We have assumed, as a matter of course, that women had none; that only the man, with his natural energy and impatience of restriction, would ever invent anything.
Here we found that the pressure of life upon the environment develops in the human mind its inventive reactions, regardless of sex; and further, that a fully awakened motherhood plans and works without limit, for the good of the child.
That the children might be most nobly born, and reared in an environment calculated to allow the richest, freest growth, they had deliberately remodeled and improved the whole state.
I do not mean in the least that they stopped at that, any more than a child stops at childhood.

The most impressive part of their whole culture beyond this perfect system of child-rearing was the range of interests and associations open to them all, for life.

But in the field of literature I was most struck, at first, by the child-motive.
They had the same gradation of simple repetitive verse and story that we are familiar with, and the most exquisite, imaginative tales; but where, with us, these are the dribbled remnants of ancient folk myths and primitive lullabies, theirs were the exquisite work of great artists; not only simple and unfailing in appeal to the child-mind, but TRUE, true to the living world about them.
To sit in one of their nurseries for a day was to change one's views forever as to babyhood.

The youngest ones, rosy fatlings in their mothers' arms, or sleeping lightly in the flower-sweet air, seemed natural enough, save that they never cried.

I never heard a child cry in Herland, save once or twice at a bad fall; and then people ran to help, as we would at a scream of agony from a grown person.
Each mother had her year of glory; the time to love and learn, living closely with her child, nursing it proudly, often for two years or more.
This perhaps was one reason for their wonderful vigor.
But after the baby-year the mother was not so constantly in attendance, unless, indeed, her work was among the little ones.