Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists

by Sally Roesch Wagner

  Stanton recognized and valued women’s work in one small way with this prayer, delivered when she was asked to bless the food at a meal:Heavenly father and mother, make us thankful for all the blessings of this life and make us ever mindful of the patient hands that oft in weariness spread our tables and prepare our daily food. For humanity’s sake. Amen.11

  Stanton—unlike the Christians of her day—acknowledged the divinity of woman, along with the role of women in the creation of daily life.12 Her words expressed a sentiment somewhat similar to the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, an ancient prayer given by Iroquois elders before and after an event of importance. An oral tradition, it can take four hours to tell in its entirety. This is a contemporary Mohawk version:We give greetings and thanks to our Mother the Earth—she gives us that which makes us strong and healthy. We are grateful that she continues to perform her duties as she was instructed. The women and Mother Earth are one—givers of life. We are her color, her flesh and her roots. Now our minds are one.13

  While EuroAmericans might have lost that grounding, Native people had not. Traditionally, woman as mother and woman as creator of life were one and the same. Mother Earth was an obvious descriptive term, not a romantic metaphor. The Haudenosaunee believed that the earth would not bear unless cultivated by women. Agriculture retained its ancient spiritual connection to fertility, growth, and revival among the Haudenosaunee.

  What happened to bring about the downfall of Western women from sacred creators of life-giving food to kitchen drudges? Stanton presented her theory, with which Gage agreed:Women and their duties became objects of hatred to the Christian missionaries and of alternate scorn and fear to pious ascetics and monks. The priestess mother became something impure, associated with the devil, and her lore an infernal incantation, her very cooking a brewing of poison, nay, her very existence a source of sin to man. Thus woman, as mother and priestess, became woman as witch. The witch trials of the Middle Ages, wherein thousands of women were condemned to the stake, were the very real traces of the contest between man and woman. Christianity putting the religious weapon into man’s hand made his conquest complete.14

  Gage documented the spiritual and practical authority Native women maintained in the field as well as in the kitchen, while acknowledging their influence on white women in both areas. “Let every eater of succotash—a ‘luscious mixture’ of green-corn, beans, and venison correctly called ‘msickquatash’—henceforth remember to whom we are indebted for that toothsome dish.” After replacing venison with pork and changing the name, “we white people speak of it as one of our national dishes,” she said, when in truth, “the gustatory succotash” was given to us by Haudenosaunee women. It is not “our only culinary remembrance of the red-woman’s skill in cookery,” she added, “for more than one of our national dishes are ours not by invention, but by adoption from our Indian predecessors.”15

  In another article headlined, “Do You Love Corn?” Gage questioned whether the reader might “emulate Sancho Panza, and bless the man who first invented Succotash.” If so, Gage was ready for a fight. “Never, Mr. Editor, you cannot deprive my sex of that glory,” she challenged, for “succotash is the invention of a squaw.” [sic] “White men borrowed tobacco of the Red Indian,” she wrote, while “white women, more to good purpose, borrowed the art of succotash-making, and the golden pumpkin, its fit accompaniment, when in a Yankee pie.”16

  A further Gage acknowledgment of Haudenosaunee influence on cooking claimed that, “Hasty pudding was an ancient method of preparing corn among the Iroquois.” Her proof? Reference to “A History of the New Netherlands, published in Amsterdam in 1671, [which] speaks of the Indian food, called by them sappaen, and made of crushed corn boiled to a pap.”17

  Western women ... [from] sacred creators of life-giving food to kitchen drudges.

  Appropriately, when Hattie Burr published her Woman Suffrage Cook Book in 1886, Gage contributed a recipe for Indian pudding that had been handed down in her family, coming to her from her mother:

  Old-Time Baked Indian Pudding

  Three pints of sweet milk, two large iron spoonfuls of yellow cornmeal, one small egg, one iron spoonful of molasses, three-fourth cup of sugar, heaped teaspoonful of ginger, level teaspoonful of cinnamon, one-third of a small nutmeg, and one-half a teacupful thick sour cream. Put half the milk over the fire with a sprinkling of salt; as soon as it comes to a boil, scatter the meal quickly and evenly in by hand. Remove immediately from the fire to a dish, stir in the cold milk, the egg well-beaten, the spices, sweetening, and sour cream. Bake three hours, having a hot oven the first hour, a moderate one the remainder of the time. Eat with sweet cream. If rightly made and rightly baked, this pudding is delicious, but four things must be remembered as requisite: First, the pudding must be thin enough to run when put in the oven, second, the egg must be small, or if large, but two- thirds used for a pudding of the above size. Third, the sour cream must not be omitted (but in case one has no cream, the same quantity of sour milk with a piece of butter the size of a small butternut can be substituted). Fourth, the baking must be especially attended to. Many a good recipe is ruined in the cooking, but if the direc tions are carefully followed, this pudding will be quavery when done, and if any is left, a jelly when cold. Use no sauce, but sweet cream or butter.

  Matilda Joslyn Gage, Fayetteville, N.Y.18

  As they grew older, Stanton and Gage recognized that superficial changes in their culture and government would not bring freedom. Mirrored by surrounding nations with an ancient history of mutuality, the cutthroat world of competition in which they lived appeared flawed. “The hope of the future seems to be largely in cooperation,” Gage mused.19 Stanton concurred in the speech she delivered at her eightieth birthday party:My message today to our coadjutors is that we have a higher duty than the demand for suffrage. We must now, at the end of fifty years of faithful service, broaden our platform and consider the next step in progress ... cooperation, a new principle in industrial economics. We see that the right of suffrage avails nothing for the masses in competition with the wealthy classes, and, worse still, with each other.20

  They knew a cooperative society was possible; they had seen it.

  From Subordination to Cooperation

  Punished simply for being female, both religiously and legally, without rights (or even a recognized existence), the EuroAmerican wife and mother was the virtual slave of her husband. Not all men were tyrants but the law, as Lucretia Mott said, gave all men the right of tyranny. Most paid positions were closed to women and the few available ones paid no more than half the wages men received for the same work. None of this was natural or divinely inspired, said the advocates of woman’s rights. They personally knew of nations where women’s work stood equally valued with that of men.

  Underpinnings of Western women’s oppression were to be found in the Bible, Stanton and Gage believed. Genesis 3:16 consigned women to subordination to men because of the sin of Eve:Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

  In her Woman’s Bible, Stanton interpreted this passage and its effect on women:The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty ... so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.1

  [Men] “cling to the idea of the family unit,” Stanton maintained, “because on that is based the absolute power of the father over the property, children, and the civil and political rights of wives.”2 She echoed words she had written decades earlier, when she penned the “Declaration of Sentiments” in 1848 for the first woman’s rights conv
ention in the world’s history at Seneca Falls:He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.3

  Violence Against Women

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton was especially sensitive to the issue of divorce, publicly and consistently calling for a change in the law to allow women the right to leave loveless and dangerous marriages. She was labeled an infidel on more than one occasion for this stand, Christianity generally holding the opinion that marriage was a covenant with God which no woman had a right to break, even if her life was in danger from a violent husband. To contrast Indian-style divorce in an 1891 speech to the National Council of Women, Stanton called on the memoirs of Ashur Wright, long-time missionary (among the Seneca) whose wife, Laura, had published a dictionary of the Seneca language. Ashur Wright related:Usually the females ruled the house. The stores were in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge; and after such an order it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him; and unless saved by the intercession of some aunt or grandmother he must retreat to his own clan, or go and start a new matrimonial alliance in some other.4

  Suffragist Alice Fletcher delicately explained that “offense and injuries which can befall a woman”—marital rape and battering—when they occurred, “would be avenged and punished by the relatives under tribal law, but which have no penalty or recognition under our [United States] laws. If the Indian brother should, as of old, defend his sister, he would himself become liable to the law and suffer for his championship.”5

  ... the wife never becomes entirely under the control of her husband. Her kindred have a prior right, and can use that right to separate her from him or to protect her from him, should he maltreat her. The brother who would not rally to the help of his sister would become a by-word among his clan. Not only will he protect her at the risk of his life from insult and injury, but he will seek help for her when she is sick and suffering ...6

  Carrie S. Burnham, the legal genius of the National Woman Suffrage Association, analyzed women’s position under common law. As the women had claimed in 1848, men had the right to beat their wives.

  The husband being bound to provide for his wife the necessaries of life, and being responsible for “her morals” and the good order of the household, may choose and govern the domicile, choose her associates, separate her from her relatives, restrain her religious and personal freedom, compel her to cohabit with him, correct her faults by mild means and if necessary chastise her with the same moderation as [if] she was his apprentice or child.7

  Under common law, a husband had the right to beat his wife so long as the battering wasn’t too harsh. Blackstone explained that “the husband, by the old law, might give his wife moderate correction; for, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, he ought to have the power to control her.”8 The courts generally concurred.

  In an 1864 case where a husband and wife had separated, he entered the home, “seized her by her hair, pulled her down upon the floor and held her there for some time,” injuring her head and throat, the pain continuing for several months after the attack. The North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed his right to do so in an 1864 ruling that “A husband is responsible for the acts of his wife, and he is required to govern his household, and for that purpose the law permits him to use towards his wife such a degree of force as is necessary to control an unruly temper and make her behave herself, and unless some permanent injury be inflicted, or there be an excess of violence, or such a degree of cruelty as show that it is inflicted to gratify his own bad passions, the law ... prefers to leave the parties to themselves, as the best mode of inducing them to make the matter up and live together as man and wife should.”9

  A far different fate awaited Native wife batterers, as writer Minnie Myrtle interpreted the teaching of Handsome Lake about the eternal punishment awaiting any wife batterer: “A man, who was in the habit of beating his wife, was led to the red-hot statue of a female, and requested to treat it as he had done his wife. He commenced beating it, and the sparks flew out and were continually burning him, but yet he would not consume. Thus would it be done to all who beat their wives.”10

  In the Journal of American Folklore, Beauchamp related an Iroquois story in which “A man who had beaten his wife cruelly upon earth, struck a red hot statue of woman. The sparks flew with every blow and burned him.”11 Minnie Myrtle attributes this story to the Code of Handsome Lake, the Haudenosaunee spiritual guide.

  Fletcher was concerned about what would happen to Indian women when they became citizens, lost their rights and were treated with the same legal disrespect as white women, as she explained to the International Council of Women in 1888:Not only does the woman under our laws lose her independent hold on her property and herself, but there are offenses and injuries which can befall a woman which would be avenged and punished by the relatives under tribal law, but which have no penalty or recognition under our laws. If the Indian brother should, as of old, defend his sister, he would himself become liable to the law and suffer for his championship.12

  She was referring, of course, to sexual and physical violence against women. Native men’s intolerance of rape was commented upon by many eighteenth and nineteenth century Indians and non-Indian reporters alike, many of whom contended that rape didn’t exist among Native nations prior to white contact. 13

  “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,”14 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.” She elaborated, saying that Miss Remington, for example, a teacher at Onondaga, “often starts off, between eight and nine in the evening, lantern in one hand and alpenstock in the other, and a parcel of supplies strung from her shoulder, to walk for a mile or more up the hill-sides.” Without fear.15 [Miss Remington, “had long been in charge of the mission house. She was adopted into the Snipe Clan of the Onondaga in 1886, and given the name “Ki-a-was-say,” A new word.]

  Gage is likely to have had this information. William Beauchamp’s daughter-in-law dedicated her “The Battle Hymn of the Suffragists,” to Matilda Joslyn Gage. Gage also wrote short stories for The Skaneateles Democrat—a paper edited by the father of Mary Elizabeth and William’s father—in the 1850s.

  Coming from a European tradition which legalized both marital rape and wife battering, it is difficult to comprehend a culture in which rape was not allowed. Living in a country where one out of three women are raped, according to current FBI statistics, it is tempting to believe—as some current scholarship would have us believe—that rape is biologically inherent. Our feminist foremothers knew better, since they knew women who lived in nations where men did not rape.

  A Tuscarora Chief, Elias Johnson, wrote about the absence of rape among Haudenosaunee men in his popular 1881 history. As far as he knew, among white men, it was only the Germans who held the same respect for woman, Johnson wryly added, “until they became civilized.” Maintaining that sexual violation of women was virtually unknown among all Indian men, Johnson celebrated the “marvelous” fact “that whole nations, consisting of millions, should have been so trained, religiously or domestically, that [nothing] should have tempted them from the strictest honor and the most delicate kindness.”16

  Another Tuscarora, J. N. B. Hewitt (whose publications with the Bureau of American Ethnology o
f the Smithsonian Institution are widely read and cited by anthropologists), substantiated Johnson’s claim:This great regard for the person of woman was not limited to the persons of native Iroquois women, but women of alien blood and origin shared with them this respect. For example: In the face of circumstances adverse to the Iroquois, Gen. James Clinton, commanding the New York division of the Sullivan punitive expedition in 1779, with orders to disperse the hostile Iroquois and to destroy their homes, paid his enemies the high tribute of a brave soldier by writing in April, 1779, to his lieutenant, Colonel Van Schaick, then leading his troops against the Onondaga [one of the six Iroquois nations] and their villages, the following terse compliment: “Bad as these savages are, they never violate the chastity of any woman, their prisoner.” And he added this significant admonition to his colonel, “It would be well to take measures to prevent a stain upon our army. ”17

  A Woman’s Right to Her Children

  This issue of lineage had great bearing on the status18 of women, early feminists believed. Gage wrote about the absence of a woman’s right to her children in the EuroAmerican tradition:The slave code has always been that children shall follow the condition of the mother; hence, as the present law of marriage makes the wife the irresponsible slave of the husband—robbing her of her name, her earnings, her accountability—it consistently follows that she shall be robbed of her children. Blackstone, the chief exponent of common law, says: “A mother has no legal right or authority over her children; she is only entitled to respect and honor.” The United States, governing itself by English law, inherited this with other oppressions, and it to this day holds force in most of the thirty-seven States of the Union. One or two States have by statute law placed the mother on equal basis of legal right with the father ... men, calling themselves Christian men, have dared to defy God’s law, and to give to the father alone the sole right to the child; have dared make laws which permit the dying father of an unborn child to will it away, and to give any person he pleases to select the right to wait the advent of that child, and when the mother, at the hazard of her own life, has brought it forth, to rob her of it and to do by it as the dead father directed. What an anomaly on Justice is such a law! 19