Herland

Three young American men, a sociologist, a doctor and a wealthy adventurer, hear rumours of a land without men hidden in the mountains of an unexplored region, and fly there in a biplane, each expecting something different: a paradise of women, a dull convent, or easy conquests. They find a peaceful, prosperous and highly organised society of women who have lived without men for two thousand years, bearing children without fathers and raising them in common, and who calmly study the three visitors as curiosities.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), the American writer and feminist best known for The Yellow Wallpaper, serialised the novel in her own magazine, The Forerunner, in 1915, but it was published as a book only in 1979. Its gentle comedy turns the explorers' assumptions about women and men upside down. Compare Looking Backward.