Women's "rights" in the Iroquois Confederation [View all]

Just thought I'd pass along a couple of links to articles I've recently read with short excerpts from each.

Women's "rights" in the Iroquois Confederation
http://www.examiner.com/article/women-s-rights-the-iroquois-confederation

(excerpts)
Each group, the Indians and the Anglo-Americans, learned from the other through these official and personal connections. To Benjamin Franklin and others in New England, the Iroquois demonstrated a system of political organization that seemed free of oppression and class, as well as gender stratification. And within the center of the Iroquois culture, was the daily demonstration in practical organization that had eluded the Europeans and their transplanted descendants: a very obvious application of gender equality and a quite natural balance of the roles and responsibilities within male – female relations.

Certainly, the Iroquois women did not fit into the mold that European women were expected to accept in that day and age. By the time other Americans started to study the Iroquois peoples in the 18th and 19th centuries, they realized that the Iroquois women held equal status to men and held leadership positions within the clan structure. It was not by accident that the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which is recognized as the foundation for the feminist movement in the United States, took place within the stomping grounds of the Iroquois people. The early leaders of the women’s rights movement were quite impressed with the equality established between men and women in the Iroquois culture.

Amazingly, Iroquois women enjoyed quite many “rights” that women in European society could only dream of having. Iroquois women participated fully in helping to maintain the economic, political, social, and spiritual well-being of their communities and clans. The women served as the keepers of their people’s culture. They served as clan leaders and the tribal leadership was matrilineal, as the sister of the sachems (chiefs or leaders) chose the male successor once her brother no longer held a leadership position...

...In the Iroquois society, women participated in many activities and held responsibilities that were primarily reserved only for men in the European-based culture. Iroquois women could own property and were the ones who actually owned the land. It seemed natural that the land was under the control of the women since they were the ones who tended the crops, and as the Iroquois were an agricultural-based society, women were fundamentally the ones responsible for nourishing the community... MORE

And this article:
The Untold Story of The Iroquois Influence On Early Feminists
http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/genwom/iroquoisinfluence.html
by Sally Roesch Wagner

(excerpt)
I had been haunted by a question to the past, a mystery of feminist history: How did the radical suffragists come to their vision, a vision not of Band-Aid reform but of a reconstituted world completely transformed?

For 20 years I had immersed myself in the writings of early United States women's rights activists -- Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) -- yet I could not fathom how they dared to dream their revolutionary dream. Living under the ideological hegemony of nineteenth-century United States, they had no say in government, religion, economics, or social life ("the four-fold oppression" of their lives, Gage and Stanton called it.) Whatever made them think that human harmony -- based on the perfect equality of all people, with women absolute sovereigns of their lives -- was an achievable goal?

Surely these white women, living under conditions of virtual slavery, did not get their vision in a vacuum. Somehow they were able to see from point A, where they stood -- corseted, ornamental, legally nonpersons -- to point C, the "regenerated" world Gage predicted, in which all repressive institutions would be destroyed. What was point B in their lives, the earthly alternative that drove their feminist spirit -- not a utopian pipe dream but a sensible, do-able paradigm?

Then I realized I had been skimming over the source of their inspiration without noticing it. My own unconscious white supremacy had kept me from recognizing what these prototypical feminists kept insisting in their writings: They caught a glimpse of the possibility of freedom because they knew women who lived liberated lives, women who had always possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination -- Iroquois women.... MORE

Hope y'all will enjoy. I found the history truly fascinating.