In a brief Preface, Gilman plainly identifies her novel with the established utopian literature; she cites The Republic of Plato and the original Utopia of Sir Thomas More, along with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and H. G. Wells's In the Days of the Comet (1906).

Yet the tactic of moving a character forward in time can be found in American literature as far back as Mary Griffith's 1836 story Three Hundred Years Hence.

The novel opens with a brief scene written in the third person: at a remote location in Tibet, a man in local costume, backed by a group of native people, confronts a woman at the head of an exploratory expedition.

She concentrates on measures of rationality and efficiency that could be instituted in her own time, largely with greater social cooperation – equal education and treatment for girls and boys, day-care centers for working women, and other issues still relevant a century later.

Robertson does not find it easy to accept the new social order; his sister gently mocks him as an example of "An Extinct Species of Mind", as exotic as a "Woolly Mammoth".

In his discontent, Robertson travels to his home state of South Carolina to visit his Uncle Jake, an old farmer and a determined reactionary who rejects the radical improvements of the past thirty years.

Robertson remembers his cousin Drusilla, ten years his junior, as a darling child – and is shocked by the harsh and deprived life she lives.

"[10] He convinces Drusilla to marry him, to salve his own loneliness and to give her a better life – and in doing so Robertson comes to accept the superior modern world he had previously resisted.

"[12] Gilman's fictional transformation of America had its dark side: one informant explains to John Robertson that "We killed many hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots, and real perverts, after trying our best powers of cure.

"[13] Yet new methods of treatment make such extreme measures less necessary; the character in the book who speaks these words is a reformed alcoholic and cocaine addict who has become a university professor of ethics.