Moving the Mountain

John Robertson, lost years earlier in the mountains of Tibet, is found and brought home to an America he no longer recognizes. In the three decades he was gone, the country has reorganized itself around women’s full participation in public and economic life, and much of the poverty, disease, and waste he once took for granted has been engineered away. Charlotte Perkins Gilman published this 1911 novel as the opening book of a loose utopian trilogy that also includes Herland. Less a plot-driven story than a guided tour of her ideas about work, education, and reform, it lays out in plain, hopeful terms the society she believed was already within reach. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.