Reviews

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

dashadashahi's review against another edition

5.0

Anderson applies her sociological training to understanding how and why women of the Huron and Montagnais women in New France became subjugated members of their societies. Anderson argues that the subjugation of Huron and Montagnais women occurred as a result of a series of struggles between Jesuit missionaries and the two native societies over worldviews. The struggle between the two worldviews took place in societal, institutional, and emotional structures. Anderson argues that the disruptive period of contact, combined with the Jesuit’s presentation of a Christian worldview resulted in women taking on the status of inferior dependents subjected to men’s anger and aggression, while men similarly embraced the role of domineering leaders. As a result of Jesuit imposition and the disruptive effects of colonialism, such as famine, epidemics, and warfare, the mostly egalitarian societies came to replicate France’s hierarchical structure. While Anderson analyzes the specific mechanisms that brought about the subjugation of women’s status in Huron and Montagnais society over a short period of about thirty years, 1609-1649, she also places her work within a broader feminist project of understanding Western Europe’s subjugation of women (p. 5).