Herland

 Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 147 pages.

Three men set out on an adventure after they hear rumors about a country populated entirely by women. The utopian society they find hidden away in the mountains then causes them to carefully think about their own society in many ways they never had and question many of the things they had considered to be inherent parts of society.

It's always really interesting to read historical social criticism. This book is especially interesting because many of the things that Gilman examines are still very relevant today, while others are obvious references to specific societal problems in 1915, when the book was published. She also did a very clever thing by making our three men hold a wide range of the prevailing social views about women. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was one of my favorite short stories I read in school, so I don't know why it never occurred to me to look for other works by the author until a coworker here at the library recommended this book to me (he doesn't seem to have written a post about it, but you can see Jan's here). Gilman's writing in this book is very intelligent, and she manages to write a book that feels like a story instead of just a social treatise, while also definitely being that.