1

Anderson, Karen. . Chain Her By One Foot: The Subjugation of
Native Women in      Seventeenth-Century New France.  New
York: Routledge, 1993.


     Karen Anderson wrote Chain Her By One Foot to address

the question of how, in a brief period in the early

seventeenth century, the power of Huron and Montagnais women

was radically altered.  Anderson observes that the native

women changed from an essentially egalitarian society to a

European-style hierarchical society (with women at the

bottom of the pecking order) in about thirty years.  This

illumination of a previously egalitarian and power-balanced

society and its erosion by European influences demonstrates

that subjugation is not a natural condition for women, then

or now.  To provide structure for her feminist work,

Anderson relies on the power theories of  Foucault to

describe how power centers exist and change, and marxist

theory to express the mechanics of production.  Together,

the marxist and Foucaultian theories provide a mutually-

reinforcing system or that allows Anderson to describe the

changing situation of native women after the introduction of

European culture.

     Chain Her By One Foot is a monograph built largely on

the printed versions of the Jesuit Relations.  Taken at face

value, the Relations document for Anderson the social

changes occurring in the native populations of New France.

The Relations provide not only the record of this change,

but lengthy excerpts inform the reader of the tone of and

Jesuit interest in contemporary events.  The book is also

literally organized around phrases from the Relations, each

chapter titled by a phrase from the Jesuit reports.

Anderson also relies on primary printed works of such

Western luminaries as Plato, Aristotle and Saint Thomas

Aquinas to explain the philosophical background for Jesuit

beliefs, occasionally also acting as translator for some of

the works.  When Anderson relies on secondary sources, she

seems to rely on articles in left-leaning journals, and

marxist-feminist writers.

     The first of these, "Proud, Disobediant and Ill-

Tempered" sets the stage for the reset of the work.  The

record tells of formerly wild woman who became "truly a

lamb" concurrent with Christianization.1  This example

capsulizes the experience of native women in that area.

Anderson lays out in the remainder of the chapter her

methods and intent, to document the change from equality to

subjugation using marxist/Foucaultian methods.

     In "The Blood of Martyrs is the Seed of Christians"

Anderson demonstrates the background for Jesuits personal

and organizational fanaticism, and willingness to mortify

the self and the Other in the battle for souls.  The Jesuit

fear of chaos (as an expression of the Anti-Christ)

Libertinage and "free will" among the natives was

dangerously chaotic.  In this model, conformance to

authority and obedience gave evidence that a new moral order

had taken root.  Anderson uses the marriage of Charles and

Marie Meiaskawat as a an indicator that this new moral order

(with the attendant subjugation of women) was partially or

completely in place, and that "previous relations . . . had

been transformed."2

     In 'That They May Also Acquire a French Heart and

Spirit", Anderson ties the Jesuit transformation of native

society in New France to the building of a centralized state

in France proper.  Although the power foci were still

entangled in the nascent state, the concept of hierarchy and

obedience were widely understood as necessary to the

project.  Out of the confused power structures in France

came the introduction of France as a late player in the

American game.  Anderson also uses this chapter to introduce

Loyola, using his personal story to illustrate how Jesuit

institutional martial personality came to be formed, and how

well-placed Jesuits were able to influence the missionizing

of New France.

     In the fourth chapter, "The Male is More Fitted to Rule

than the Female", traces Jesuit (and, by extension,

European) misogyny to the Aristotelian and Thomist

philosophy and ideas such as the "sex polarity argument".3

Women and their uncontrolled sexuality were a danger to

ordered society, and so required close control of husbands.

     The fifth chapter, 'This Little Fury of Hell', is a

study of Jesuit responses to native attitudes toward

marriage and sexuality (particular pre-marital sexuality).

As the family was the microcosm of the social macrocosm,

control at the familial level was crucial to Jesuit success

in changing native society to the European model.  Again

relying on the Relations, Anderson details the objections of

the natives (men, included) to Christian marriage; European

matrimony was antithetical to native social organization and

means of productions, as the reader later learns.

Ironically, the harsh teachings of the Jesuits backfired

occasionally; young people might adopt the Pauline model of

preferring not to marry (or socialize) at all, putting

downward pressure on the Jesuit' ability to subvert native

society.

     The sixth chapter marks a change in this work, a closer

look at the native society before European encroachment.

Anderson discusses the valued places women in Huron and

Montagnais societies.  From there she describes the kinship-

ordered means of production (longhouse-oriented, in this

case) and its ramifications for social order and valuation

of individuals in marital, economic, and political arenas.

In this section, Anderson gives credit to her feminist

predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s who "radically altered

the way women had been studied", particularly in pre-

capitalist societies.4  In particular, Anderson uses Coontz

and Henderson's model of a "kin corporate property-owning

system" to explain relations beween genders.5

     The seventh section is an anthropological exploration

of technology, gender and other factors in the division of

labor.  In this section, one of the seeds for the

destruction of the egalitarian society is revealed.  Male

ownership of warring and trading means of production was not

a destabilizing factor as long as trade was minimal and did

not overshadow domestic and agricultural means of

production.  Following Engels, Anderson points to concepts

of private property, commodity production, and monogamy as

precursors to social structures that would necessitate the

subjugation of women and the matrilineal/unilineal system..

Anderson offers "an explanation of the force behind social

change, from sex in the transition from savagery to

barbarism, to property in the transition from barbarism to

civilization."6  Increasing trade was damaging to women both

directly and indirectly, whether in the increased need for

woman-provided corn meal for traders or in direct attack or

murder by Iroquois.7

     The eighth chapter, 'Death Over a Slow Fire', describes

the shifts in socially-acceptable violence from a focus on

non-Huron men to female Huron subordinates.8  This is

examined by an examination of two "axes": native Huron

matriarchal mythology and socially-acceptable forms of

aggression.9  Women had full participation in aggression,

cruelty (and creation) in both mythological and worldly

venues.  Anderson notes that "women participated in the

activities with as much or more vigour than men," indicating

their equal status rather than some inferior placement.10

     The ninth chapter details the social disruption to the

kinship-based model and the native factionalism which

further splintered the social fabric.  The defeat of

tradition-based religion, the decimation by pathogens and

the adoption of European patterns of subjugation and

domination constituted a failure of native culture.  In the

process '"all women became potential victims."11

     Anderson concludes that Jesuit social victory came

after strenuous rebellion by women.  The Jesuit disassembly

of woman-empowering kinship-ordered production radically

devalued women in the coming society.  While her work does

not provide "global" answers to questions of female

subjugation, Anderson positions Chain Her By One Foot as a

"clear record of massive change", one datapoint to

understand the massive social reorganization.12  These

reorganizations reinforce the understanding that women are

not fated or designed to be subjugated, but rather that such

subjugation results from particular settings and power-

structures, probably most recognized in periods of massive

disruption.

     Chain Her By One Foot's emphasis on pre-existing

culture and concrete evidence about changing means of

production and culture  vis-…-vis social order was a welcome

adjunct to the short readings on Jesuit missionary work in

New Spain and New France by Merril and Bitterli.  Although

Hefner's collection intended to demonstrate the "Great

Transformation" ramifications of Jesuit work, Anderson's

work provided a more systematic framework to understand the

changes.  Still there were seemingly obvious glosses that

detracted from the otherwise-convincing nature of Chain Her

By One Foot.  The main problem with off-"center" histories

in general is that they increase divisiveness by exhibiting

tunnel-vision: all native peoples discussed in this book

were subjugated; only the relative positions are different.

Anderson's position is similar to a scene in Joseph Heller's

Catch-22:



     Yossarian:  [taking flak in a bomber, screaming]
     "They're trying to kill me!
     Arfy (?): "It's a war.  They're trying to kill
     everybody."
     Yossarian: "What difference does that make?"


     Anderson does not see, or perhaps thinks it

unimportant, that women were singled out for punishment more

because they were obstructionist (from the Jesuit point of

view) rather than because they were women, per se.  To the

Jesuit, those that fought the new order were agents of

chaos, minions of the Anti-Christ.  The capitalist means of

production requires self-denial (literal denial of self) to

function well, as Sartre pointed out.13  Everyone is a slave

to the machine, and it is, in my opinion, non-productive to

single out one oppressed subset as if it were the entire set

of subjugated people.



jason carr

_______________________________
1 Page 2.
2 Page 30.
3 Page 57.
4 Page 109.
5 Page 126.
6 Page 155.
7 Page 159.
8 The tortured prisoners were non-Huron in that they were
captured in war, though they were nominally Huron in that
they were frequently adopted into a family.  This tendency
to torture one's adopted member (while using familiar
language) seems to be a sublimation stemming from the taboo
against intra-Huron aggression in non-ritual situations.
9 Page 163.
10 Page 177.
11 Page 223.
12 Page 227.
13 One of my favorite quotes: "Their condition is wholly one
of ceremony.  The public demands of them that they realize
it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the
tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavor to
persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer,
an auctioneer, a tailor.  A grocer who dreams is offensive
to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer.
Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a
grocer ..."  Sartre, Patterns of Bad Faith.

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