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A wide-ranging text, Wagner explores how history is recorded and written, why that issue matters, and Haudenosaunee history and culture, in addition, to documenting the Haudenosaunee influence on 19th century feminist and 19th century feminism.
Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the major theoreticians of the woman's rights movement, claimed that the society in which they lived was based on the oppression of women.
Haudenosaunee society, on the other hand, was organized to maintain a balance of equality between women and men. Shown here are the contrasting differences between the two worlds of women who lived side-by-side in this region of upstate New York in 1848.
| Haudenosaunee | EuroAmerican |
| Social | Social |
| Children are members of the mother's clan. | Children are the sole property of fathers. |
| Violence against women not part of culture, and dealt with seriously when occurs. | Husbands have legal right and religious responsibility to physically discipline wives. |
| Clothing fosters health, freedom of movement and independence. | Clothing is restrictive, unhealthy and dangerous. |
| Women's responsibilities have a spiritual basis. | Woman's subordination has a religious foundation. |
| Economic | Economic |
| Work satisfying, done communally | Work drudgery, isolated |
| Responsible for agriculture as well as home life | Responsible for home, but subordinate to husband. |
| Work done under the direction of the women, working together. | Work done under the authority of the husband. |
| Each woman controls her own personal property. | No rights to her own property, body, or children. |
| Spiritual | Spiritual |
| "Sky Woman" the spiritual being, catalyst for the world we see. | No female in the godhead. |
| Mother Earth and women spiritually interrelated. | Spirituality not connected to the earth. |
| Women have responsibilities in ceremony. | Women forbidden to speak in churches. |
| Responsibilities in balance with those of men. | Responsibilities subordinate to men's authority. |
| Political | Political |
| Women choose their chief. | Illegal for women to vote. |
| Women hold key political offices (e.g., clan mothers) | Women excluded from political office |
| Confederacy laws ensures woman's political authority. | Common law defines married as "dead in the law." |
| Decision making by consensus, everyone has a voice. | Decision making by men, majority rules |
The European invasion of America resulted in genocide. That is the most important story of contact. But it is not the only one. While Europeans concentrated on "Christianizing and civilizing," relocating and slaughtering Indians, they also signed treaties, coexisted with and learned from them. Regular trade, cultural sharing, even friendship between Native Americans and EuroAmericans transformed the immigrants. Perhaps nowhere was this social interaction more evident than in the towns and villages of upstate New York where Matilda Joslyn Gage lived, Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up, and Lucretia Mott visited. All three of these leading suffragists knew Haudenosaunee women, citizens of the Six Nations Confederacy that had established peace among themselves long before Columbus arrived at this "old" world.
Stanton, for instance, sometimes sat across from Oneida women at the dinner table in Petersboro, New York, during frequent visits to her cousin, the radical social activist Gerrit Smith. Smith's daughter (also named Elizabeth) was among the first to shed the twenty pounds of clothing that fashion dictated should hang from any fashionable woman's waist, usually dangerously deformed from corseting. The reform costume Elizabeth Smith adopted (named the "Bloomer" after the newspaper editor who popularized it) promised the health and comfort of the loose-fitting tunic and leggings worn by Native American friends of the two Elizabeths.
In 1853 Gage worked on a committee headed by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley to document the woeful few jobs open to white women. Meanwhile she knew nearby Onondaga women who farmed corn, beans, and squash -- nutritionally balanced and ecologically near-perfect crops called "the Three Sisters" by the Haudenosaunee.
Lucretia Mott and her husband, James, were members of the Indian Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the society of Friends. From the 1790s on, these Quakers sent missionaries among the Seneca, educating them and supporting them against land speculators. During the summer of 1848 the Motts visited Cattaraugus where they witnessed women exercising equal authority in discussion and decision-making while the Seneca nation changed its governmental structure. Lucretia watched as the Native women planned the strawberry ceremony in a most non-Christian tradition of women's spiritual leadership. With her feminist vision fired by her first-hand experience of women's political, spiritual, social, and economic authority, Mott traveled from the Seneca nation to nearby Seneca Falls, where she and Stanton called the world's first woman's rights convention in July.
These suffragists regularly read newspaper accounts of everyday Iroquois activities: a condolence ceremony to mourn a chief's death and to set in place a new one; the sports scores when the Onondaga faced the Mohawks at lacrosse; a Quaker council called to ask Seneca women to leave their fields and work in the home (as the Friends said God commanded but as Mott opposed). Newspaper readers in New York also read interviews with white teachers who worked at various Indian nations testifying to the wonderful sense of freedom and safety they felt since Indian men did not rape women. These front-page stories admonished big-city dandies to learn a thing or two from Native men's example so that white women too could walk around any time of the day or night without fear. Rev. M. F. Trippe, long a missionary on the Tonawanda, Cattaraugus and Alleghany reservations, told a New York City reporter:
Tell the readers of the Herald that . . . they have a sincere respect for women -- their own women as well as those of the whites. I have seen young white women going unprotected about parts of the reservations in search of botanical specimens best found there and Indian men helping them. Where else in the land can a girl be safe from insult from rude men whom she does not know?
In the United States, until women's rights advocates began the painstaking task of changing state laws, a husband had the legal right to batter his wife. A North Carolina court ruled in 1864 that the State had no business meddling in wife battering cases unless "permenant injury or excessive violence" was involved. The battered and his victim should be left alone, the court determined, "as the best mode of inducing them to make the matter up and live together as a man and wife should." Suffragists knew that wife battering was not universal, living as neighbors to men of other nations whose religious, legal, social and economic concepts of women made such behavior unthinkable. To Stanton, Gage, Mott, and their feminist contemporaries, the Native American principles of everyday decency, nonviolence, and gender justice must have seemed the Promised Land." pp. 42-45
"I sat in the kitchen of Alice Papineau -- De-wa-senta -- an Onondaga clan mother, on a hot summer day, drinking iced tea as she described the criteria clan mothers use to choose -- and depose, if necessary -- the male sachem who represents their clan in the Grand Council, a responsibility of which Stanton and Gage were well aware. But neither suffragist had explained the sachem job requirements, which De-wa-senta listed: "First, they cannot have committed a theft. Second, they cannot have committed a murder. Third, the cannot have abused a woman." And the overriding qualification: the chief needs to have shown that he can take care of a family, behave as a responsible family man, since he will be responsible for the well-being of the larger families of the clan, the nation, and the confederacy -- through seven generations.
There goes Congress! I think to myself, followed by a flight of fantasy: What if, in the United States, only women chose governmental representatives, and women alone had the right "to knock the horns off the head," as Stanton marveled -- to oust officials if they failed to represent the needs of the people unto the seventh generation?" pp. 46-47
"I arrive, hurried, at the home of Ethel, a friend with whom I work. We have exactly an hour to meet, squeezed into a tight travel schedule. After pleasantries we get down to business, moving along at a smooth clip, and it looks as if we will finish on time when suddenly her son enters. A strapping 17-year-old, he fills the room with his presence. Ethel beams at him and hangs on his every word as he describes his teachers' deadlines, clean uniform needs, other mundane details of his day. Virginia Woolf got it right: his mother's admiring gaze reflects him twice life size. He never acknowledges my presence, she doesn't introduce us, and our work is forgotten. When finally he walked out, Ethel and I scramble to tie up loose ends, some of which still dangle as I dash out the door.
Ethel is EuroAmerican: her son stands poised to inherit the world.
A week later I sat in my friend Jeanne's living room, enjoyable chatting. I hear her 17-year-old son in the kitchen rattling pans, perhaps cooking or washing dishes. Minutes later he appears and places cups of tea in front of us without a word, his gift offered unobtrusively, his demeanor without display. I look up to thank him but he is gone, his back already turned as he repairs to the kitchen. Jeanne seems not even to notice, and our conversation continues.
Jeanne is Onondaga, a Haudenosaunee woman descended from the traditional "pagan" Iroquois -- those who refused to be "Christianized" and "civilized." Her son recognizes his mother, and all women, as the center of the culture.
Such sons of such mothers belonged to our feminist foresisters' vision too. They are sons who learned from their fathers and their father's fathers to respect the sovereignty of women. They are sons of a tradition in which rape and battering of women was virtually unknown until contact with white people, a tradition in which women's rights are a birthright." p. 51
"That the woman of every Christian land fears to meet a man in a secluded place by day or night, is of itself sufficient proof of the low state of Christian morality," wrote Gage. Family friend Mary Elizabeth Beauchamp also described how, "It shows the remarkable security of living on an Indian Reservation, that a solitary woman can walk about for miles, at any hour of the day or night, in perfect safety." " pp. 66-67
The children are of the tribe of the mother; as are the children's children to the latest generation, and they are also of the same nation. If the mother is a Cayuga, the children are Cayugas; and if a Mohawk, the children are Mohawks. If the marriage proves unhappy, the parties are allowed to separate, and each is at liberty to marry again. But the mother has the sole right to the disposal of the children. She keeps them all as she chooses, and to their father they are ever [mere] strangers.
Men were mourned but, Hale wrote, "it is still harder when the woman shall die, because with her the line is lost." The same sentiment prevailed among the Hurons, he explained, quoting Father Raguenea:
For a Huron killed by a Huron, thirty gifts are commonly deemed a sufficient satisfaction. For a woman forty are required, because, as they say, the women are less able to defend themselves; and moreover, they being the source whence the land is peopled, their lives should be deemed of more value to the commonwealth, and their weakness should have a stronger support in public justice.
"Such was the reasoning," Hale marveled, "of these heathen barbarians. Enlightened Christendom has hardly yet advanced to the mark of these opinions." pp. 70-71
As I have tried to explain our statues to Indian women, I have met with but one response. They have said, "As an Indian woman I was free. I owned my home, my person, the work of my own hands, and my children could never forget me. I was better as an Indian woman than under white law.p. 76
Does the modern American woman [who] is a petitioner before man, pleading for her political rights, ever stop to consider that the red woman that lived in New York state five hundred years ago, had far more political rights and enjoyed a much wider liberty than the twentieth century woman of civilization?p. 93
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