Perdue – Popular Politics in Early America

October 17, 2013

An Expansion of Women's History

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This past week, we read Theda Perdue’s Cherokee Women. I found it very interesting because I have not read many direct accounts of Native American life and society structure, and unsurprisingly ones I have read tended to focus on men. As Michael Lameroux points out in his post, this book fits into what I have seen from a few other books in my history classes in the past year or so. For example, last year I read Woody Holton’s Abigail Adams, which focused on how John Adams’ wife Abigail took an active and often equal role in their marriage. I also read Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles, which spent a good deal of time on Molly Brant, a woman of the Mohawk tribe who wielded great power in her community during the Revolutionary era, in great part due to her romantic relationship with the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs. However, those books focused on women of the upper echelons of their respective societies, and also ones who likely would not have had as much power were it not for their husbands’ positions. Perdue’s book, on the other hand, exposes the importance of the roles of a wider swath of Cherokee women.

Perdue begins by establishing that the Cherokee did have defined gender roles, which she describes as “theoretically rigid” but in reality not so, due to men’s propensity to help. Women’s duties included agricultural chores, which seems to have been typical of native societies who depended heavily on crops. (18) Another example of a similarly structured society is that of many western African cultures, where agricultural tasks were similarly seen as women’s work to the point that men who participated were lesser than their peers. However, Perdue makes it clear that things were much more fluid among the Cherokee, pointing out that men were often expected to help in these agricultural duties rather than discouraged. Perdue also points out the important role of the menstrual cycle in Cherokee society. Cherokee women derived power from the menstrual cycle as it was so tied to pregnancy and childbirth. Perdue’s account of the myth of the “stone man” shows that this reverence for women’s menstruation was a deep-rooted part of Cherokee culture.

If I had one issue with the book, it is that I am a bit worried about the primary source material Perdue uses to make these claims. In the introduction, Perdue outlines the difficulties of finding reliable primary source material on Native American women, noting that many of the early accounts of Native American life come from Europeans who lacked context for what they saw and likely misinterpreted a lot. That, combined with the fact that historians have neglected women in general until relatively recently, makes this a difficult subject to research. However, after the introduction, Perdue does not remark much on those concerns. I think that it is difficult to make definitive claims with such limited source material, and believe Perdue should have done more to justify why her sources were worthwhile and good enough to back up her claims.

October 17, 2013

"Hear that, Ed? Bears. Now you're putting the whole station in jeopardy."

As both Ian and AJ have commented, this book shocked my preconceived perception about Cherokee women. I, too, began this book with the notion that women maintained a submissive role to the men in Cherokee society as they did in European societies. A combination of menstrual power, farming techniques, and the ability to birth children, positioned women atop the gender ladder in Cherokee society. In conjunction with Ian’s claim, Perdue even goes so far as to say women were dangerous because they maintained the ability to bring about unknown change (34). Furthermore, Perdue discusses those Cherokees who crossed the traditional gender roles. As I read her description of the events, I came to the same conclusion as Perdue. Men who farmed were not taken seriously because they could neither fight nor bear a child, yet women who proved victorious on the battlefield showed their power to be proficient in nearly all aspects of life important to the Cherokees. Another aspect of the Cherokee society that Perdue brings up concerns the opposite of the classic Disney portrayal of Native Americans. Hunting was not nearly as important to the tribe as I anticipated it would be; however, farming various foods, especially corn, provided most of the tribe’s sustenance. This dependence on farming further elevated the status of women.

The concept of marriages in Cherokee culture also varied significantly from European marriages. Although the two cultures were similar in the reverence for childbearing ability, Cherokee women were revered for this ability and they derived much of their power from it (55). Perdue’s description of infidelity astonished me. As she states, married women were not given complete freedom to intermingle with other men; however, the attitude was drastically different than if a man cheated on a woman. Part of this attitude change derived from the lack of support men had to tell on their wives. In Cherokee culture, according to Perdue, it seemed in the man’s best interest to never speak of his wife’s infidelity. Additionally, when a man did decide to take action, an implausible experiment was the only way to punish his wife (reviving a dead fly and burrowing the fly in the woman’s body).

I wasn’t a big fan of the rest of Perdue’s book. Once she got away from the initial information about Cherokees (maybe I liked it because it was new and unique), Perdue describes the Indian encounters with Americans in extreme detail. Because Cherokee women adopted much different roles and lost much of their power due to this American invasion, I think the book loses some of its mystique during the chronicles of Cherokee maltreatment. Cherokee women adopted many western characteristics, such as religious beliefs and domestic roles. Interestingly though, the United States initially sought to maintain somewhat peaceful relations with the Cherokees and respected many of their customs, laws, and traditions. At least during Washington’s presidency, the overall American goal was to coexist with the Cherokees in a symbiotic relationship. As Perdue points out, Washington’s ideas severely hurt women because the American view of women was drastically different than the Cherokee. Washington didn’t even include women in his address to the Cherokee chief (112). Unfortunately for women, the American perception eventually became more of the norm within Cherokee culture and women’s power diminished severely as did the Cherokee nation itself.

October 16, 2013

A Culture of Persistence

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.