Yellow Women and Leslie Marmon Silko's Feminism

Mary Crow Dog in her memoir Lakota Woman admires in passing the lifestyle of the Pueblo Indians, who, unlike her own people, the Lakota Sioux, had not been uprooted and herded onto reservations. She writes, "I could not help noticing the great role women played in Pueblo society. Women owned the houses and actually built them. Children often got their mother's last name, not their father's. Some joined their mothers' clans" (106). This picture of female eminence is confirmed in Leslie Marmon Silko's essay "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit," where she describes the building of houses Crow Dog refers to:

One of my most vivid preschool memories is of the crew of Laguna women, in their forties and fifties, who came to cover our house with adobe plaster. They handled the ladders with great ease, and while two women ground the mud on stones and added straw, another woman loaded the hod with mud and passed it up to the two women on ladders, who were smoothing the plaster on the walls with their hands. Since women owned the houses, they did the plastering.

(Yellow Woman 66)¹

Silko concludes this passage with the assertion that "because the Creator is female, there is no stigma on being female; gender is not used to control behavior. No job was a man's job or a woman's job; the most able person did the work" (Yellow Woman 66). She notes that she never heard the expression "women's work" until she left her Pueblo community for college. On the contrary, Silko remembers her Grandma Lily always fixing broken lamps and appliances.

In Silko's description a liberating fluidity of identity seems to have characterized the pre-Columbian Pueblo people and to have continued to some extent into her own twentieth-century experience. Rigidity of gender categorization arrived with the Christian missionaries, ending an Edenic era in which "a man could dress as a woman and work with the women and even marry a man," while "a woman was free to dress like a man, to hunt and go to war with the men, and to marry a woman. . . . Marriage did not mean an end to sex with people other than your spouse" (Yellow Woman 67). Nor did paternity matter since "children belonged to the mother and her clan, and women owned and bequeathed the houses and farmland" (Yellow Woman 68).²

Since the clan was a close-knit group, united by blood and community, children might be redistributed within it from women who had unplanned pregnancies to women who were barren. As in European peasant societies, women in Pueblo cultures were prized more for their ability to cope with a strenuous life than for physical beauty. But more than this, Pueblo women had always had one of the freedoms that Euroamerican feminism sought, that of abolishing gender as a qualification for occupation. The nineteenth-century American feminist Margaret Fuller proclaimed that "we would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man" (260), a goal that remained central to twentieth-century feminism.

If Silko's own experience growing up in a twentieth-century pueblo provided an egalitarian view of gender as a matter of course, Pueblo religion reinforced the idea of a female creative principle that actively contributed to the well-being of the people through such female deities as Thought Woman, Spider Woman, Corn Mother, and others. Not surprisingly, given the shaping attitudes of Pueblo culture toward gender, the mythic female figure of Kochininako, Yellow Woman, is Silko's professed favorite.³ Yellow Woman in old Pueblo tales is both heroic and sexual, that is, she protects the Pueblos with her heroism and also with her uninhibited sexuality, which affirms the life force of nature. Like Maxine Hong Kingston's woman warrior, Yellow Woman often assumes a role traditionally associated with men, exhibiting courage in the wider world reserved for male action. At the same time she embodies an aggressive sexuality, also considered male, but with a traditional object of female desire—"a strong...