Chain her by one foot: The subjugation of native women in seventeenth-century New France

by Karen L. Anderson

An investigation into how relations of subjugation and domination between men and women were introduced into egalitarian societies following the destruction of their cultures. The author uses case studies of two native peoples in the New World to support her theory.

Genres: History, Indigenous, Native American

247 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 1991

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anderson applies her sociological training to understanding how and why women of the Huron and Montagnais women in New France became subjugated members of their societies. Anderson argues that the subjugation of Huron and Montagnais women occurred as a result of a series of struggles between Jesuit missionaries and the two native societies over worldviews. The struggle between the two worldviews took place in societal, institutional, and emotional structures. Anderson argues that the disruptive period of contact, combined with the Jesuit’s presentation of a Christian worldview resulted in women taking on the status of inferior dependents subjected to men’s anger and aggression, while men similarly embraced the role of domineering leaders. As a result of Jesuit imposition and the disruptive effects of colonialism, such as famine, epidemics, and warfare, the mostly egalitarian societies came to replicate France’s hierarchical structure. While Anderson analyzes the specific mechanisms that brought about the subjugation of women’s status in Huron and Montagnais society over a short period of about thirty years, 1609-1649, she also places her work within a broader feminist project of understanding Western Europe’s subjugation of women (p. 5).

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1991, this was one of the first monographs to study the changing status of women in colonial-era Native American communities. Anderson follows the lead of Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock, who argued that the status of women in a society tended to decline as that society became more complex and “civilized.” She applies this interpretive framework to the Montagnais (or Innu) and Huron-Wendat nations of present-day Canada, on whose seventeenth-century forebears the Jesuits left an abundance of records. Prior to the 1630s, Anderson argues, gender relations in Montagnais and Huron communities were relatively harmonious and egalitarian, structured around an equal division of social responsibilities: men hunted, cleared the fields, fought ritual wars, and served as chiefs, while women farmed, dressed animal skins, appointed chiefs, and selected captives for adoption or execution. In the mid-1600s, Jesuit missionaries began making converts among both peoples, who had been traumatized by epidemic disease and warfare. Influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, the Jesuits viewed Native American gender norms as “savage, l” and they anathematized equality and reciprocity between men and women. They identified women as naturally wicked and childish, argued that they required physical correction by men, and demanded that female converts adopt European norms of domesticity and submissiveness. Huron and Montagnais converts apparently adopted these norms with some enthusiasm, particularly at Christian reserve communities like Sillery, from whose regulations Anderson takes the title of her book.

Anderson's view of pre-Columbian gender reciprocity holds up pretty well, but her treatment of Native American Christianity has been superseded by later studies that ask why and how Indian women became Christian converts. Nancy Shoemaker and Susan Sleeper-Smith, in particular, have noted that Catholicism gave Indian women the opportunity to remain celibate or delay marriage, that it provided them with a new network of fictive kin (namely, godparents and godchildren), and that it offered both them and converted men with access to new sources of spiritual power. These interpretations give Indian women more agency than Anderson's earlier study allowed them. Such are the pitfalls of being a pioneer in an important field – one's work soon comes to seem dated. Still, the elegance of this book's argument and its arresting title will ensure that students of history will continue to read it.

[Karin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karen Anderson explains how 2 native tribes could, in a span of 30 or so years, move from a culture of equality between males and females where neither side dominated the other to a culture where women were submissive and obedient to their husbands even when they did not want to be.

The Jesuits came to New France to bring a knowledge of Christianity to the natives. In the 16 and 17th centuries Christianity meant that men dominated and ruled the world and women were to be submissive to them. Women were thought of as weak and more easily led astray by the devil. Men NEEDED to dominate women or they would not be saved. This was the way God wanted society to be.

In the old world this kind of doctrine brought order to their society as well as witch hunts. In the new world the natives, especially the women, were not so keen on Christianity. Men had roles to perform in society and so did the women. Women cultivated the ground and so in order to eat, men had to be in favor with their wives or their mothers. Divorce was an option if the marriage was not working out.

So how did this change in such a short time?

It seems that there were a combination of factors, none of which had to do with native people's belief in Christianity: war, disease and famine were wiping out the native tribes too fast for them to regain their old customs. Christian men were given better trade deals, were sold guns and had the protection of France. Unbaptised Hurons had none of these advantages.

While in the early years, women could complain that Christianity's advent caused sickness and thus they wouldn't join, over the next few decades many natives came to have the Jesuit viewpoint that it was better to be a dead Christian than a live heathen. Christians went to heaven while heathens went to hell- a horrible place.

Not sure which is worse: the Christianization of the Natives so they learned it was good to dominate over their wives and children or the pre-Christian customs of the natives where they would go to war, capture some enemy, torture them and possibly eat them but treat the members of their own tribe and families very well.

I learned a lot about how the whole patriarchal society of Western Europe had a religious basis and why some churches thus still hold fast to those outdated and decidedly non-Christian practises.

[Catina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Full review to come.
The book is extremely repetitive, boring, full of filler/padding, and not very informative. As usual in these type of hack works (revisionist pseudohistory), most of the reliable sources the author references, cities, or quotes contradict her theories.

[Janice]

Not very academic

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A harrowing and distubing account of the destruction of the gender-egalitarian culture of the Huron and Montagnais tribes by French explorers, missionaries, and settlers. Not for the weak of stomach.

[Care · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wrote a paper on pre-contact gender identity/roles versus post-contact gender identity/roles in New France/Iroquois territory. This book was particularly helpful.