User:Rct97/Native American Women in Colonial America

Traditional gender roles transformed upon European colonization of North America. Before contact with European colonizers, several Native American cultures were matrilineal, meaning that women, rather than men, passed on clan membership to their children. After marriage, husbands left their household and joined their wives' families. Historian Katy Simpson Smith described eighteenth-century Cherokee motherhood as a "social, economic, and political institution" which included "not only the relationship between biological mother and child, but also women's broader kin networks, their productive connection to fertile land and economic subsistence, and their political role as mothers of the Cherokee nation." Cherokee acknowledged the prominent role of motherhood in their culture by calling all female relatives "mother." The Hopi were both matriarchal and matrilineal, with equalitarian roles in society. Women also participate in Hopi politics.

In many Native American cultures, although male family members arranged marriages, wives controlled whether or not they wanted a divorce. In the Haudenosaunee tribes and Cherokee Nation, a woman could leave her husband's belongings outside their door to show that she wanted a divorce.

Upon contact with European colonizers, some tribes adopted a patriarchal system of gender roles that resembled European culture. In the Cherokee Nation, a series of laws passed by the Cherokee Council over the course of the nineteenth century restricted women's sexual freedom, including the criminalization of abortion. The Council also passed laws which introduced new patrilineal forms of inheriting property and establishing citizenship. Historian Theda Perdue suggests that changes to Cherokee gender roles were "superficial" before removal, and that the Council's series of bills represented a point of view "limited perhaps to the Cherokee elite who sought to emulate white southern planters."