Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France

Chain Her by One Foot is an excellent scholarly examination of how the status of women in Huron and Montagnais societies changed shortly after contact with French missionaries. The main argument of the book states that in these two tribes, men and women had different roles but were equally valued. This, however, horrified the Christian missionaries who visited these tribes because they believed that God intended males to have a more exalted and powerful position than females. For this reason, as part of their general effort to convert Hurons and Montagnais to Christianity, they did everything in their power to convince the tribes to transform their views about hierarchy in general and gender roles in specific. Apparently, the Jesuit missionaries were successful since just a few decades after their arrival the status of women in these societies plummeted considerably. This is particularly striking in light of the fact that-unlike the Spaniards in other parts of the Americas-the French were not in a position to impose their own ideology by force since they never conquered these tribes. According to the author, the main reason why this was possible has to do with the fact that the Jesuits were preaching their message at a time when the Hurons' and Montagnais' world was falling apart. Diseases were decimating them, warfare was increasing in both frequency and intensity, and traditional remedies did not seem to solve these new problems. These phenomena created an environment of cultural chaos which made the tribes more receptive to any alternative way of making sense of their rapidly changing world. This is how the Jesuits' message began finding a receptive hear among them. In the process of explaining how this transformation came into being, Anderson explores the history of the Jesuit order and the ideological roots of misogyny in the Western world. Because of her emphasis on the role that Christian values had in the colonization of Indian peoples, her work is in many ways reminiscent of the latter part of David Stannard's American Holocaust. Chain Her by One Foot, on the other hand, is diametrically opposed to Susan Sleeper-Smith's Indian Women and French Men, which argues that the status of Indian women was actually elevated by the spreading of Christianity. In my opinion, Anderson wins the argument hands down since the evidence she provides is much more convincing and less ambiguous. The only people who feel compelled to reject her carefully researched argument are individuals who are adamant about establishing the superiority of a Christian, Western world over that of "savage" Indians. Also, any individual who has issues with the notion that gender roles are not biologically determined may not like her conclusions. One of the only minor faults I find with Chain Her by One Foot is that the author drags on her argument for much longer than she needs to. Her main thesis is repeated-with minimal paraphrasing-countless times througho

Ms. Anderson has added a scholarly and authentic voice to the research on the origins of male domination. I highly recommend this book for anyone who would like to know more about the damage done by Christian missionaries to peaceful egalitarian societies. I explore the same subject on my website...Werner Krieglstein Professor of Philsophy