Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists

by Sally Roesch Wagner

  A Vision of Radical Respect

  While early women’s rights activists successfully changed some repressive laws, an ensuing backlash in the 1870s resulted in the criminalization of birth control and family planning, while custody of the children remained the exclusive right of fathers. By the 1890s, Stanton and her daughter, Harriet, began to envision “voluntary motherhood,” the title of a speech Harriet prepared for the 1891 National Council of Women. “Motherhood is sacred—that is, voluntary motherhood,” Harriet declared, “but the woman who bears unwelcome children is outraging every duty she owes the race. ”18 Mother and daughter presented a revolutionary alternative to the patriarchal family, with women controlling their own bodies and having rights to the children they bore. No utopian dream, body right was a birthright of Haudenosaunee women. Family lineage traditionally was reckoned through mothers; no child was born a “bastard” (the concept didn’t exist). Every child found a loving and welcome place in a mother’s world, surrounded by a mother’s sisters, her mother, and the men whom they married. Unmarried sons and brothers lived in this large extended family, too, until they left home to marry into another matrilineal clan.

  Family lineage traditionally was reckoned through the mothers.

  Stanton envied how Indian women “ruled the house” and how “descent of property and children were in the female line.” When called a “savage” for practicing natural childbirth, Stanton rebuked her critics by mocking their use of the word, pointing out that Indian women “do not suffer” giving birth. They “step aside the ranks, even on the march and return in a short time bearing with them the newborn child,” she wrote.19 Thus it was absurd to suppose “that only enlightened Christian women are cursed” by painful, difficult childbirth.20

  In 1875, while serving as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Gage penned a series of admiring articles about the Haudenosaunee for the New York Evening Post in which she wrote that the “division of power between the sexes in this Indian republic was nearly equal,” while the Iroquois family structure “demonstrated woman’s superiority in power.”21

  For white women living in a world where marital rape was commonplace and forbidden by neither church nor state (although the Comstock Law of the 1870s outlawed discussion of it), Native women’s violence-free and egalitarian home life could only have given suffragists sure knowledge that their goals could be reached. Still, they had a long way to go.

  Until woman’s rights advocates began to change divorce laws in the last half of the nineteenth century, women found themselves trapped in marriage, unable to leave. Women fleeing from a violent or abusive husband could be returned to him by the police, as runaway slaves were returned to their master. Husbands could will away an unborn child, and the baby would be taken from its mother and given to its “rightful owner” when the father/guardian died. And, until married women’s property acts were slowly enacted state by state throughout the nineteenth century, any money a wife earned or inherited belonged outright to her husband.

  A married woman was “nameless, purseless and childless,” Stanton summed up, even though she be “a woman, heiress and mother.” Calling for an end to this injustice, the early suffragists were labeled hopeless dreamers for imagining a world so clearly against nature; worse, they were labeled heretics for daring to question God’s divine plan. Stanton, whose major work, The Woman’s Bible,was published in 1895, became convinced that the oppression of women was not divinely inspired at all. Gage agreed, calling the church the “bulwark” of women’s oppression.

  When the religious right tried to destroy religious freedom by placing God in the Constitution and prayer in public schools and by pushing a conservative political agenda in the 1890s, Stanton and Gage (Mott had died) determined to challenge the church. Their theory held that indigenous women in early history held positions of respect and authority in egalitarian and woman-centered societies that often worshiped a female deity, sometimes in combination with a male consort. This matriarchal system was overthrown, Stanton contended, when “Christianity, putting the religious weapon into man’s hand, made his conquest complete.”22 While common knowledge held that Christianity and civilization meant progress for women, Stanton and Gage disagreed.

  A Vision of Responsibilities

  A few years ago I was invited to lecture at the annual Elizabeth Cady Stanton birthday tea in Seneca Falls along with Audrey Shenandoah, an Onondaga nation Spiritual leader. A crowd of my feminist contemporaries packed the elegant, century-old hotel, and I spoke about the rights of Haudenosaunee women. Then Audrey talked matter-of-factly about the responsibilities of clan mothers, who continue to nominate, counsel, and keep in office their clan’s chief, as they always have. In the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, she explained, Haudenosaunee women have worked with the men to successfully guard their sovereign political status against persistent attempts to turn them into United States citizens. In Audrey’s direct and simple telling, the social power of the Haudenosaunee women seemed almost unremarkable. “We have always had these responsibilities,” she said.23

  My feminist terminology, I suddenly realized, had revealed my cultural bias. Out of habit I had referred to women’s empowerment as women’s “rights.” But for Haudenosaunee women who have maintained many of their traditional ways despite two centuries of white America’s attempts to “civilize and Christianize” them, the concept of women’s “rights” has little actual meaning. To the Haudenosaunee, it is simply their way of life. Their egalitarian relationships and their political authority are a reality that I—like my foresisters—still but dream.

  Mother Earth Does Not Revolve Around the Son

  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 walks 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 sit in my friend Jeanne’s living room, enjoyably 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.

  Mother Earth, Creator of Life

  Haudenosaunee women were farmers. What an amazing revelation this must have been to reformers accustomed to a society where women were corseted, fashionably weak, and believed to be incapable of hard labor. Nodding their tacit approval to the prevailing social, legal and religious wisdom, most white women of means accepted their place: inside the home. Not Native women, who farmed, Gage marveled, and who did so using highly effective methods unknown to white men.

  Their method of farming was ent
irely different from our own. In olden Iroquois tillage there was no turning the sod with a plough to which were harnessed a cow and a woman, as is seen today in Christian Germany; but the ground was literally ‘tickled with a hoe’ and it ‘laughed with a harvest.’ Corn hills three or four times larger than those seen today remained in use successive years, and when the country was first settled the appearance of those numerous little mounds created great wonder. Slightly scratched with a stick or piece of bone, maize was there planted, and but little labor attended its cultivation.1

  Haudenosaunee women planted primarily corn, beans, and squash. Harriet Maxwell Converse (Gage’s friend) explained that this nutritionally perfect combination was the staple of their diet:The three vegetables, the corn, beans and squash were known to the Onondagas as tu-ne-ha-kwe meaning ‘these we live on,’ and to the Senecas as Dio-he’-ko, meaning ‘our true sustenance.’ It is interesting to note that among the ancient Aztecs the spirit of the maize was called Tonacayohau, She Feeds Us.2

  Arthur C. Parker (of Seneca descendent), an acquaintance of Susan B. Anthony and an early Director of the Rochester Museum of Arts and Science (now the Rochester Museum and Science Center), explained the method of planting used by the women:The Iroquois generally planted their squashes in the same hills with corn and some kinds of beans. Besides the land and labor saved by this custom there was a belief that these three vegetables were guarded by three inseparable spirit sisters and that the plants would not thrive apart in consequence.3

  The spiritual harmony of the Three Sisters is also ecological. The corn stalk provides support for the beans while the beans provide nitrogen to nourish the corn. The squash covers the mound, keeping weeds out and moisture in. Eaten together, these Three Supporters constitute a nutritionally balanced diet.

  Native women’s honored obligation, recognized by the men, was to direct the home and the community’s agriculture. Satisfying and sacred, women’s work harmoniously complemented the hunting/diplomatic duties of men; both were equally valued. Within this framework of community responsibility, individual liberty flourished.

  Gage knew about Mary Jemison, the white captive adopted into the Seneca nation who, when given the option of returning to the white world, chose instead to live with her Native family. Jemison’s story was recorded by a Dr. Seaver and made into a popular book during Gage’s childhood. Although she was eighty at the time the book was issued, Jemison still planted, tended, and harvested her corn, gathered and chopped her own wood, and fed her cattle and poultry, wearing the traditional dress. Jemison offered a detailed description of Seneca women’s agricultural work:Our labor was not severe; and that of one year was exactly similar in almost every respect to that of the others.... Notwithstanding the Indian women have all the fuel and bread to procure, and the cooking to perform, their task is probably not harder than that of white women, who have those articles provided for them, and their cares certainly are not half as numerous, nor as great. In the summer season, we planted, tended, and harvested our corn, and generally had all of our children with us; but had not master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased.... We pursued our farming business according to the general custom of Indian women, which is as follows: In order to expedite their business, and at the same time enjoy each other’s company, they all work together in one field, or at whatever job they may have on hand. In the spring, they choose an old active squaw [sic] to be their driver and overseer, when at labor, for the ensuing year. She accepts the honor, and they consider themselves bound to obey her.... By this rule, they perform their labor of every kind, and every jealousy of one having done more or less than another is effectually avoided.4

  In a newspaper report that she published on the 1875 Onondaga County Indian Fair, Gage marveled that “forty-eight kinds of beans were on exhibition.” She went on to give some history of Haudenosaunee agriculture:A Dutch history of the New Netherlands as early as 1621 speaks of the luxuriant growth of Turkey beans. Planted in hills with corn they twined around the stalks. Hendrick Hudson in 1609 saw at one place more than three shiploads of corn and beans drying, beside the crops still luxuriantly growing. It was no lack of other food that forced the Five Nations into agriculture; all kinds of game were abundant.... Turkeys, geese, ducks, swan, teal, plover, pheasants, deer, bear, beaver and many other kinds of game were equally abundant, besides an infinite variety of nuts and wild fruits. But this confederacy, with its wonderful government and customs and its fixed dwelling places, had in its own steps of progress developed a science of agriculture. Corn, beans, potatoes, and plants of the gourd family, including squash and a species of pumpkin, and tobacco, were all regularly cultivated, and together with vast quantity of nuts, were stored in pits or cellars for winter use.5

  Gage recognized the superiority of the Iroquois agricultural method. Beyond that, she believed that Haudenosaunee recognition of the spiritual, life-giving supremacy of woman’s creation of food represented a higher form of civilization than her own:Three of the five ancient feasts of the Iroquois were agricultural feasts connected with this, their great staple. The first was celebrated immediately after corn planting in May, the second, or Succotash Feast, at filling of the ears in August, and continuing for a fortnight; the third, after corn-harvest. Centuries ago was agriculture honored by this ancient people. In Christian Europe during the middle ages the agriculturist was despised; the warrior was the aristocrat of civilization. In publicly honoring agriculture as did the Ongwe Honwe three times a year, they surpassed in wisdom the men of Europe.6

  William Beauchamp described the third spiritual ceremony Gage mentioned—the “Thanksgiving that traditionally accompanied the harvest of the Three Sisters”—as one more example of cultural borrowing. “It is noteworthy that the Indian Thanksgiving Day antedated our own,” Beauchamp wrote. “It is more American than we have ever claimed.”7 Thanksgiving, it turns out, is a Native American celebration adopted by EuroAmerican settlers.

  Haudenosaunee women held the sacred responsibility of creating life—from their own bodies and from the body of Mother Earth—the creation story told: The Grandmother buried her daughter and planted in her grave the plants and leaves that she had clutched in her hands when she fell from the sky world. Not long after, over her daughter’s head grew corn, beans and squash. These were later known as the “three sisters” and became the main life support groups for the people of the Haudenosaunee. From her heart grew the sacred tobacco which would later be used as an offering to send greetings to the Creator. At her feet grew the strawberry plants, as well as other plants that would be used as medicines to cure sickness. The earth itself was referred to as “Our Mother” by the Master of Life, because their mother had become one with the earth.8

  Women were responsible for everything in the earth, while men had the care of everything on the earth (hunting, fishing, etc.). That was the balance. It was, ironically, the benevolent attempt to “Christianize” and “civilize” the “savage Indian” that worked to destroy the previously healthy gender balance of the Iroquois Confederacy. Missionaries insisted that woman’s proper sphere was the home, and that Indian men should take up farming. When accomplished, this change not only would take away women’s economic independence, leaving them as dependent as white women; it also tore at the very fabric of Native society, which held that women, producers of life, were the only appropriate group to bring life from the soil. Despite resistance, Indian land—over which women had historically been the caretakers for the nation—was often divided up among Indian men, as “heads of the family.” Tribal governments, systematically changed to model after that of the United States, disfranchised women.

  “It behooves us women,” Stanton wrote, “to question all historians ... who teach ... any philosophy that lowers the status of the mothers of the race.”9 She found a suppressed history, one that elevated women. While women’s work was not valued in the EuroAmerican world (if it were, it would be paid, Stanton insisted), ther
e was nothing inherently demeaning about it, she held. To the contrary, the creative powers of woman in birthing and maintaining daily life, she came to believe, were the source of her strength. Stanton recognized the indigenous truth that agriculture grew naturally out of woman’s ability to birth. In an 1891 speech to the National Council of Women she expressed this view:Careful historians now show that the greatest civilizing power ... has been found in ... motherhood. For the protection of herself and her children woman made the first home in the caves of the earth, then huts with trees in the sunshine. She made the first attempts at agriculture, raised grains, fruits, and herbs, which she learned to use in sickness. She was her own physician; all that was known of the medical art was in her hands. She domesticated the cow and the goat, and from the necessities of her children learned the use of milk. The women cultivated the arts of peace, and the sentiments of kinship, and all there was of human love and home-life. The necessities of motherhood were the real source of all the earliest attempts at civilization. Thus, instead of being a ‘disability,’ as unthinking writers are pleased to call it, maternity has been the all-inspiring motive or force that impelled the first steps towards a stable home and family life. 10