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Similes
Chapter 9: Our Relations and Theirs
Explanation and Analysis—How Many Children:
In Chapter 9, Alima and the other women's questioning forces the men to admit the situational irony that in the United States, the women with the most children have the least access to domestic help and vice versa:
“How many children do your women have?” Alima had her notebook out now, and a rather firm set of lip. Terry began to dodge.
“There is no set number, my dear,” he explained. “Some have more, some have less.”
“Some have none at all,” I put in mischievously.
They pounced on this admission and soon wrung from us the general fact that those women who had the most children had the least servants, and those who had the most servants had the least children.
The men have just been describing the gendered division of labor in their society. They tell Alima and the others that women do not work outside the home, instead managing the household and raising children. The Herlandians, who take motherhood and childhood education very seriously, are startled to hear that raising children is considered a small enough job that mothers can do it while also keeping house. Terry's explanation that servants help with all the work does not satisfy the Herlandians. Soon, they learn that the most wealthy women have access to both birth control and domestic servants. The poorer a woman is, the less access she has to either of these resources. As a result, poor women are expected to care for more children with less help.
This system is ironic when the men spell it out like this. It sounds especially upsetting to the Herlandians because their entire society is organized around the mission of raising children to be good citizens, a project they treat as sacred. They believe every child should have access to the best collective resources society has to offer. Under the system the men describe, the children of rich parents receive a disproportionate amount of the child-rearing resources (a tale that is still familiar today). Meanwhile, for poor women, motherhood is a burden they are forced to bear without help. This prevents motherhood from being the sacred, sought-after role it is in Herland.
Related Themes:
