Lost Women of the Matriarchy: Iroquois Women in the Historical Literature

The historical portrayal of Iroquois women is of importance to all women’s history but especially to the history of Indian women. If historians have ”lost” Iroquois women, widely recognized to hold positions of power in their society, how can we hope to find other Indian women, with less obviously powerful roles, in the histories of their people? We find two important questions here. The first concerns the extent to which historians have actually ignored, misrepresented, or marginalized Iroquois women. The second question pertains to the methods and basis of such misrepresentation and neglect. In this paper I cannot possibly examine all of the literature or explore these questions in depth. It is, rather, my intention to present certain aspects of the problem of Indian women’s invisibility that the study of Iroquois women illuminates. Ethnologists have long recognized the relatively powerful position held by women in Iroquois society. With the possible exception of the Pueblo people and the Mandan, no other Indian women are so widely recognized as enjoying a comparably influential role within their society. If Iroquois women are lost from the historical record, the methods and circumstances by which this loss was possible should be easier to discover in their case than in histories of people for whom women played a less prominent role or for which the documentation of women’s roles and position is absent