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Theda Perdue’s “Cherokee Women” is one of the few academic works that assesses how women were affected by European imperialists and explorers in a more traditional society. A well-regarded work that tells a story that is relatively unknown to most; “Cherokee Women” details a drastically different view of the role and impact of Cherokee women in their society during colonial and European expansion. I personally liked this book because unlike some of the other pieces we have read this semester, this work clearly had its depth of research but distanced itself from some of our other reads by presenting it in a manner that makes it manageable to the average history reader. Like Ian stated in his previous post, this was somewhat of an eye-opening read for me because it illustrated such a different type of female than the usual colonial and European perspective we run into so often. The submissive or obedient women is often the picture painted by colonial and European history, a picture I obviously went into this book imagining and a picture I surely did not see. Unlike the patriarchal society we are often accustomed too and often find in our history texts involving this time frame, Perdue describes Cherokee females as holders of power and influence in their traditional matrix of societal power.
First, before I get into my opinions of Perdue’s interpretations of Cherokee female society and its significance to our understanding of our nation’s history and unique cultural and gender studies, I want to quickly comment on the interesting choice in cover art for the book. Even though most of her work is documenting the experienced changes in Cherokee women through their contact with colonial expansion and eventual removal, Purdue does also tell a story about the Cherokee people and their continued valued in culture and tradition. I found the cover art to be interesting and clever because she chooses to portray a woman from each of the seven Cherokee clans to mark her central claim, that Cherokee women are the people and are the culture. Moving forward, my first instinct after reading this work was to compare it to the only other work I have read regarding and detailed matrilineal societies and the strong role of women in a traditional culture. My first experience was with the early civilizations in Western Africa that placed a high emphasis on their matrilineal culture and a higher emphasis on the special powers of the women that make it work. I like Ian’s quote and its general blanketing of Perdue’s explanation of Cherokee women’s power, it reads “I have this to say that the women rules the roost and wears the breeches and sometimes will beat their husbands within an inch of their lives.” Each gender provided different roles within societies structure that needed to be filled, neither was subservient to the other, rather a tribe coming together and balancing roles throughout its people.
Perdue strongly argues that “the story of most Cherokee women is not cultural transformation…but remarkable cultural persistence.” If historians were to look at “other indices of cultural change, including production, reproduction, religion, and perceptions of self, as well as political and economic institutions,” then a very different portrait is painted of these Cherokee women during and after contact with the new world and that is one of cultural persistence. Obviously, she cannot deny the profound negative effects that contact with Europeans had on women and nicely articulates the diminished influence women had in terms of trade, possessions and political status due to this contact. I want my last point to focus on her pretty convincing argument about cultural persistence. Despite the negative impacts of encroachment by whites, may it be takeover of institutions or relocation to the west, “a distinct culture survived removal, rebuilding, civil war, reconstruction, allotment and Oklahoma statehood.” She quietly touches on the continuing influence of the role of the women towards the end of the 20th century to prove her point on the persistence of this different culture. She ends quite persuasively in my opinion, and states the fate of Cherokee women has been one of “persistence and change, conservatism and adaptation, tragedy and survival.” I believe that this is a nice look into matrilineal roles and there control of trade and social functions, how this was changed as war and economics adapted and how they affected certain European and Indian relations and dominant European viewpoints.