Book Review

In some ways, Theda Perdue's Cherokee Women is a short treatise on the role women played in Cherokee society as white and red folks met each other in the mid-South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is much more than that, however; it is a pioneering volume suggesting that for too long historians—mostly males—have maintained that the thoughts and actions of men are intrinsically more important than the activities of women, and in so believing we have missed a part of history that gives special meaning to the whole. In fact, as one contemplates the three parts of the book—women's world, contact, and civilization—one recalls many things apparent in one's own research that were neglected and should not have been. For example, native men and women lived lives more separate than did most whites or blacks. Since native males had little to do with farming, historians have described the male activities of hunting, fishing, canoeing, negotiating, and warring while relegating female agricultural activities to a footnote. What makes this neglect all the more embarrassing is the fact that we have consistently maintained that North, Central, and South American Indians have given the world as much as 75 percent of the foods we enjoy—from watermelons to coffee, from peas to forty-two different varieties of corn not improved until hybrid varieties in the 1940s—without mentioning that it was the non-warring women who lifted agriculture to a state not seen in other nations and on other continents.

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