Explains how traditional Cherokee women’s roles were destabilized, modified, recovered, and in some ways strengthened during three periods of great turmoil

American Indian women have traditionally played vital roles in social hierarchies at the family, clan, and tribal levels. In the Cherokee Nation, specifically, women and men are considered equal contributors to the culture. With this study, however, we learn that three key historical events in the 19th and early 20th centuries—removal, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands—forced a radical renegotiation of gender roles and relations in Cherokee society.

Carolyn Johnston (who is related to John Ross, principal chief of the Nation) looks at how Cherokee women navigated these crises in ways that allowed them to retain their traditional assumptions, ceremonies, and beliefs and to thereby preserve their culture. In the process, they both lost and retained power. The author sees a poignant irony in the fact that Europeans who encountered Native societies in which women had significant power attempted to transform them into patriarchal ones and that American women struggled for hundreds of years to achieve the kind of equality that Cherokee women had enjoyed for more than a millennium.

Johnston examines the different aspects of Cherokee women’s power: authority in the family unit and the community, economic independence, personal autonomy, political clout, and spirituality. Weaving a great-grandmother theme throughout the narrative, she begins with the protest of Cherokee women against removal and concludes with the recovery of the mother town of Kituwah and the elections of Wilma Mankiller and Joyce Dugan as principal chiefs of the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokees.
 

Offers an opportunity to view the history of feminism and the family from a fresh perspective
 
Since the early 1970s, scholars have argued, defined, and refined a wide range of interpretations of American women’s lives. Despite the richness of the recent literature, few interpretations sufficiently credit women’s family and sexual experiences for the emergence of feminism and the construction of pro-family agendas. Thus, Johnston’s approach offers an opportunity to view the history of feminism and the family from a fresh perspective.
 
Much of the literature on feminism has focused on women’s oppression and victimization, rather than on the power that women historically have exerted. Johnston’s interpretation of American feminism differs from previous works because she argues that the gradual growth of feminist consciousness lies not simply in oppression or feelings of victimization, but paradoxically in a growing sense of the empowerment of women as wives and mothers. She traces how reproduction, sexuality, domesticity, and motherhood have been socially constructed, and examines how feminists and anti-feminists have fought on the terrain of “family” issues.
 
Johnston explores critical questions concerning American women’s sexual lives. How have women’s empowering experiences in the family shaped feminist consciousness and action? How have feminists confronted family issues? How have women exerted sexual power? How was it contained within the limits of patriarchal society at times, while at other times it fueled the fires of feminist rebellion? How have gender and class issues affected domestic politics and feminism?