Page 58 - ECOlogic Book

answerable to the women for his or her actions Women were held in equally
high esteem as men, politically as well as in everyday roles.

This strong role for women in government, so prominent in the Iroquois
Great Law, is conspicuously missing from our constitution. Knowing this,
one could say that, not only were our founding fathers Indians; they were
mothers (or should have been).

(possible second essay title?)

The “founding fathers” were not the only ones influenced by the Iroquois.
Feminists were too. “The United States revolutionaries, once they had
cemented power, placed women into a political subordination more severe
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even that that of the colonial period.” This was largely a result of English
common law which placed women in the role of property. “Marriage under
common law was a legal institution that robbed women of their rights and
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created conditions that encouraged men to act tyrannical.”

More than 100 years after the signing of the U. S. Constitution, two women,
Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the founding
“mothers” of the feminist movement, became students of the Hau do no sau
nee, (Iroquois) and “found a cosmological world view which they believed to
be far superior to the patriarchal one of the white nation in which they
lived,” wrote Gage, The children always followed the totemship of the
mother . . . if a Seneca brave married a Cayuga Squaw (sic), the children
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were not Senecas, . . .but Cayugas . . .”

Contrast this with these words of Blackstone, the chief exponent of common
law: “A mother has no legal right or authority over her children; she is only
entitled to respect and honor.” After careful study of the Iroquois, Gage
concluded that “division of power between the sexes in this Indian republic
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was nearly equal.”

67 Wagner, Sally Roesch, “The Iroquois Influence on Women’s Rights”, Spring, 1992, Akwe-Kon Journal.

68 IBID.

69 IBID.

70 IBID.

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