Erika Nevins’s Reviews > Herland and Selected Stories > Status Update

These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call “femininity.” This led me to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.