Matilda Joslyn Gage
Gage contrasted this with the primacy of the mother-child bond among the Haudenosaunee:If for any cause the Iroquois husband and wife separated, the wife took with her all the property she had brought into the wigwam; the children also accompanied the mother, whose right to them was recognized as supreme.20
Clark, (the regional historian cited by Gage), explained that Iroquois marriage and separation required “no special ceremony, no disgrace, and each keeps their property.”21
Amazed at the absolute authority of the mother, Gage marveled that,So fully to this day is descent reckoned through the mother, that blue-eyed, fair-haired children of white fathers are numbered in the tribe and receive both from state and nation their portion of the yearly dole paid to Indian tribes. The veriest pagan among the Iroquois, the renowned and important Keeper of the Wampum, and present sole interpreter of the Belts which give the most ancient and secret history of this confederation, is Ephraim Webster, descended from a white man, who, a hundred or more years since, became affiliated through marriage with an Indian woman, as a member of the principal nation of the Iroquois, the Onondagas.22
Ephraim Webster, who came as a trader in 1786, lived with the Onondaga and Oneida for a quarter of a century, and was adopted into the Onondaga nation. Webster said,The Indians have no altercations, and that in ten years I have not heard any angry expression nor seen any degree of passion. They treated their women with respect, even tenderness. They used no ardent spirits. They settled differences amicably, raised wheat and corn in considerable quantities, and also apples.23
“The children always followed the totemship of the mother,”Rose Yawger wrote in her 1893 Good Housekeeping-approved book, then explained:.If a Seneca brave married a Cayuga squaw [sic], the children were not Senecas, as might be supposed, but Cayugas, and even though they were born and brought up among the Senecas, they were aliens to the tribe and had to be adopted in the same ceremonious manner that strangers sometimes were. The Cayuga nation could even call on them to take arms in case of war.24
Minnie Myrtle, whose writing was published by the popular Appleton press in 1855, similarly wrote: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 if she chooses, and to their father they are ever [mere] strangers.25
Men were mourned but, Hale wrote, “it is still harder when the woman shall die, because with her the line is lost.”26 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 .27
“Such was the reasoning,” Hale marveled, “of these heathen barbarians. Enlightened Christendom has hardly yet advanced to the mark of these opinions.”28
Matilda Joslyn Gage first wrote in 1875 about the “division of power between the sexes in this Indian republic” which, she contended, “was nearly equal.”29 As President of the National Woman Suffrage Association she published a series of articles on the Iroquois which were featured prominently in the NewYork Evening Post and reprinted in several other papers in the state.30 The introduction to the series recognized the significance of this suffrage/Native American connection, stating:Mrs. Gage, with an exhibition of ardent devotion to the cause of woman’s rights which is very proper in the president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, gives prominence to the fact that in the old days when the glory of the famous confederation of savages was at its height, the power and importance of women were recognized by the allied tribes.31
Her writing on the superior rights of Haudenosaunee women continued, and twenty years later, Gage noted that:The family relation among the Iroquois demonstrated woman’s superiority in power. When an Indian husband brought the products of the chase to the wigwam, his control over it ceased. In the home, the wife was absolute; the sale of the skins was regulated by her, the price was paid to her.32
Property Rights
EuroAmerican women lost all rights to their property when they married. Native women, men, and children all had control of their own personal property, an authority which was respected by all. Alice Fletcher talked about the property rights among the Indian women in the numerous tribes and nations she had observed, touching a sensitive nerve as she recounted this personal experience with the Omaha:At the present time all property is personal; the man owns his own ponies and other belongings which he has personally acquired; the woman owns her horses, dogs, and all the lodge equipments, children own their own articles, and parents do not control the possessions of their children. There is really no family property, as we use the term. A wife is as independent in the use of her possessions as is the most independent man in our midst. If she chooses to give away or sell all of her property, there is no one to gainsay her ... 33
When I was living with the Indians, my hostess ... one day gave away a very fine horse. I was surprised, for I knew there had been no family talk on the subject, so I asked: “Will your husband like to have you give the horse away?” Her eyes danced, and, breaking into a peal of laughter, she hastened to tell the story to the other women gathered in the tent, and I became the target of many merry eyes. I tried to explain how a white woman would act, but laughter and contempt met my explanation of the white man’s hold upon his wife’s property.34
A similar story came from the pen of a French woman, Emma Borglum, who spent her 1891 honeymoon with the Dakota on the Crow Creek reservation of South Dakota, where her husband, sculptor Solon Borglum, (brother of Gutzum, the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore) was working:One day I showed some astonishment at seeing a young Indian woman, in the absence of her husband, give two horses to a friend. She looked at me very coldly and said: “These horses are mine.” I excused myself saying that in my country a woman would consult her husband before giving such expensive presents. The woman answered proudly: “I would not be a white woman!”35
Minnie Myrtle wrote, “In regard to property, too, the wife retains whatever belonged to her before marriage distinct from her husband, and can dispose of it as she pleases without his consent, and if she separates from him, takes it with her, and at her death, either before or after separation, her children inherit all she possessed.36
It was far different for United States women under common law, which denied them property rights, as attorney Carrie S. Burnham explained:By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the legal existence of the woman is “merged in that of her husband.” He is her “baron,” or “lord,” bound to supply her with shelter, food, clothing and medicine and is entitled to her earnings—the use and custody of her person which he may seize wherever he may find it.37
Stanton and Gage read early anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose study of the Iroquois also served as a basis for Frederick Engel’s On the Origins of the Family,Private Property and the State.The Haudenosaunee thus gave a practical example and framework for the development of socialism as well as feminism.
Morgan, who left money in his will to endow a women’s college at the University of Rochester, carefully explained how “not the least remarkable of their [Iroquois] institutions, was that which confined the transmission of all titles, rights and property in the female line to the exclusion of the male.” To EuroAmerican men who came from a political /social heritage in which only sons could inherit, it must have been remarkable to discover “the perpetual disinheritance of the son” among the Iroquois.
The Haudenosaunee principle that “the child must be the son of its mother, although not necessarily of its mother’s husband” sharply contrasted with the Euro-Christian system of descent traced through the male line with legitimacy exclusively conveyed by the ather.38
While feminists—with the support of their male allies—were waging an uphill struggle to gain married women the right to control their own property and wages, Morgan pointed out that among the Iroquois:The rights of property, of both husband and wife, were continued distinct during the existence of the marriage relation; the wife holding, and controlling her own, the same as her husband, and in case of separation, taking it with her.39
In 1846, two years before the first woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, the noted scholar Henry Schoolcraft—one of Gage’s sources—had similarly written:Marriage, among the Iroquois, appears to be a verbal contract between the parties, which does not affect the rights of property. Goods, personal effects, or valuables of any kind personal or real, which were the wife’s before, remain so after marriage. Should any of these be used by the husband, he is bound to restore the property or its worth in the event of separation.... Descent being counted by the female, may be either an original cause or effect of this unique law.40
While Schoolcraft’s Christian-blinded eyes failed to see the spiritual foundation that rooted longhouse marriages in the hands of a supportive community, other EuroAmerican observers commented on the remarkable stability of these marriages. Economic independence seemed to be good for a marriage.
The first married woman’s property law in the country was passed in Mississippi in 1839, a full nine years before New York reformed its law in 1848. Years later the Mississippi Bar Association explained how this unlikely Southern state became a leader in women’s rights reform:Let it not be forgotten, however, whence came to us the conception. It is said, and it is no doubt true, that our first married woman’s law ‘in the statute of 1839’ embodied and was suggested by the tribal customs of the Chickasaw Indians, who lived in our borders.41
The vision of economic equality in marriage spread slowly across the United States as women demanded their financial independence.
No Equality in Employment
Women’s subordinate position in marriage spilled over into the world of employment as well, as the “Declaration of Sentiments” made clear at the very beginning of the woman’s rights movement:He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.42
Four years later, in her maiden speech at the third National Women’s Rights Convention, held in Syracuse during 1852, Matilda Joslyn Gage pointed out the connection between lack of employment, unequal pay, and marriage:Because all lucrative and honorable means of support have been seized by men, ... women have been driven to marriage as a necessity ... or driven to a life of pollution, by the insufficiency of wages in those departments of labor which she is legitimately permitted to enter ... men’s wages are from one-half to two-thirds greater than woman’s.43
How far removed was this life from that of Haudenosaunee women doing respected, satisfying, enjoyable work which gave them economic autonomy?
Alice Fletcher talked about her conversations with Native women who were well aware of their superior rights:As I have tried to explain our statutes 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.”44
Fletcher found a similar response among Indian men:Men have said: “Your laws show how little your men care for their women. The wife is nothing of herself. She is worth little but to help a man to have one hundred and sixty acres.” One day, sitting in the tent of an old chief, famous in war [one source says this is the Lakota medicine man, Sitting Bull], he said to me: “My young men are to lay aside their weapons; they are to take up the work of the women; they will plow the field and raise the crops; for them I see a future, but my women, they to whom we owe everything, what is there for them to do? I see nothing! You are a woman; have pity on my women when everything is taken from them.”45
Political Outsider and Lawbreaker
The vote was the major tool that women could use in the white nation to gain their rights. They believed suffrage was their inherent right in a Republic based upon the consent of the governed. The government believed otherwise. State laws denied women suffrage and, in 1874, the United States Supreme Court ruled that they had the constitutional right to do so. Women did not achieve a recognition of their constitutional right to vote in the United States of America until the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally enacted in 1920, seventy-two years after the struggle began. EuroAmerican women came from an age-old tradition of political slavery, as Stanton charged in “The Declaration of Sentiments”:The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.... Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen ... he has oppressed her on all sides.1
Suffragists waged a campaign of civil disobedience during which they broke the law (by voting), refused to pay their taxes (no taxation without representation), and accused the government of failing to live up to its founding principle—a government based on the consent of the governed.
“I am a citizen of the United States and the state of New York, and demand the right to vote for the rulers and laws by which I am governed,” wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the Centennial Autograph Book at the Philadelphia Commemoration on July 4, 1876. Twenty-eight years after their first call for the vote, the suffragists of the National Woman Suffrage Association chose their words carefully. Women already had the right to vote, they argued. Were they not citizens of a Republic based on the consent of the governed? Did they not pay taxes? How wrong it would be to ask for a right denied them; no, they demanded that the federal government protect them in exercising that right.
Matilda Joslyn Gage, the movement’s foremost theoretician, outlined their position in her “Woman’s Rights Catechism”:Q: From whence do governments derive their just powers?
A: From the consent of the governed. (Declaration of Independence)
Q: Are rights granted people by governments or through constitutions?
A: No. Rights existed before governments are founded or constitutions created.
Q: Of what use then are governments and institutions? A: To protect people in the exercise and enjoyment of their natural and fundamental rights, which existed before governments or constitutions were made. (Declaration of Independence and Constitution)
Q: What is a citizen?
A: In the United States, a citizen is a person, native or naturalized, who has the privilege of exercising the elective franchise. (Webster)
Q: What persons are citizens of the United States?
A: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside. (14th Amendment)
Q: What right has a citizen of the United States?
A: The right to vote ...
Q: Are those persons who, under color of law, forbid woman the ballot, law-keepers or law-breakers?
A: They are law-breakers, acting in defiance to both National and State law, in thus refusing to women citizens the exercise of a right secured to them by the Constitution of the United States; and they render themselves liable to prosecution thereby.2
In this interpretation, each state was therefore a law-breaker for having laws that denied women their legal right to vote. Schooled in the
anti-slavery movement, the suffragists knew that unjust laws must not be obeyed. Just as they had refused to obey the Fugitive Slave Act, they now broke the law that denied them citizenship. Gage’s “catechism” laid the groundwork for a brilliant campaign of civil disobedience.
From Maryland to Washington Territory, from Fayetteville, New York, to South Newbury, Ohio, women by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, broke the law and voted in the decade after the Civil War. In Washington, D. C. over seventy women marched to the polls in a single day. In Vineland, New Jersey, 183 women attempted to vote over a four-year period. Not all the resisters were white. African American women voted in South Carolina, where the suffragist Rollin sisters wielded such influence that their home was called the unofficial Republican Party headquarters. In Michigan, Sojourner Truth, the famous former slave, joined other women at the polls.3
Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists Page 7