Lindy West’s G2 article (The lost land of women: forgotten feminist classic Herland is 100 years old, 31 March) on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s forgotten feminist classic Herland rightly draws attention to the centenary of its original publication and the challenges posed by it, both then and now.
Just as empowering is the even less well known Sultana’s Dream, written by a Bengali Muslim woman, Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, a decade earlier. Married at the age of 16 (reportedly a love match) to an older man who supported her studies and writing, she took a leading role in local campaigns for female education and set up a school (which was eventually relocated to Kolkata, where it still stands).
In her 1905 short story, Hussain takes readers to Ladyland, where peace-loving women overpower aggressive men thanks to the power of their brains. Rather than seeing this world through male eyes, Hussain uses a female narrator to get her points across.
Unlike Herland, Hussain’s imagined world contains space for men but they live in seclusion or purdah, hidden from public gaze.
As the narrator is told by her guide: “You need not be afraid of coming across a man … This is Ladyland, free from sin and harm. Virtue herself reigns here.”
Though these two classic accounts of “feminist utopias” understandably reflect the different contexts that produced them, they remind us just how far gender relations mattered in debates taking place right around in the world in the early 20th century.
After all, as Sultana’s Dream underlines, it was not necessarily women in North America and in Europe who set the agenda for these frank discussions.
Sarah Ansari
Windsor, Berkshire
