Is equality indigenous? The Untold Iroquois Influence on Early Radical Feminists

Among the Haudenosaunee, family lineage 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 matrilocal clan. Stanton envied how American Indian women "ruled the house" and how "descent of property and children were in the female line." Gage, while serving as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1875, penned a series of admiring articles about the Iroquois 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." For these white women living in a world where marital rape was commonplace and forbidden by neither church nor state (although the Comstock Laws of the 1870s outlawed discussion of it), Indian women's violence-free and empowered home life must have looked like heaven. From her firsthand knowledge of the Iroquois, Stanton knew that the patriarchal "women's sphere" was not universal. When called a "savage," for instance, for practicing natural childbirth, Stanton rebutted her critics by mocking their use of the world; she also pointed out that Indian women "do not suffer" giving birth - thus it was absurd to suppose "that only enlightened Christian women are cursed" by painful, difficult childbirth. 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. "The Bible," she wrote, Gage agreed, naming the church the "bulwark" of women's oppression. "In the name of religion," Gage wrote in Woman, Church and State, published in 1893, "the worst crimes against humanity have ever been perpetrated." [Alice Fletcher] also quoted an Indian man who reproached white men: "Your laws show how little your men care for their women. The wife is nothing of herself." He was not alone in chastising white men for their domination of women. A Tuscarora chief, Elias Johnson, writing about the absence of rape among Iroquois men in his popular 1881 book, Legends, Traditions and Laws, of the Iroquois, or Six Nations..., commented wryly that European men had held the same respect for women "until they became civilized." Acco