Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists Read Online Free Page B

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?
     

    Corseted and ornamental non-persons in the eyes of the law.

     
    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.
    Gage and Stanton, major theorists of the woman suffrage movement’s radical wing, became increasingly disenchanted with the inability and unwillingness of Western institutions to change and embrace the liberty of not just women, but all disfranchised groups. They looked elsewhere for their vision of the “regenerated world” and they found it—in upstate New York. They became students of the Haudenosaunee and found a cosmological world view they believed to be superior to the patriarchal, white-male-dominated view prevalent in their own nation.
    Once I understood the connection, I came to realize it was everywhere—right where I hadn’t seen it before. The more evidence I uncovered of this indelible Native influence on the vision of early United States feminists, the more certain I became that, previously, I had been dead wrong. Like most historians do, I had assumed that the story of feminism began with the “discovery” of America by white men, or the political revolution staged by the colonists—that there was no seed of feminism already in American soil when the first white settlers arrived. Without realizing it, I had assumed that white people had imported the germ of the idea of woman’s rights and that was the end of the story. My eyes and ears, I realized, certainly needed the clearing Ray Fadden advised in his “Fourteen Strings of Purple Wampum to Writers about Indians.”

A Vision of Everyday Justice
     
    The European invasion of America resulted in genocide. That is the most important story of contact. But it is not the only one. While Europeans concentrated on “Christianizing and civilizing,” relocating and slaughtering Indians, they also signed treaties, coexisted with and learned from them. Regular trade, cultural sharing, even friendship between Native Americans and EuroAmericans transformed the immigrants. Perhaps nowhere was this social interaction more evident than in the towns and villages in upstate New York where Matilda Joslyn Gage lived, Elizabeth Cady Stanton grew up, and Lucretia Mott visited. All three of these leading suffragists knew Haudenosaunee women, citizens of the Six Nations Confederacy that had established peace among themselves long before Columbus arrived at this “old” world.
    Stanton, for instance, sometimes sat across from Oneida women at the dinner table in Peterboro, New York, during frequent visits to her cousin, the radical social activist Gerrit Smith. 11 Smith’s daughter (also named Elizabeth) was among the first to shed the twenty pounds of clothing that fashion dictated should hang from any fashionable woman’s waist, usually dangerously deformed from corseting. The reform costume Elizabeth Smith adopted (named the “Bloomer” after the newspaper editor who popularized it) promised the health and comfort of the loose-fitting tunic and leggings worn by Native American friends of the two Elizabeths.
     

    Bloomers on an American woman. Carolyn Mountpleasant, a Seneca woman, in traditional dress.

     
    In 1853 Gage worked on a committee headed by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley to document the woefully