Cherokee Women
--by Theda Perdue

Long before the arrival of the white man, women enjoyed a major role in the family life, economy, and government of the Cherokee Indians. The Cherokees originally lived in villages built along the rivers of western North Carolina, northwestern South Carolina, northern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee. When white men visited these villages in the early 1700s, they were surprised by the rights and privileges of Indian women.

Perhaps most surprising to Europeans was the Cherokee’s matrilineal kinship system. In a matrilineal kinship system, a person is related only to people on his mother’s side. His relatives are those who can be traced through a woman. In this way a child is related to his mother, and through her to his brothers and sisters. He is also related to his mother’s mother (grandmother), his mother’s brothers (uncles), and his mother’s sisters (aunts). The child is not related to the father, however. The most important male relative in a child’s life is his mother’s brother. Many Europeans never figured out how this kinship system worked. Those white men who married Indian women were shocked to discover that the Cherokees did not consider them to be related to their own children, and that mothers, not fathers, had control over the children.

Europeans also were astonished that women were the heads of Cherokee households. The Cherokees lived in extended families. This means that several generations (grandmother, mother, grandchildren) lived together as one family. Such a large family needed a number of different buildings. The roomy summer house was built of bark. The tiny winter house had thick clay walls and a roof, which kept in the heat from a fire smoldering on a central hearth. The household also had corn cribs and storage sheds. All these buildings belonged to the women in the family, and daughters inherited them from their mothers. A husband lived in the household of his wife (and her mother and sisters). If a husband and wife did not get along and decided to separate, the husband went home to his mother while any children remained with the wife in her home.

The family had a small garden near their houses and cultivated a particular section of the large fields which lay outside the village. Although men helped clear the fields and plant the crops, women did most of the farming because men were usually at war during the summer. The women used stone hoes or pointed sticks to cultivate corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and sunflowers. Old women sat on platforms in the fields and chased away any crows or raccoons that tried to raid the fields.

In the winter when men traveled hundreds of miles to hunt bears, deer, turkeys, and other game, women stayed at home. They kept the fires burning in the winter houses, made baskets, pottery, clothing, and other things the family needed, cared for the children, and performed the chores for the household.

Perhaps because women were so important in the family and in the economy, they also had a voice in government. The Cherokees made decisions only after they discussed an issue for a long time and agreed on what they should do. The council meetings at which decisions were made were open to everyone including women. Women participated actively. Sometimes they urged the men to go to war to avenge an earlier enemy attack. Sometimes they advised peace. Women occasionally even fought in battles beside the men. The Cherokees called these women “War Women,” and all the people respected and honored them for their bravery.

By the 1800s the Cherokees had lost their independence and had become dominated by white Americans. At this time white Americans did not believe that it was proper for women to fight wars, vote, speak in public, work outside the home, or even control their own children. The Cherokees began to imitate whites, and Cherokee women lost much of their power and prestige. In the twentieth century, all women have had to struggle to acquire many of those rights which Cherokee women once freely enjoyed.

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The Women of Somerset Place

--by John Sykes

Life at Somerset Place revolved around farming. Josiah and the overseers kept good records each year to prepare for the next year’s planting season. Most of Somerset’s slaves were field hands who labored five days a week from sunrise to sunset and until noon on Saturdays. Each morning the overseer had the horn sounded to begin the workday. The field hands were divided into gangs assigned to different tasks and different fields.

Sixty percent of Somerset’s field hands were women and they labored in the fields alongside the men. In the winter months, women and the older children cleared the fields of weeds, cleaned the roads, repaired and built fences, chopped wood for the wood house, and burned wood to make charcoal. In the spring, men, women, and children prepared the fields for planting. Children planted potatoes, turnips, and flax. During the herring season, they were sent to dip herring out of the canal. There were two harvest holidays, one in June after the wheat harvest and another in October. Slaves also had a five-day holiday at Christmas. Those who had family members in Edenton were sometimes allowed to leave the plantation to visit them. [Go to http://www.arch.dcr.state.nc.us/amonth/somerset.htm to find out about African-American archaeology at Somerset Place.]

Women who were injured or too old for fieldwork were given jobs closer to the plantation house, sometimes called the Big House. These jobs included weeding the gardens, milking the plantation’s fifty-two cows, watching over the herd of 225 sheep, tending the chicken yard and pigpens, and caring for the little children whose mothers worked in the fields.

Rebecca "Becky" Drew (1825-1901) was one of these women. Becky was born in Edenton at another plantation and had been sent to work in the fields at Somerset when she was fifteen years old. Homesick for her mother and family, Becky tried to run away but was caught and put in the stocks overnight as punishment. Unfortunately, the night turned cold, her feet froze, and she lost circulation in both legs. As a result, her feet were amputated. Despite the loss of her feet, however, Becky could walk and was able to do smaller jobs.

Charlotte Cabarrus, the Collinses’ family housekeeper, was born in Edenton around 1800. She and her family had been freed by their owner, Auguste Cabarrus. Because she was free, Charlotte was the only African American person on the plantation to be paid for her work. She was hired when Josiah and Mary first came to Somerset Place. When the Collins boys were small, she was their nurse. The boys were very fond of Charlotte and called her "Shish." Running a large plantation household was a great deal of work, and Charlotte was second in command to Mary Riggs Collins. It is likely that Charlotte guided her mistress in the effective management of the household. Charlotte also helped to heal slaves on the plantation who were ill.

Mary loved to entertain and frequently had members of her family come from New Jersey for long visits. One of her greatest pleasures was the flower garden that she developed near the plantation house alongside the canal. An experimenter with flowers, Mary had a greenhouse near the kitchen where she could plant new varieties of flowers for her garden.

In June 1860, Mary had a severe stroke that left her partially paralyzed and unable to write or speak. Her new daughter-in-law, Sarah "Sally" Rebecca Jones Collins, suddenly found herself in charge of the large household at Somerset Place. Sally was twenty-seven years old and had recently married the Collinses’ oldest son, Joe. Born in Hillsborough, Sally was accustomed to the responsibilities of managing a large plantation household.

During the Civil War, the Collins family left Somerset Place in care of an overseer. Many of the slaves were transported up-country to a plantation in Franklin County called Hurry Scurry. The Collinses hoped to keep the slaves away from the Union forces that took over most of eastern North Carolina.

Josiah Collins III died in 1863, but Mary Collins and her sons returned to Somerset Place after the war. The plantation was never as profitable as before the war, and eventually the family stopped farming. Most of the freed slaves moved away from the plantation in search of a better life. In the 1950s, the State of North Carolina took over most of the plantation property and opened it as a state historic site.

Somerset Place Historic Site offers tours and hands-on educational programs that present an inclusive history of the plantation.

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The lives of rural women in North Carolina have changed greatly over the past one hundred years. The following article is based on oral histories of women born in the late 1890s and early 1900s. They all grew up on farms and know the meaning of hard work in a way that most of us will never understand. They may not have had the luxuries and modern conveniences that so many of us take for granted, but they look back on their lives with happiness and fond memories.

Gilda Knight Spainhour

Gilda Spainhour and her husband, Will, live just east of King in Stokes County. Gilda began working at a very young age. "When I was ten years old I would go out and stay with people and cook for them. I done the cooking for all the hands and milked two cows and fed the hogs, and I got a dollar and a quarter a week. I know how to work," she told Tar Heel Junior Historianmagazine.

She worked for Jim Kreeger, a landowner in King, and made enough money to buy her black-buttoned wedding shoes. She made her wedding dress from blue wool. "We got married on Wednesday and the next day Will finished sowing wheat. We moved into a log house--great big logs. The floors were pretty pine; there wasn’t such a thing as paint then."

Their house had no luxuries, only the bare necessities. "I wish you could have seen how we done and what we had. Grandpa Spainhour made us a box up on the wall for our cupboard, and Grandpa and Will made the table. [The woodstove] had one leg broken off. We had it propped up. We used it about four years because we had to have farming tools and other things. What you needed came first, it wasn’t what you wanted."

Gilda looks back on her seventy-nine years of marriage with satisfaction. "I’ve got a good man. He’s done just as much in raising this family as I. I think he’s pinned on more diapers than I have." What her husband did to help with the children was unusual for a man born in 1888. "Well, there wasn’t many men done it," she said.

Ida Mae Cundiff

Baking sweet potatoes in her Mount Airy home, Ida Cundiff tells about her childhood, almost a hundred years ago, growing up on the Milton Cundiff place near the Yadkin River. Her older sister, Julie, was a cook in the Cundiff household. Her grandfather was a slave.

When Ida was a little girl, she worked in the fields: "When I got big enough. Yes, that what I did, chile. Hoeing, chile. Hoeing the crops. You’d go down to the river bottom. . . had corn or tobacco all down there."

When the boys would come courting her sisters, she pestered them to give her money for candy. They would give her a nickel just to get rid of her. Ida explained the value of money spent almost a hundred years ago: "A nickel! Lord, chile. A nickel was just like a dollar. . . That was something!"

She would give the nickel to her father so he could buy candy for her at the nearest town, Siloam, in southeastern Surry County. Sometimes she and her sisters rode with him on a two-horse wagon.

"Daddy would hitch up the wagon, put us all in there, and here we’d go--a quilt back there. We young’uns back there. . . Yeah, them days were good days. I enjoyed it. We had some good days all right!"

Magdalene Robertson Tilley Compton

Magdalene Compton, eldest of nine children, grew up in the Snow Hill community near Lawsonville, north of Sauratown Mountain. From her house it is about thirteen miles through a valley into Stuart, Virginia. Magdalene used to go there with her father when she was young. They would travel by wagon three or four times a year to the mill at Stuart, north across the North Carolina state line, east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They took wheat from the family farm to the mill and had it ground into flour.

"I went with him many a time. We’d start out early in the morning and be gone all day. Get back by dark. He would carry a whole load of wheat--what the mules could pull. Get it ground up enough to last two or three months," she said.

Magdalene grew up on a tobacco farm. Her family, like other Stokes and Surry farm families, also grew the food it ate. Although men did the heavier outdoor work on the farm--building fences, clearing fields, and plowing with mules--both men and women shared in other chores. Women chopped kindling and carried water and wood into the houses. They also built fires to cook food and heat the houses. She explained that her grandfather "had four boys and four girls, and the girls worked just like boys until they got to be old ladies. I’ve seen ’em pitch hay and the water just run off of ‘em." Magdalene herself preferred outdoor work to inside chores. "Give me the outside anytime!"

Magdalene said people today are much more wasteful than they were when she was growing up. "They didn’t buy new stuff like they do now. If you wore out a shirt or something, and it had a hole or two in it, and it was ragged, and you didn’t want to wear it, you’d cut the good parts of it out and make you a cotton top or a quilt and fix it. If people had to live like we lived back then, they’d go wild. They waste more than we had."

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Changing Images: Three Devereux Sisters
--by Terrell Armistead Crow

The role of women in society has changed dramatically over the last century. The Devereux family of Halifax County, North Carolina, left many records (letters, diaries, notes, and the like) that document some of those changes. This family included six sisters who lived from the antebellum period through Civil War and Reconstruction.

Daughters of a well-to-do planter family, these women received careful instructions during childhood on the ideal image of woman. This included lessons on sewing, organizing a large household, cooking, and behaving like a lady. They also enjoyed the benefits of a governess who taught them French, English, literature, music, history, arithmetic, and other subjects. Their grandfather, John Devereux, described in 1821 the type of woman that the family most admired: “A modest diffident and soothing style as well in writing as in conversation when combined with simplicity of character and truth are amongst the finest ornaments of the female mind. A bold, self assured and positive manner is the very reverse, and ought to be avoided both by men and women.”
 

Hascosea plantation, Halifax County, Kate Edmondston’s home

The Civil War overturned this advice in at least three of the sisters’ lives. Catherine (Kate) Devereux married Patrick Edmondston in 1846. She kept a diary during the Civil War and stated in it that women should be submissive, sweet, and mild. The Civil War, however, forced her to assume greater and greater control over the family plantation while her husband was away on war-related duties. Kate also recalled in 1863 how indignant she was with her husband in the first years of their marriage. Anxious to please him by running a smooth household, nonetheless, she felt “pained & mortified” at his belief that “the first duty of woman was to attend to the cooking.” Kate wondered to herself whether it was “for this that you had been educated?. . .

Was it for this such tastes had been cultivated in you? . . . You were willing enough and happy in attending to domestic duties . . . but the pedestal on which he placed them debased all else. You could not worship at such a shrine!” When Patrick died shortly after the war, Catherine refused to give up their farm and struggled successfully to keep it.

Her sister, Mary Bayard Devereux, married to William J. Clarke of New Bern, experienced many changes during and after the war. More adventurous than her sisters, she traveled extensively after her marriage. She also published poetry, short stories, and newspaper columns. Before the war Mary Bayard wrote for personal enjoyment, although many in her family disapproved of a woman’s publishing material for the general public to read. During and after the war, however, her writings became an economic necessity. In 1868 Mary Bayard wrote a friend, “I am busy editing my paper the Literary Pastime; . . . contributing to two magazines; and translating a French novel; added to which I am composing the libretto for an opera, and writing Sunday-school hymns at five dollars apiece.”

Mary Bayard proved an independent and spirited woman. She encouraged independence in her children as well. In 1873 she wrote her eldest son William:

that I loved all my children differently, and I am glad to say that they all have distinct individualities . . . You don’t all look exactly alike and it is not strange you should not feel alike, think alike, and act alike. . . . Live your own life is my motto but I was brought up to think I ought to live somebody else’s life and must take my opinions and feelings as I did my clothes when a child; they were cut and made properly and I must wear them—I have always tried to avoid this with you children and I should as soon think of making you all like the same things to eat as of insisting you should all think alike or scold you because you did not. . . . [D]o please my dear Willie start in life with the conviction that God intended men to think differently and don’t think that because people don’t agree with you they are necessarily wrong. . . . I have suffered so much from intolerance on every subject that I dread to see it in my family. . . .

Mary Bayard Clarke had obviously outgrown the picture of perfect womanhood described by her grandfather over fifty years before. Her role as a member of the old planter class was finished, and she clearly recognized it.

Another Devereux sister, Nora, also weathered the storm of war. Nora had married a doctor and moved to Tennessee before the Civil War. Her husband’s death in 1865 forced her to return to North Carolina. At first Nora depended on her sisters and brothers-in-law for protection. Yet, she deeply desired to support herself and her four daughters. Nora eventually secured a teaching post at St. Mary’s School in Raleigh. This gave her independence and the assurance that her own daughters would receive adequate schooling. Nora’s change in attitude toward women and their rights can be measured in two letters she wrote her nephew William Clarke. In 1873 Nora slyly described women’s three rights: the right to be “bewitching,” the right to serve good meals, and the right to keep buttons sewn on men’s shirts. She added, however, that if there was no man “coming home she [the woman] must necessarily take on herself part of the man’s work and rights & resign her own. Understand, I mean by bewitching not only to the eye but to the mind by cultivating her intellect. . . .” Earlier, in 1872, Nora expressed her delight with teaching at St. Mary’s.

You do not know the pride I feel in the fact that last year I supported, clothed, and educated my children & boarded and clothed my self without one cent from any of my relatives except your Father who sent me twice a present of $10.00. . . . You should have heard the tone of voice in which I told sister Kate of the fact that except [for] the $20.00 given me by your Father I made all we lived on; & when she asked “how” it was as good as a play. “By my sewing machine. I often sewed ‘til 12 o’clock at night.” Good bye for here is Madame Ego again on the stage.

Nora’s growing self-confidence later led her back to Tennessee along with three of her daughters. There she owned a small farm. She also abandoned the traditional view of woman she had been taught since childhood when she was elected superintendent of public instruction for Fayette County, Tennessee. She served two years, beginning in 1881, and won reelection to office in 1886.

The three women described here had been taught to act as wealthy homemakers and had received a good education. Strong in character, Kate, Mary, and Nora were forced by the Civil War to change their lives. By doing so they broke old habits of thought. Nevertheless, they were not militant supporters of woman’s rights. Mary Bayard Clarke, for example, opposed woman’s suffrage. Neither could she deny, however, that the war had expanded woman’s role. Half-jokingly, she wrote in a newspaper column: “I ain’t of opinion that she [a woman] has a right to be a man or even pretend she’s one; if she is obliged to wear the britches for the good of the family, her skirts ought to be long enough to hide ‘em.”

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Assignment #2

Complete one of the following assignments:

Option 1:
Do you feel it's important to teach the stories of unknown people, like the ones in this session? If so, how do you (or could you) make the time to do so during the school year? How could such stories be used to fill in traditional gaps in information on women's contributions to society throughout history? There are no right or wrong answers; just state your case on the workshop's Bulletin Board. 

Option 2:
Research the life of one woman in your community or family, focusing on her role in the home. You may choose any historical time period, and your research might include, but is not limited to 
 

• oral history interviews of the subject or her family members 
• primary documents (journals, diaries, photographs) 
• secondary sources (newspapers, books, Web sites) 
• artifacts connected to the subject (quilts, recipes, artwork) 

Write an essay or outline comparing your subject’s role in the home to women’s roles today. How have these roles changed? Why do you think they’ve changed?

Option 3:
Create a lesson plan about how women’s roles in the American household have changed over time. You may compare two or more time periods (World War II and the 1950s, for example), or trace the development over a longer span (such as the 20th century, perhaps including one entry per decade). Feel free to adapt the lesson plan to your curriculum; we hope you’ll be able to use it in your classroom.

When complete, submit your lesson via e-mail to: tricia.l.blakistone@ncdcr.gov.

Post comments and questions about this material on the workshop's Bulletin Board.