Cherokee People Treating their Women as Equals was Surprising to New Settlers
Europeans arriving in what is now the USA, were astonished to see the Cherokee treating their women as equals in relation to money, politics and theology.
Mother and Child
“Women had autonomy and sexual freedom, could obtain divorce easily, rarely experienced rape or domestic violence, worked as producers/farmers, owned their own homes and fields, possessed a cosmology that contains female supernatural figures, and had significant political and economic power,” she writes. “Cherokee women’s close association with nature, as mothers and producers, served as a basis of their power within the tribe, not as a basis of oppression. Their position as ‘the other’ led to gender equivalence, not hierarchy.”
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/01/10/power-cherokee-women-3767