history, with its straight, smooth, upreaching lines, reaching higher
and going faster up to the smooth comfort of their present life. We
had learned a little of their psychology, a much wider field than the
history, but here we could not follow so readily. We were now well used
to seeing women not as females but as people; people of all sorts, doing
every kind of work.

This outbreak of Terry's, and the strong reaction against it, gave us
a new light on their genuine femininity. This was given me with great
clearness by both Ellador and Somel. The feeling was the same--sick
revulsion and horror, such as would be felt at some climactic blasphemy.

They had no faintest approach to such a thing in their minds, knowing
nothing of the custom of marital indulgence among us. To them the one
high purpose of motherhood had been for so long the governing law of
life, and the contribution of the father, t