Haudenosaunee women and the suffragists, as one scholar tells it

American suffragists of the nineteenth century had a living example of women with power right next door, according to a scholar of women's studies. In an essay carried on the National Park Service site, Sally Roesch Wagner argues that Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drew on what they knew of the Haudenosaunee, the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy, to imagine and argue for equality. The essay first appeared on the blog of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission, and what follows is a summary of its argument, in hubnx's own words.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan B. Anthony (right). Image from the National Park Service's page.

A leader who was left out of the story

Gage led the National Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the three trading executive posts over the 20 years the group existed. When the suffrage leadership turned conservative, the essay says, Gage left the movement and was largely written out of its history, and Stanton partly so. With them went the story of how both women looked at Haudenosaunee society, where they saw women's rights in action. The essay says that by the 1880s, after some forty years of campaigning with few gains, they looked beyond the Euro-American world they knew and found a vision of equality among their neighbors. Gage wrote that "never was justice more perfect; never was civilization higher."

Matilda Joslyn Gage. Collections of the Library of Congress.

What the essay says about Haudenosaunee women

The essay describes a family and government structure built on female authority, in the past and today:

• Women controlled the economy through their charge of growing and distributing food.
• They had the final say over land transfers and over decisions to go to war.
• Children belonged to the mother's line, and stayed with her, or with her clan family, if the parents separated.
• Women kept their own property, and so did the children.
• A clan mother chooses and advises the chief, and can remove one who stops listening to the people, weighing the effect on seven generations ahead.
• Chiefs could not be warriors, thieves or abusers of women.

The author calls the confederacy's consensus-based politics the oldest continuing democracy in the world, and says violence against women was almost unthinkable and was severely punished when it happened.

The law the suffragists lived under

By contrast, the essay says, United States common law followed Blackstone's rule that a wife's legal existence was suspended in marriage. A married woman had no right to her property, her wages, her inheritance or her body, and her children belonged to her husband. At mid-century, white women, married or single, and all enslaved women had no say in family or government decisions. Women could not vote, serve on a jury, sue or be sued, or write a will.

How the idea reached the suffragists

Alice Fletcher, an ethnographer and suffragist, told the 1888 International Council of Women that an Omaha woman she was visiting had laughed at the idea that a husband held a claim on his wife's property. Fletcher also reported that Native women told her they had been better off as Indian women than under white law, at a time when U.S. policy pushed them toward citizenship through boarding schools and assimilation laws.

Alice Fletcher. From the collections of the Library of Congress.

The essay says this example gave suffragists something they needed. Ministers told them women's subordination was God's decree, and the science of the day called women less intelligent and weaker. Native women who farmed, controlled their own lives and lived as equals of men undercut both arguments, as Stanton pointed out.

Gage wrote admiring newspaper articles on Haudenosaunee society and described, in her book Woman, Church and State, a line of descent through women and a Council of Matrons. In 1893 she was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation, receiving the name Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi. The essay notes the irony that she was considered for a voice in her adopted nation's chieftainship the same year she went on trial for voting in a state school election. Stanton, speaking to the National Council of Women in 1891, held up Haudenosaunee divorce customs as a model, and the essay says she faced criticism from clergy and other suffragists for promoting divorce.

The author's conclusion

Wagner concludes that Indigenous women of many nations had rights and economic independence long before European settlers arrived, and that the Six Nations clan mothers still nominate, hold in office and remove their chiefs. Non-native women, she writes, still have much to learn from Native women.

Sources

• Sally Roesch Wagner (founder and executive director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center for Social Justice Dialogue; adjunct faculty member at Syracuse University), "How Native American Women Inspired the Women's Rights Movement", National Park Service page (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/how-native-american-women-inspired-the-women-s-rights-movement.htm), first published on the blog of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission; the author's biography, bibliography and the commission's logo are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.