Native+American+Women

Native American History and Culture [|Dating the Iroquois Confedercy] Native American Women  Under Haudenosaunee law, which was the Iroquois Confederacy, clan mothers choose candidates (who are male) as chiefs. The women also maintain ownership of the land and homes, and exercise a veto power over any council action that may result in war. The influence of Iroquois women surprised and inspired nineteenth-century feminists such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, according to research by modern feminist Sally Roesch Wagner.

"SAVAGERY TO CIVILIZATION" THE INDIAN WOMEN: We whom you pity as drudges reached centuries ago the goal that you are now nearing. We, the women of the Iroquois Own the Land, the Lodge, the Children Ours is the right to adoption, life or death; Ours is the right to raise up and depose chiefs; Ours is the right to representation in all councils; Ours is the right to make and abrogate treaties; Ours is the supervision over domestic and foreign policies; Ours is the trusteeship of tribal property; Our lives are valued again as high as man's. Puck, May 16, 1914.

The use of Indian women to provide **an exemplar of feminist liberty** continued into the nineteenth century. On May 16, 1914, only six years before the first national election in which women had the vote, Puck printed a line drawing of a group of Indian women observing Susan B. Anthony, Anne Howard Shaw and Elizabeth Cady Stanton leading a parade of women.

 from [|//Exemplar of Liberty, Native America and the Evolution of Democracy//],  Chp.11, "[|The Persistence of an Idea, Impressions of Iroquois liberty after the eighteenth century]"