On my 10-day road trip during this year's winter holidays, I made a stop in the town of Seneca Falls in upstate New York, in order to stand at the site of the historic 1848 Women's Rights Convention where 68 women and 32 men signed the Declaration of Sentiments condemning sexism and demanding gender equality. The fragile brick remnants of the Wesleyan Chapel where the convention was held remain standing, just barely, propped up by a modern steel support structure installed after the National Park Service purchased the plot as a National Historical Park in 1985. In the intervening years, the building had been repeatedly bought, sold, and modified, serving at various times as a plumbing workshop, a bowling alley, a roller skating rink, an auto repair shop, a laundromat, and even an opera house which hosted burlesque shows and where blackface minstrels performed such numbers as "Dar's a Watermelon Spoilin' Down at Johnson's" and "Da Disappointed Coon".
A park visitor center adjacent to the chapel serves as a sort of museum of US feminism, commemorating the 1848 milestone and many subsequent developments in the struggle for equal rights. It's obvious that a conscious effort has been made in recent years to highlight women of color, including a prominent tribute to Sojourner Truth, as well as interactive multimedia kiosks exploring intersections of race, gender, and class. It's equally obvious that such gestures of inclusion, while certainly praiseworthy, remain wedged into a set of implicit narratives which could probably still use some work. For example, discussions of the Underground Railroad, by virtue of omission, continue to create an impression that antislavery activism was the work primarily of white abolitionists heroically saving pitiful black slaves, rather than centering the ongoing efforts of black abolitionists throughout the history of slavery, from early slave rebellions, to later coalition-building with non-black indentured laborers and activists, to all manner of effective direct action and organization in the Underground Railroad and the antislavery movement.
Perhaps the most fundamental oversight, however, is embodied within the most obvious question: Why Seneca Falls? What historical winds were swirling through that particular place at that particular time to give rise to the so-called "first wave" of US feminism? Was there something in the regional water which gave women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Matilda Joslyn Gage the vision and fortitude to do what they did? Were there any socio-cultural undercurrents in Seneca Falls which might have helped create fertile intellectual ground for the foundations of US feminism?
These questions have fascinated me for years, because I've stumbled across tidbits and whispers here and there in my readings and wanderings, which have aroused suspicions that there's more to this story than I've been told. This was one of my reasons for wanting to personally visit Seneca Falls, so that I could stand among those ghosts and walk those streets and see if anything caught my eye. As it turns out, something did catch my eye, right there in a corner of the visitor center giftshop which I was perusing after taking in the exhibits, a book which jumped out at me as being exactly what I was looking for: Sisters In Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists by Sally Roesch Wagner. I decided that this would be my first book of 2009. I devoured it in a few nights and when I was done, I started over and read the whole thing again.
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Sally Roesch Wagner is a feminist pioneer who was one of the first to earn a PhD for her work in women's studies (at UC Santa Cruz) and who founded one of the nation's first women's studies programs at CSU Sacramento. She's the author and editor of numerous books and article, and serves as executive director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage foundation in Fayetteville, New York. Wagner writes in Sisters In Spirit:
For twenty years I had immersed myself in the writings of early United States women's-rights activists Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1989) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1816-1902), yet I could not fathom how they dared to dream their revolutionary dream. Living under the ideological hegemony of nineteenth-century United States, these women had no say in government, religion, economics, or social life. Whatever made them think that human harmony, respect for women's lives, and equal rights for women were achievable? Surely these white women, living under conditions they likened to slavery, did not receive their vision in a vacuum. [...]
How were these women able to see from point A, where they lived — corseted and ornamental non-persons in the eyes of the law — to point C, the "regenerated world" Gage predicted, in which all repressive institutions would be destroyed? What was point B in their lives, the real and visible alternative that drove their feminist spirit — not a utopian pipe dream but a living example of equality?
Then it dawned on me. I had been skimming over the source of their vision without even noticing it. My own stunningly deep-seated presumption of white supremacy had kept me from recognizing what these prototypical feminists kept insisting in their writings. They believed women's liberation was possible because they knew liberated women, women who possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination: Haudenosaunee women.
The word Haudenosaunee (pronounced "ho-de-no-SHO-nee") means "People of the Long House" (European colonists called them "Iroquois"). The name refers both to the architectural style of their wood-framed living structures which housed up to 60 residents, and to the inclusivity of their society, which united the Six Nations of the Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, and Tuscarora under a democratic constitutional Confederacy, in which women occupied key positions of power and decision-making authority in all matters of statecraft and treaty ratification, war and peace, agriculture and economy, social order and spiritual life.
The connection between the Haudenosaunee and early US feminists is not tenuous; it is plainly documented. In the 19th century, many white folks in the Seneca Falls region had regular contact with Native folks. The local Syracuse newspaper of the day, The Onondaga Standard, regularly carried reports on Haudenosaunee council proceedings, spiritual ceremonies, political and commercial activities. An article on the Haudenosaunee ginseng trade with China, for example, informed readers that Haudenosaunee leaders were following the unfolding political turmoil overseas with interest as they thought it might have an adverse effect on trade.
Dozens of European American women in the 1800s wrote extensively about their contacts with and studies of the Haudenosaunee. Laura Sheldon Wright published Dictionary of the Seneca Language in 1835. That same year, Lydia Maria Child produced the two-volume History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations, which included descriptions of women's roles in Haudenosaunee culture in juxtaposition to European patriarchal culture. In 1855, Minnie Myrtle published The Iroquois; or, The Bright Side of Indian Character. Erminnie A. Smith was appointed by the Smithsonian Institute to study the Six Nations, and was eventually adopted into the White Bear Clan and given the name Katietiostaknost meaning "Beautiful Flower". She published Myths of the Iroquois in 1883, and at the time of her death in 1886, she had compiled a dictionary of 15,000 Haudenosaunee words.
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Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage — three of the principal architects of 19th century US feminism — all had personal contacts with Haudenosaunee women. Indeed, Lucretia Mott, a key organizer of the historic convention, actually spent time in the Seneca community of Cattaraugus in June of 1848, one month before the convention. There, she saw women leading spiritual ceremonies, and she watched women exercising equal power in political discussion and decision-making as the Seneca nation ratified changes to its governmental structure.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton's cousin, Peter Skenandoah Smith, was named after an Oneida family friend, Chief Skenandoah, and her closest neighbor in Seneca Falls was an Onondaga named Oren Tyler. Stanton often dined with Oneida women during frequent visits to her cousin's home in Petersboro. In her explosive speech before the National Council of Women in 1891, entitled "The Matriarchate, or The Mother-Age", Stanton argued for the subversion of patriarchal beliefs embedded within Christianity itself, holding up Haudenosaunee society as an alternative model of "matriarchate" or rule of mothers. She noted: "Among the greater number of the American aborigines, the descent of property and children were in the female line. Women sat in the councils of war and peace and their opinions had equal weight on all questions." Quoting the memoirs of Reverend Asher Wright, she continued:
Usually the females ruled the house. The stores were in common, but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge; and after such an order it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him, and unless saved by the intercession of some aunt or grandmother he must retreat to his own clan, or go and start a new matrimonial alliance with some other.
Indeed, Haudenosaunee women led lives that must have shocked and confused many of their European American contemporaries, who often found themselves trapped in isolated lives of drudgery and servitude. Of course, life in those times could be tough and everybody had to work hard to survive; but Haudenosaunee women enjoyed tremendous stature in their society. They were leaders of their extended clans. They farmed their own fields in communal groups, harvesting the three staple crops of corn, beans, and squash, an ecologically and nutritionally balanced combination which they called "the Three Sisters". They wore loose comfortable decorative clothing. They experienced their bodies as sacred extensions of Sky Woman and Mother Earth. They were guaranteed custody over all their children and owned everything in their homes except for their husband's weapons, horse, and sacred implements; even when a husband brought home game from the hunt, it became the woman's possession; she decided how to dispense it and she collected the money from the hide. Haudenosaunee women
appointed male chiefs to manage the state, and if a chief did not
properly serve seven generations of his people, women could vote to impeach him and remove him from office. Perhaps most shockingly, rape and violence against women was rare to the point of being almost unheard of; it was repeatedly reported that many white women felt safe wandering alone in Haudenosaunee territory at any time of day or night. And when men went hunting or fishing, conducted state business, erected buildings or monuments, or went to war, according to Haudenosaunee spiritual ideals, they did so in service of women.
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There are, of course, contradictions, complexities, and
cross-currents contained within the writings of early US feminists
about the Haudenosaunee. After all, they were still white people; which
means that they were cognitively indoctrinated to view people of color
through a dehumanizing lens of Otherness, with a certain arrogant
distaste and a feeling of their own innate cleanliness and beauty,
despite all the overwhelming in-your-face evidence of the ongoing
stream of barbaric violence which white civilization unleashed upon the
peoples of the world and upon the Earth itself. Even as European
American feminists were writing admiringly about the role of women in
Haudenosaunee society, Quaker missionaries were "Christianizing" them
by having men farm the fields and putting women to work strictly within
their homes. The "pagan" branches of the Haudenosaunee resisted this
social upheaval, believing that the fields would not be fertile if
there were no women there.
Moreover, the point here isn't to deny the influence of European thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft. There's no doubt that early US feminists saw themselves as inheritors of a distinctly European American intellectual tradition. But my perspective is that narratives such as the ones I'm presenting here can only add to, not subtract from, the sum of our knowledge. Most people who have any interest in feminism know about Susan B. Anthony, but how many know about the Women of the Long House? It seems to me that they, too, have important things to teach us.
Neither is it my intention to romanticize the Haudenosaunee and thus contribute to their Othering. Human behavior and human society are necessarily subject to human error, flaw, and folly. Yet this radically different social structure did exist and flourish, on the very soil where I grew up and still live, and I can't imagine being incurious about their ways of life and how things worked. Turning back to Wagner's writings from Sisters In Spirit:
I remembered that in the early 1970s, some feminists flirted with the idea of prehistoric matriarchies on which to pin women's egalitarian hopes. Anthropologists soon set us straight about such nonsense. The evidence just wasn't there, they said. But Paula Gunn Allen, a Laguna Pueblo / Sioux author and scholar, believed otherwise:
Beliefs, attitudes and laws such as [the Iroquois Confederation] became part of the vision of American feminists and of other human liberation movements around the world. Yet feminists too often believe that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of its rules and civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware of the recent presence of gynarchial societies on this continent is unnecessary confusion, division, and much lost time.
Allen's words opened my eyes, threw into question much of what I thought I knew about the nineteenth-century woman's movement, and sent me on an entirely new course of historical discovery. The results shook the foundation of the feminist theory I had been teaching for almost twenty years.
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Matilda Joslyn Gage is probably the least remembered of the early luminaries of US feminism, though she was a highly influential theoretician who worked closely with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and many other well-known figures. At the time of her death in 1898, Gage was working on a book about the Haudenosaunee. During her life, she was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation and given the name Karonienhawi, meaning "She who holds the sky". In 1875, while serving as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Gage published a series of articles in the New York Evening Post about the Haudenosaunee. In a piece entitled "The Remnant of the Five Nations: Woman's Rights Among the Indians", she wrote:
Division of power between the sexes in this Indian republic was nearly equal. Although the principal chief of the confederacy was a man, descent ran through the female line, the sister of the chief possessing the power of nominating his successor. The common interests of the confederacy were arranged in councils, each sex holding one of its own, although the women took the initiative in suggestion.
In another article entitled "The Onondaga Indians", Gage marveled at Native agriculture:
Their method of farming was entirely different from our own. In olden Iroquois tillage there was no turning the sod with a plough to which were harnessed a cow and a woman, as is seen today in Christian Germany; but the ground was literally 'tickled with a hoe' and it 'laughed with a harvest.' [...]
Three of the five ancient feasts of the Iroquois were agricultural feasts connected with their great staple. The first was celebrated immediately after corn planting in May, the second, or Succotash Feast, at filling of the ears in August, and continuing for a fortnight; the third, after corn-harvest. Centuries ago was agriculture honored by this ancient people. In Christian Europe during the middle ages the agriculturist was despised; the warrior was the aristocrat of civilization. In publicly honoring agriculture as did the Ongwe Hongwe [Haudenosaunee] three times a year, they surpassed in wisdom the men of Europe.
The third spiritual ceremony which Gage mentions here, the corn-harvest feast, has transmogrified into what today's Americans call "Thanksgiving". Clearly, Gage was a culinary fan of the Haudenosaunee; she published an article in Appleton's Journal in 1875 entitled "Msickquatash" in which she wrote: "Let every eater of succotash — a 'luscious mixture' of green-corn, beans, and venison correctly called 'msickquatash' — henceforth remember to whom we are indebted for that toothsome dish." And in 1886, she contributed to the Woman Suffrage Cook Book a recipe for "Old-Time Baked Indian Pudding" which she claimed was the predecessor to what came to be known as "hasty pudding".
Of course, the influence of the Haudenosaunee extended far beyond food; and indeed, beyond feminist theory. In her magnum opus Woman, Church, and State, Gage asserted that the US Constitution itself was informed by the system of government conceived by the People of the Long House:
But the most notable fact connected with woman's participation in governmental affairs among the Iroquois is the statement of Hon. George Bancroft that the form of government of the United States was borrowed from that of the Six Nations. Thus to the Matriarchate or Mother-rule is the modern world indebted for its first conception of inherent rights, natural equality of condition, and the establishment of a civilized government upon this basis.
Gage was far from the only one who believed that the "founding fathers" who framed the US Constitution derived some of their most progressive notions from the "founding mothers" of the Haudenosaunee. Once again, the evidence is voluminous and in plain sight if one is simply able to open one's eyes and cleanse one's ears of Euro-centric white-supremacist perceptual filters.
The overall symbol of the Six Nations was the bald eagle. Seminal figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson necessarily had extensive exposure to the Confederacy, which had been in place before Columbus arrived; both wrote frequently of their curiosity about Native ways of life and social organization. They were particularly intrigued by ideas of "natural liberty" which Native people enjoyed, in contrast with the imposed authority of the state as advocated by Europe's Hobbesian and Machiavellian thinkers.
I believe that in drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the "founding fathers" created a mash-up of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's tightly argued Social Contract; British imperialist law on finance, slavery, and the disenfranchisement of women; and lofty Haudenosaunee concepts of equality, liberty, and democratic self-determination.
In a letter to his wife Abigail Adams on July 10, 1776, John Adams wrote:
I wish I were at perfect liberty, to portray . . . the course of political changes in this province. It would give you a great idea of the spirit and resolution of the people, and show you, in a striking point of view, the deep roots of American Independence in all the colonies. But it is not prudent, to commit to writing such free speculations, in the present state of things. Time which takes away the veil, may lay open the secret springs of this surprising revolution.
More than 200 years later, in 1979, the chiefs of the Haudenosaunee (yes, they are still with us) released a "Haudenosaunee Statement to the World" in which was written:
European people left our council fires and journeyed forth into the world to spread principles of justice and democracy which they learned from us and which have had profound effects upon the evolution of the Modern World.
And so it seems to me that even though most people around the world have never heard the word "Haudenosaunee", they are familiar with Haudenosaunee ideas. They are famliar with the rhetoric of American democratic idealism. They have seen the symbol of the bald eagle. Thus they have heard the ongoing and still-vibrant echoes from the Women of the Long House. We no longer remember the names of the people whose great vision and wisdom gave us these gifts; but the gifts are still with us and perhaps that's what matters most.
There's something oddly thrilling about the thought that every time some grandstanding politician or pundit holds forth about self-evident truths or inalienable rights, every time the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution is solemnly read in some dusty classroom, indeed every time Congress convenes and American representative democracy attempts to function, it is an unwitting ode to the Haudenosaunee. Needless to say, US "democracy" has all-too-often succumbed to the ugliest, most oppressive, exploitative, bigoted, and authoritarian streaks which were also embedded in the founding of this nation. Yet as long as the sonorous, liberatory words passed down from the Haudenosaunee continue to echo in our cities and valleys and countrysides, words about freedom and equality and inherent human rights, then there's always hope that new life can be breathed into them and that humankind can yet build, as Matilda Joslyn Gage foretold, a regenerated world.
