While today's students are more familiar with "The Yellow Wallpaper" than any of Gilman's other writings, Herland is actually more closely linked to the nonfiction treatise Women and Economics than any of Gilman's other works. Published nearly twenty years earlier, Women and Economics attempts to explain how the imbalance of power between men and women has created a situation whereby male desire not only subjugates women but throws the fate of the human species into peril. Relying on Darwinian theories of evolution, Gilman explains how social taboos that discourage excessive (or sometimes any) procreation in the upper-classes makes inferior people the majority of the human gene pool. The fundamental flaw of human relations, she asserts, lies in the fact that "excessive sexindulgence is the distinctive feature of humanity" vis-a-vis the rest of the animal kingdom. Thus,.....
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