On April 30, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. the Historical Society in Newark Valley will present a lecture, The Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Influence on Women’s Rights. The lecture will welcome Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner, and is free and open to the public. The lecture will take place at the Newark Valley High School, Room 144 in Newark Valley.
Hear a new approach to the origins of feminism by a pioneer scholar. For the first time, the Native American influence on woman’s rights has been uncovered by one of the first women in the country to receive a doctorate for work in women’s studies.
Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner weaves the story of the Six Nation Confederacy, whose practice of gender equality inspired the emerging woman’s rights movement in upstate New York over 100 years ago.
This dynamic and thought-provoking lecture by Dr. Wagner is based on her book, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists and challenges existing perceptions about the early years of the woman’s rights movement.
Imagine that women had the right to choose all political representatives, and to remove from office anyone who didn’t address the wishes and needs of the people. Haudenosaunee (traditional Iroquois) women have had that responsibility – and more – since long before Christopher Columbus came to these shores. Pre-contact, Native American women generally had a status which would be the envy of United States women, even today.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, the two major theoreticians of the early women’s rights movement, had direct knowledge of the Haudenosaunee, writing about the superior social, political, religious, and economic status of women in the Iroquois nations. Their work for women’s rights, Wagner argues, was inspired by the vision they received from the Haudenosaunee of gender balance and harmony.
Dr. Wagner is Founding Director, Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in Fayetteville, New York, and the nation’s foremost authority on Gage. She is one of the first women to receive a doctorate for work in women’s studies in the United States (UC Santa Cruz, 1978). Dr. Wagner is also a founder of one of the country’s first women’s studies programs at California State University, Sacramento (1970), and a women’s studies professor for 44 years.
Wagner’s recent titles include: She Who Holds the Sky: Matilda Joslyn Gage (Sky Carrier Press, 2003); Introduction to the reprint of Matilda Joslyn Gage’s 1893 classic Woman, Church and State (Humanity Books, 2002); and Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists (Native Voices, 2001). Dr. Wagner also appeared in the Ken Burns documentary, Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
A book signing will follow the lecture. This event is sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities and the Newark Valley Historical Society.
