Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change 1700-1835

Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835, is a well-organized and well-supported novel by Theda Perdue. Perdue writes an informative account of the history of Cherokee “social life” and the role of women in Cherokee culture. She walks the reader through changes in trade, war, and general interaction of peoples. Perdue states, “The story of Cherokee women, therefore, is not one of declining status and lost culture, but one of persistence and change, conservatism and adaptation, tragedy and survival. (p195)” Theda Perdue portrays an image of women’s cultural persistence throughout the novel.

The novel is broken in the three main sections, Part 1 – A Woman’s World, Part 2 – Contact, and Part 3 – Civilization. In these sections, Theda Perdue shows the outside influences on and changes in Cherokee society and conceptions of gender roles and norms. The first part defines the balance of life and gender in Cherokee culture before European interaction influenced a change. Part two explains how war and trade made an impact on t

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Theda Perdue explains how women continued to lead life-styles similar to the life-styles they lead before the government’s “civilization plan” by keeping traditional tasks and roles. Perdue gives extensive background in this section, vital for the rest of the novel, for both the expert and novice on Cherokee history. She provides the reader with abundant examples of the differentiation of tasks between male and female and how gender is constructed within the Cherokee culture. Like all historical change, the transformation of Cherokee society was neither constant nor uniform… (p185)” “The story of Cherokee women, therefore, is not one of declining status and lost culture, but one of persistence and change, conservatism and adaptation, tragedy and survival.

Theda Perdue arranges the basis for her comparisons in this beginning section of the novel. However, Perdue does illustrate some ways that women used the civilization program “to embellish their culture,” by adding crops, skills, and trying to have a place in society. Trade and war disrupted their lives in the eighteenth century, and the United States’ ‘civilization’ program tried to restructure their world in the nineteenth. Some possible reasons for its failure are given, such as the program trying to completely change the Cherokee’s concept of gender. However, despite men’s new “power” during this time, Perdue argues that the men could not stop the women from their actions because they were behaving “in a way that Cherokees expected wives to behave,” and they controlled the production of food and could do with it as “they saw fit. She introduces gender, as it is perceived in early Cherokee culture, and shows how different incidences have affected this conception.

In the second section, Perdue stresses the impact of outside influences, particularly European and American-European, on Cherokee culture and the reaction of Cherokee women to this impact. ”

Part three describes the government’s attempt to change the Cherokee’s matrilineal female-farming life-style to a male-dominated housewife life-style.

In conclusion, Theda Perdue does an excellent job at pointing out the significant role that women play in Cherokee society throughout history.

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Approximate Word count = 777
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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