Quakers also were exceptional in seeing American Indians as full human beings—although even Quakers assumed their own religion to be the correct one. They sent missionaries to convert the natives, and, like virtually all other newcomers, took little heed of the political models offered by native societies. In some of those societies, especially the tribes of the northeastern Iroquois Confederacy, women were powerful. In many tribes that practiced farming, the culture was matrilineal. This was a crucial distinction from Europeans, for it meant that children took their mothers’ names and traced their families through the maternal, not the paternal, lineage. Thus, it was impossible to be a bastard, and the European shame of illegitimacy was unknown. Beyond that, matrilineal societies rejected the newcomers’ patriarchal view of women as the property of their fathers and husbands. In the Iroquois tribes that northeastern settlers encountered, for instance, a newly married man went to live with his wife’s family, and his children belonged to that clan, not to his. Personal possessions were relatively rare, but those that did exist were passed on through the mother’s line, not the father’s. If a marriage did not work out, couples easily separated, and the man went home to his mother.
Moreover, in many tribes, women held genuine political and military power. Women in the Iroquois Confederation, for example, traditionally controlled the fate of captives: they decided if a prisoner of war was to be killed, tortured, held for ransom, or adopted into the tribe. Although Pocahontas lived farther south, her famous intercession on behalf of John Smith thus can be seen as the native rule, not the exception. In the southeast, Cherokee women sometimes participated in actual combat and earned the title of “War Woman.” During Massachusetts warfare in 1676, the Pocasset band of Wamponoag was led by a woman named Wetamoo, whose head was displayed on the Taunton town square when only 26 of her 300 men survived the battle.
Indian women held their own councils and participated in treaty-making with whites—much to the annoyance of a number of white writers. Indeed, in the same year of 1848 that whites held their first women’s rights convention, the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Confederation adopted a new constitution. Under its provisions, both men and women elected judges and legislators, and all major decisions had to be ratified by three-fourths of the voters and by three-fourths of the clan mothers. Despite this, historians deem this period to mark a decline in the status of Seneca women: after their men interacted with European men, Seneca and other native women would continually lose traditional rights as their cultures adopted the white example.
Few Americans, however, were aware of these alternative societal structures, and almost none were willing to emulate the “savages”—or even the egalitarian ideas of their Quaker missionaries. Nevertheless, there were other female political leaders in mainstream colonial America, many of whom have been forgotten and remain unrecognized even by modern feminists. Lady Deborah Moody, for example, led the first English settlement of what is now Brooklyn when she took followers of her religious ideas there in 1643. They left Massachusetts because of disagreements with Governor John Winthrop, who called Lady Deborah “a dangerous woeman [sic].” Like Anne Hutchinson, her home was attacked by Native Americans. But Moody not only survived, she stayed there, holding steadfast to political and religious liberty. She also paid the natives for their land and went on to build an enlightened community.
Other charismatic religious women led similar settlements, making themselves, in effect, political leaders. Jemima Wilkinson, who called herself the “Publick Universal Friend,” took some 300 men and women into the wilderness of western New York in 1788, where her commune established peaceful relationships with its Seneca neighbors. “Mother” Ann Lee was even more successful. She immigrated from England just before the outbreak of the American Revolution, and, distrusted by both sides, was imprisoned for the pacifism she preached. Within a decade, her original eight disciples expanded to several thousand; eventually, the Shaker movement that she founded developed economically successful colonies in 18 states.
It was not coincidental that rebellious women—Hutchinson, Dyer, Moody, Wilkinson, Lee, and others—took refuge in New Netherland and its later version, New York. The Dutch who settled there in 1626 not only were religiously tolerant, they also were exceptionally egalitarian in their treatment of women. Colonial Dutch women retained their maiden names, which were recreated each generation with a father’s first name used as a girl’s surname. Married women not only had property rights, but also, commonly, prenuptial agreements. Most significantly, Dutch women engaged in a great deal of commercial enterprise, even after marriage.
Margaret Hardenbroeck, for example, owned a shipping line, exporting furs and importing merchandise from Holland; despite two marriages and five children, she frequently sailed across the Atlantic on business. Polly Provoost also was an importer; she attracted customers by laying America’s first sidewalk outside of her business. Annejte Loockermans Van Cortlandt paved the first street in America; her daughter, Maria Van Rensselaer, eventually controlled a 24-square-mile Albany fiefdom. Among the first public expenditures in New Amsterdam was the construction of a house for the colony’s midwife, Tryntje Jonas; her daughter, pioneer settler Annetje Jans, farmed 62 acres of land along Broadway, and her granddaughter, Sara Roeloef, was employed as an interpreter among English, Dutch, and Algonquin speakers. Although none of these women voted or held office, a historian of early Manhattan described Van Cortlandt’s home as “one of the centres of the petticoat government that so often controlled the affairs of the Colony.”
The least covert, most undeniable political power exercised by a colonial woman was that of Catholic Maryland’s Margaret Brent. Although from a noble family, she emigrated when Lord Baltimore granted her a tract of land as an inducement. Presumably he saw her as more talented than two of her brothers, for she led them, a sister, and servants to Maryland in 1638. Remaining determinedly single, she owned thousands of acres of land. When the governor, Lord Baltimore’s younger brother, lay dying, he granted his power of attorney to her, and she ran the colony after his death. After Lord Baltimore, comfortable back in England, complained about one of her decisions, Maryland’s legislative assembly backed her judgment call, not his: without Mistress Brent, they averred, “All would have gone to ruin.”
English-speaking colonial women, of course, benefited from the examples of seventeenth-century Queen Mary and especially the highly successful Elizabeth I, followed in the next century by Mary II and Anne. The English idea that a woman was capable of being the supreme monarch was rarely replicated on the European continent, Spain’s Isabella notwithstanding, and the status of women in French and Spanish colonies reflected this lesser place. Nor did the Catholic Church of France and Spain offer women roles analogous to those of Protestant women, especially Quakers. Although Spain’s Catholic colonies were North America’s first and priests held significant roles in them, more than two centuries would pass before the first Spanish sisterhoods arrived.
Spanish colonial women did enjoy some social freedoms that Anglo women lacked—dancing, drinking, smoking, gambling, wearing more comfortable clothing—but any aspirations to educational and political equality were more difficult. As late as the nineteenth century, for example, Catholic women in California were actively discouraged from even reading.
In contrast, reading was fundamental to Protestantism. Especially in the Puritan colonies of New England, girls were taught to read so that they could properly inculcate religious principles in their children. It is therefore wholly appropriate that the nation’s first written feminist theory came from its original Puritan settlement, Salem. It was the work of a intellectual giant whose name should be well known, but again, few Americans are familiar with Judith Sargent Stevens Murray.
A childless sea captain’s wife, Murray had time to think. In 1784—almost a decade before English Mary Wollstonecraft published the much more famous Vindication of the Rights of Women—she wrote on the need for improved female self-esteem, “Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms.”