SOCIAL POSITION OF WOMAN.
The position of woman as the representative of the clan, and as the only parent through whom kinship is traced, necessarily confers upon her prerogatives which she would not otherwise enjoy. Property rights become vested in her, and the possessions acquired by her husband are more hers than his. This has been noticed with some astonishment by travellers who did not understand this feature of savage society. A mis sionary among the Shawnee Indians writes : " The women are the only drudges, and yet they own all the property." Captain Gregg remarks of the Osages of the Western Plains that the " oldest daughter on her mar riage comes into possession of all the family property." Gynocracy in Savage Li a general rule, the woman in savage life wields a greater influence than the superficial observer, who witnesses the constant toil and frequent ill-treatment to which she is subject, is apt to suppose. What Captain W. P. Clark has remarked of the Indians of the Plains holds good generally of the social power of the females in uncivilized communities : "Though not as a rule permitted to be present at the councils, and not allowed to join the men in the more important feasts, the women exercise a great influence over the warriors. Their shrill songs of encouragement urge on the departing war-party to greater exertions, to braver deeds, and the same shrill voices give them praise and welcome on their return, and, should any have fallen, for days their weird chanting fills the air of the camp with the great deeds of those who have been slain ; and this honor•is dearly prized by the savage heart. In this and many other ways they shape and control the public feeling and opinion of the camp ; and this is the greatest force which controls the destiny of Indian tribes." But their power is frequently more positive than this. Among all the tribes of the stock of the Iroquois in the New World, and very generally among the Tartar hordes of Asia, the women took part in the councils, advised openly on matters of public welfare, and often cast the deciding voice on questions of peace or war and in the election of rulers. Nor is it at all an uncommon occurrence to find a female the chief ruler of savage tribes, and all the men belonging to it submissive to her commands. The records of the monarchies of the Old World preserve the memory of some famous queens, as Semiramis, Cleopatra, Zenobia, and the queen of Sheba; in Africa, nations much lower in the scale of development than these have been found under the supremacy of female chiefs; and in America such instances may be said to have been frequent. Thus, among the earliest of the historic figures of the red race is "Anacoana, queen of the Caribs," whose fate has been chosen as the theme of song and story by more than one writer of the clay; when Hernando de Soto plunged into the un tracked wilderness to find the Mississippi River, he was met somewhere near the southernmost spurs of the Appalachian Mountains by the " em press " of a powerful native tribe, perhaps the Lichees; later, when the French explored the lower waters of the Great River, they came into contact with the Natchez, a tribe of noteworthy culture, who lived under the rule of a woman who bore the title " The Great Sun." Her power
was hereditary, but it did not pass to the children of her husband, but to those of her brothers or sisters. The annals of the warlike Aztecs record that when one of their emperors had died without heirs male, his daugh ter ascended the throne and was an acceptable ruler over his extensive domains.
The numerous examples of this character which have been adduced by travellers and historians go far to modify the opinion widely enter tained that the position of woman in the ruder stages of culture is always one of debasement and slavery. The most intelligent ethnologists do not entertain this opinion. Thus, Mr. Horatio Hale says in a recent work, " The common notion that women among the Indians were treated as inferiors and made 'beasts of burden ' is unfounded among all tribes of which I have any knowledge. With them, as with civilized communities, the work of the community and the cares of the family are fairly divided. The hunting and fishing, the house-building and canoe-making, fall to the men. The women cook, make clothing, scratch the ground with their hoes, plant and gather the crops, and take care of the children. The household goods belong to the woman. On her death her relatives, and not her husband's, claim them. The children are also hers; they belonged to her clan, and in case of a separation they also went with her. Among the Iroquois she was really the head of the household; and in this capacity her right, when she chanced to be the oldest matron of a noble family, to select the successor to a deceased chief of that family, was recognized by the highest law of the confederacy." The earliest missionaries bear testimony to the general correctness of this opinion. Thus, one of them informs us that among the Hurons of Canada thirty strings of wampum were generally considered sufficient satisfaction for the murder of a man by one of his fellow-tribesmen, but for a woman forty strings were required, the reasons they gave being that a woman is less able to defend herself than a man; that as her sex is the source whence the land is peopled, her life is of greater value to the com monwealth; and that her weakness should have a stronger support in public justice.