In what follows I discuss women and gender in relation to labor and diplomacy in early America as portrayed in Richard White’s The Middle Ground and William Cronon’s Changes In The Land. Neither Cronon nor White’s book is ostensibly about women, gender, or labor, but these are important themes which can be seen in each book. I focus on gender and women here because gender relations, particularly in relation to production, do not receive adequate attention in the (mainly marxist) material I tend to be drawn to, particularly in works about the early history of capitalism and the transition to capitalism.
Both White and Cronon end with the closure of a window of time at the early 1800s. At the end of this time the balance of power between Indians and non-Indians was altered dramatically, and for White the non-Indians were newly Americans rather than French or British. White describes this transition as the end of the middle ground, as a result of which “politically the consequence of Indians faded.” Cronon describes this transition as the creation of a world of “fields and fences” with a greater extension of commodity relationships. These transitions were important in the development and direction of capitalism in America.
These shifts were in large part the product of changing power balances between France, Britain and eventually the early United States. As the relationship between these power changed, their relationship to Indians changed as well, from “[i]ntercultural diplomacy” - particularly as practiced by the French - “to a spirit of outright conquest.” Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron take the war of 1812 as a definitive turning point in these processes. From this point onward on in northern North America “international diplomacy between sovereign states fixed the lines separating political communities” wherein political communities were defined in such a way that “no one consulted - as they might have even a generation earlier - Indians.” As this way of relating to Indians gradually extended westward “Indian territories became home to independent proprietors, idealized citizens of liberal regimes, to the exclusion of its original dwellers.”
Prior to this closure, prior to the shift toward exclusion, Indians and non-Indians co-existed, not merely side by side but made exchanges. If these exchanges are “excluded from considerations” or “reduced to a purely economic relation” then we miss important facts. E.P. Thompson once remarked that “[t]here is no such thing as economic growth which is not, at the same time, growth or change or a culture.” White writes found a similar situation, writing that “the exchange of goods is not so easily fenced off into an economic realm whose rules are at once distinct from other aspects of life and present in all societies. After all, goods changed hands virtually every time Frenchmen and Algonquians struggled to unite against common enemies; or met to resolve the murders between them; or asked for aid in surviving hunger, disease, droughts, and blizzards; or made love or married.”
There were economic exchanges and political ties between between Indians and non-Indians. The line between the two types can be hard to draw. What is clear is that a certain political diplomacy was key to making economic and political co-existence possible prior to the early 1800s. A key component to this diplomacy was intermarriage, specifically between Indian women and non-Indian men. Adelman and Aron write that these marriages “proved the most effective means to cement trading bonds and forge diplomatic alliances.” White writes that intermarriage served to “solidify (…) tentative connection into one of kinspeople and allies.”
Intermarriage played this function both between Indians and non-Indians (primarily the French) and between different Indian groups. Indians used a pipe called a calumet in ceremonies which declared or created peaceful relationships. White quotes a Father Hennepin that the calumet was decorated “with feathers of all colors, interlaced with locks of women’s hair.” While this might have any number of meanings, it is plausible the women’s hair knitting together the other decorations on the calumet formed a symbolic link between women and the knitting together of peaceful relationships.
Cronon comments that male Indian leaders could maintain or increase their power “by marrying several wives to proliferate wealth and kin obligations.” Cronon underscores the interrelatedness of politics and economics, noting that “kin relations undoubtedly cemented networks both of economic exchange and of political obligation, and it was on these rather than more formal state institutions that sachems based their authority.” As the balance of power between France, Britain, and the United States shifted and the way of relating to Indians moved from diplomacy to conquest, “the consequence of Indians faded” in political terms. Indians were no longer people with whom governments negotiated. The use of the calumet and the functions of intermarriage, with their symbolic and real roles played by Indian women, declined between Indians and non-Indians. Subordination of Indians in turn disrupted the Indians’ forms of production.
Prior to subordination, women “were a major force in exchange in the villages” as well as in exchanges between Indians and non-Indians. White quotes a Potawatomi leader named Onanghisse, arguing to the French that “the majority of our women (…) have but one or beavers to send to Montreal to procure their little supplies.” Onanghisse used a claim about the relative scarcity of beaver pelts as an argument against Indians having to trek to Montreal to trade. Instead he wanted the continued presence of traders who would bring goods to the Indians and take beaver pelts away. What is notable in this quote is that it is women that Onanghisse depicts as the proprietors or owners of goods, not men.
Perhaps this was an attempt to appeal to some notions about chivalry, that the French were taking advantage of poor, defenseless women. I can not say for sure without knowing more about French and Indian attitudes - and what the French and the Indians knew about each other’s attitudes - toward women and gender. It is just as plausible, however, that this is not the case but that instead women were the owners of the beaver pelts traded with the French and by extension the owners of the goods traded for the pelts.
White writes that understanding the relationships between Indians and non-Indians “necessitates discovering what meaning these goods and their exchange had” for all involved. “[G]oods changed hands” every time “Indians provided their labor, their service as warriors, or sexual favors” to non-Indians. The same is true of exchanges between different Indian tribes and villages and exchanges between Indians within the same tribe or village.
Women played important roles not only in diplomacy and exchange between Indian tribes and between Indian and non-Indians, but in production as well. Cronon writes that in the non-winter months the food “which women and children gathered [served] as a steady base for the village diet” among Indians in New England. The food gathered included shellfish, bird’s eggs, and small game. “[T]his sexual division of labor (…) made women much more important than men in providing food. A single Indian woman could raise anywhere from twenty-five to sixty bushels of corn by working an acre or two, enough to provide half or more of the annual caloric requirements for a family of five. When corn was combined with other foods for which they were responsible, women may have contributed as much as three-fourths of a family’s total subsistence needs.”
The harvest season in the fall marked the end of the part of the year where women’s work predominated in supplying subsistence needs, after which came the hunting season where men procured more of the needed food. “Autumn saw the harvesting of corn in addition to the gathering of acorns, chestnuts, groundnuts, and other wild plants. It was a time of extensive festivals when many hundreds of people gathered in dense settlements and consumed much of this surplus food.” These gatherings which consumed surplus product were at least as much political as they were economic affairs. “Gambling, dancing, and eating were combined with rituals - similar to the potlatch ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest - in which wealthy individuals gave away much of what they owned to establish reciprocal relations of obligations with potentials followers or allies.” This may be over-interpreting, but as with women’s hair being used to decorate the calumet, there is a link in these festivals between women the building or solidifying of peaceful ties between people. The festivals of consumption and gift giving come at the end of the more plentiful season in terms of food, food produced by women’s work.
In the winter months, most food came from male hunters. Men went on “extended fishing and hunting trips” of up to ten days at a time. “[W]omen maintained the campsite” during the men’s absence “and did all the hauling and processing of the slaughtered meat.” It’s not clear from Cronon what gender relations were like during this time, but at a minimum one can assume a high degree of women’s autonomy during the times of men’s absence. Cronon also comments that the extended hunting and fishing trips “exposed [Indian men] to much greater risk of injury or death” than women ordinarily faced. Again Cronon doesn’t comment on the cultural meaning of this. It could be that this risk was a source of prestige for men. It could also mean that men were less valued and were therefore a population whose lives could be risked.
Women owed many of the goods involved in the forms of production the Indians used to meet their needs. Women “owned the wigwams and most household goods.” Cronon isn’t sure about exactly which goods women owned but speculates that “women owned baskets, mats, kettles, hoes, and so on, while men owned bows, arrows, hatchets, fishing nets, canoes, and other tools.” This is a different relationship between women and property than was common among the early colonists.
Adelman and Aron write that “patriarchal household relations [were] brought west by Anglo-American men,” but they do not specify what they mean by patriarchal. Jean Boydston offers a sense of what these patriarchal relations were like. Boydston quotes a statement from men who worked as cordwainers in Philadelphia in 1805, expressing anger “that the “pittance of subsistence” they received in wages was inadequate to provide “a fair and just support for our families”.” Boydston notes that these men “expressed a conflation of “subsistence” and “wages” that was common at the time. At the time, women were considered in custom and law as “feme covert” which is to say that “a wife’s legal identity was subsumed under that of her husband, who was recognized as the owner of her labor-time, the products of that labor-time,” and anything received in exchange “of either the [wife’s] labor or its products.” Boydston argues that

“Historians have frequently analyzed the working-class family as a collectivity, run according to a communal ethic. But by both law and custom the marital exchange was not an even one. Finally the husband owned not only the value of his own labor-time, but the value of his wife’s as well - as expressed, for example, in cash or cooked food, manufactured or mended clothing, scavenged dishes or food, and in children raised to an age at which they, too, could contribute to the household economy.” (19.)

It is safe to assume that these are the patriarchal relations which extend westward with Anglo-American men as the relationship between Indians and non-Indians shifted from diplomacy to subordination. In that process, women’s importance as agents of diplomacy via intermarriage declined. Women’s role in production did not decline - women’s activities were an important part of production among the Anglo-Americans just as they were among Indians - but this importance was obfuscated.
In a sense, the shift from diplomacy to subordination in the relations between non-Indians and Indians was accompanied by a shift from diplomacy to subordination across men’s and women’s different positions in the division of labor. Women’s subordination, measured at least in women’s ownership of goods and their role as producers of peaceful political relationships, spread west alongside the subordination of Indians. The transition to capitalism in America involved, among other things, transitions in gender and gendered production relations.

Works Cited

Adelman, Jeremy and Stephen Aron.”From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History.” The American Historical Review. Vol. 104, No.3 (June 1999). 814-841.

Boydston, Jean. “To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence”, Radical History Review 35 (May 1986): 7-25

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. 1983.

Gutman, Herbert. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History. New York: Knopf. 1976.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991.

“[T]he imperatives of the fur trade provided the best reason [for the French] to pursue amicable ties with resident Indian peoples.” “[M]arriages between French men and Indian women proved the most effective means to cement trading bonds and forge diplomatic alliances.” (824.) And
“intermarriages and gift exchanges cemented political alliances.” (838.)

“The patriarchal household relations brought west by Anglo-American men did not mesh well with Indian gender systems. Nor was the quest for private landholdings easily reconciled with woodland Indian property regimes.” (828.)

“[T]he imperatives of the fur trade provided the best reason [for the French] to pursue amicable ties with resident Indian peoples.” “[M]arriages between French men and Indian women proved the most effective means to cement trading bonds and forge diplomatic alliances.” (824.) And
“intermarriages and gift exchanges cemented political alliances.” (838.)

“The patriarchal household relations brought west by Anglo-American men did not mesh well with Indian gender systems. Nor was the quest for private landholdings easily reconciled with woodland Indian property regimes.” (828.)