Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (review)

This book examines changes in Cherokee gender roles from the period of the Cherokees’ sustained contact with the British colonists to the era of their forced removal in 1838/39 from their southeastern homeland to what is now Oklahoma. Authoritative, careful, and often witty, this volume should become standard reading in the historical subdisciplines of gender, American Indians, and the early American republic. Perdue argues that men adapted the Anglo-American individualistic ethic to Cherokee forms more quickly than did women, whose corporate ethic found some voice in Cherokee affairs to the end. Cultural changes in gender proceeded more rapidly and thoroughly among the emerging elite—characterized by slave ownership, education, and a pattern of intermarriage with British subjects or American citizens—than they did among the mass of Cherokees who left no documents behind. Among women and the poor, traditional Cherokee gender proved to be resilient.

Perdue’s approach is ethnohistorical. In an effort to correct for obvious deficiencies in the documentary record, she employs readings of archaeological site reports, ethnological collections of myths—both written in later periods than that covered by her book—as well as evidence from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to reconstitute traditional and changing Cherokee gender relations. “Ethnohistorians . . . have their work cut out for them when they . . . write about Native women, because most people who recorded the Native past were men, and men of European origin at that” (3). Those men, moreover, got much of their information from Indian men, leaving Indian women doubly obscured.

Perdue declares her opposition to a “declension model,” an early version of native women’s history that saw a decline in women’s status and power accompany colonization. She also challenges such historians as McLoughlin, who, following Wallace, argued both that Indians suffered massive cultural disorientation, even anomie, in the wake of colonization’s devastating blows, and that such cultural pathology could be followed by remarkable revitalization (7).¹ Perdue sees this scenario as overdrawn. Instead, persistence “is one of the themes of this book” (8).

Does Perdue protest too much? The first 150 pages of her book read like a story of declension. Women became isolated from the major currents of Cherokee economic, political, and judicial affairs. Male hunters and warriors, who bargained with colonists more than did female farmers, became economically more important, and their individualistic ethic proved more amenable to the market than did the female farmers’ corporate ethic. As Cherokees centralized their political Nation to meet the challenge of colonization, and as they scattered their settlements to adopt Anglo-American plantation agriculture and semiferal livestock-raising practices, the importance of town councils, in which women had a voice, declined. The new Cherokee National Council, elected without reference to matrilineal clans, outlawed the traditional legal practice of clan-based retaliation, which had until then given women a voice in law and order.

Yet, Perdue convincingly argues that the decline of women’s power was not absolute, and that relative to Anglo-American women, Cherokee women retained remarkable influence over such key areas as property, household authority, and religion. She also leaves one convinced that the models of cultural death and rebirth, of massive anomie and brilliant renascence, however dramatic may be their appeal, need revision.