In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white men of the United States created the laws that regulated society. By common practice, their children identified themselves through their father’s lineage, and women had few rights. When a woman married, her rights were taken away by law and given to her husband. Post nuptials, she couldn’t own property, enter into contracts, sign legal documents, dictate how her wages were spent or have control over her children. She was also denied the opportunity to obtain an education equal to her male counterparts.

It was considered scandalous for a woman to give a speech in public, especially to both men and women. She was deemed the weaker sex and expected to be “ladylike” while accepting lower wages than a man for the same job. She was denied the right to vote, which would have given her the opportunity to make changes to the laws that subjugated her. At the founding of our country, only property-owning white males were privileged with the vote. New Jersey was the only exception. There, women and blacks could vote until 1807, when the state legislature changed the law to restrict suffrage to only free, tax-paying white male citizens. In contrast, America’s Native Iroquois population in upper New York State lived under a very different social structure of self-government. The Iroquois Confederacy, also called Six Nations, consisted of the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora tribes. Their women owned the land, their homes, and the rights to their children. They could gamble, join medical societies, participate in political ceremonies, vote, and veto wars. Though Iroquois leaders (chiefs) were men, and their tribal councils dominated by men, the women nominated council members and held the power to remove them should the men not properly fulfill their responsibilities. Iroquois children traced their lineage through their mothers. Husbands joined their wives’ clans, and all men were expected to treat women with respect. Violence against women and children was not tolerated.

The men hunted and prepared the fields for the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—while the women tended the crops. Within their fenced villages, multiple groups of matrilineally related families shared wooden longhouses and slept in bunk beds, an invention of their people.

The Native and American cultures had long shared regular trade, cultural exchanges, and friendship. Undoubtedly, the Iroquois way of life showed American women they could do more and have a larger say in governing their own people.