Problems with Utopias: Nobody Does the Yucky Jobs

At one point, idealistic Jeff praises

the women for cooperating like "bees." Terry

points out that a queen bee kills other queens.

Pollyanna with attitude.

In Chapter 6 of His in Herland, Terry gets irritated with the mantra he is being fed about how much the women care for each other, how well they cooperate, etc. 

To give Gilman credit, she is making a positive argument about women's capabilities: Women can work together. They can be professional. They can run companies and businesses. They can keep their families from starving (see Fruitlands below).

She is writing out of a very specific milieu and class. Puritan women would have raised their brows at Gilman's assertions and said, "Of course they can. So?" 

Part of Terry's irritation arises because he cannot believe that people aren't, well, people: variety is a norm, not an exception. It's normal to disagree. (See post about Sameness.) 

His other irritation arises from a point that Gilman's Terry doesn't notice (he makes similar arguments for sexist reasons, not observational ones), namely, that SOMEONE is doing a lot of hard work to keep the country clean and functional. 

In fairness to Gilman, at Fruitlands,

the women did much of the work.

In sum, Gilman's class-based assumptions are showing. Case in point: her upperclass male characters are never put to work, except to give lectures.

Hey, the Alcotts made the same mistake! Even on utopian farms, crops still have to be harvested. Roads have to be repaired. There isn't a lot of time to sit around pontificating.

It would be easy to castigate Gilman here since she utterly fails to account for the slogging effort of survival. But Star Trek suffers the same problem. Early TNG maintains, In the future, everybody loves their work! 

Regarding the episode "The Child," Phil Farrand wryly makes the following comment: 

Yet here is [a character] working every day, sitting atop the Federation's meanest and ugliest plagues--biological time bombs that might start ticking at any time. Does this sound like an exciting job? Is it a job that enriches and improves [the character's] quality of life?

The point is well-made. 

In the current chapter of His in Herland, my Terry remarks:

And there were the assumptions they presented as givens, ideas to be accepted without skepticism. Such as, We have no aristocracy.

What does one call a group of people who teach and discuss “national matters” in a well-tended hotel with good food and constant service while others are shoveling tar, scrubbing fountains, cleaning up garbage and refuse, maintaining vehicles, cutting down trees, hunting for plant-threatening insects (Alim’s job) and larger predators, building walls, weeding gardens?

Merely because people aren’t being “paid,” doesn’t mean they aren’t accruing more privileges, more ease than others.

Van argues that the mentors also cleaned and scrubbed. But then Van has no real idea how long it takes to unclog a toilet. Someone else does it for him, just as a whole host of someone elses were maintaining the country’s day-to-day infrastructures while the mentors conversed with us in airy, hygienically clean rooms.

TNG at least had the magnificent episode, "Measure of a Man" in which the point is underscored emphatically: even if one creates a bunch of androids to do all the yucky stuff, it still tokens dependence on a group to fulfill the needs of another group. 

And I'm not speaking abstractly. Someone has gotta do the laundry, cook the meals, fill the potholes, weed the gardens, cut the grass, pick up poop, wash dishes, build walls, sanitize fountains, repair holes and cracks, repair garments, resole shoes, count stuff...

See Dirty Jobs. 

There's a reason why Mike in Last Man Standing asks the family housekeeper to "release the beach cats" and make sure his "lazy kids" don't become "really lazy kids," simply because she is helping out. 

Chapter 6

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding