[Herland by Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman]@TWC D-Link bookHerland CHAPTER 11 2/26
The woman may have imagined the conditions of married life to be different; but what she imagined, was ignorant of, or might have preferred, did not seriously matter. I can see clearly and speak calmly about this now, writing after a lapse of years, years full of growth and education, but at the time it was rather hard sledding for all of us--especially for Terry.
Poor Terry! You see, in any other imaginable marriage among the peoples of the earth, whether the woman were black, red, yellow, brown, or white; whether she were ignorant or educated, submissive or rebellious, she would have behind her the marriage tradition of our general history. This tradition relates the woman to the man.
He goes on with his business, and she adapts herself to him and to it.
Even in citizenship, by some strange hocus-pocus, that fact of birth and geography was waved aside, and the woman automatically acquired the nationality of her husband. Well--here were we, three aliens in this land of women.
It was small in area, and the external differences were not so great as to astound us. We did not yet appreciate the differences between the race-mind of this people and ours. In the first place, they were a "pure stock" of two thousand uninterrupted years.
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