Susan Brownmiller

Robert Shepherd

Frederick Drimmer, who edited a collection of captivity narratives, wrote, "Anyone reading early accounts of captivity among the Indians is struck by the fact that female prisoners do not appear to have been abused by the Indians in the eastern section of the country." He presents a blanket summation from General James Clinton, who participated in a punitive expedition against the Iroquois in New York in 1799: "Bad as savages are, they never violate the chastity of any women their prisoners."

The first full-length narrative to become a popular success in its time was that of Mary Rowlandson, the "goodwife" of the first ordained minister of Lancaster, Massachusetts. She was taken captive in 1676, the sole adult survivor of a massacre of more than forty persons. Mrs. Rowlandson, as befitting her station, sprinkled her story with quotes from the Scriptures and plentiful thanks to the power of God for her divine deliverance, and her writing style became a model for many of the narratives that followed. Toward the end of her story, Mrs. Rowlandson made the following declaration:

I have been in the midst of those roaring lions and savage bears that feared neither God nor man nor the devil by night and day, alone and in company, sleeping in all sorts together, and yet no one of them ever offered the least abuse of unchastity to me in word or action. Though some are ready to say I speak it for my own credit, I speak it in the presence of God and to his glory.

Mrs. Rowlandson's case was not atypical. Isabella McCoy, captured by the St. Francis Indians in 1747, also averred that she had not been raped. The anonymous narrator of the battles of Trenton and Princeton ... claimed that British abuse of women had been "far Worse in this Respect than an Indian War, for I Never heard nor read of their Ravishing of Women ...." Another anonymous author, who penned A Narrative of the Capture of Certain Americans at Westmoreland (1780), saw fit to comment, "I don't remember to have heard an instance of these savages offering to violate the chastity of any of the fair sex who had fallen into their hands."

Susan Brownmiller continues, noting that the passages by General James Clinton and by the anonymous Westmoreland author both refer to the Iroquois, which she calls a most remarkable nation whose structure was based on a matrilineal foundation in which played an important political role, unlike other Indian tribes and unlike existing white civilization.

Drimmer points out, "It was a custom for the braves to make elaborate preparations before going on the warpath, and these included the practice of continence and rites of purification. To abuse a female captive would have weakened the Indians' 'medicine.'"

I believe it was the anthropologist Malinowski who stated that among the so-called 'primitive' tribes that are matriarchal in structure, the phenomenon of rape is unheard of.

By contrast, existing white civilization was (in Riane Eisler's word) androcratic and male dominated. The whites typically flattered themselves on their advanced civilization, their enlightenment. They expected that their Euro-centric empire would defeat the "primitives." Darwin, for example, made such a prediction time and again in his writing:

In Chapter 5, Descent of Man, Darwin said:

At the present day civilised nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations, excepting where the climate opposes a deadly barrier; and they succeed mainly, though not exclusively, through their arts, which are the products of the intellect. It is, therefore, highly probable that with mankind the intellectual faculties have been mainly and gradually perfected through natural selection; and this conclusion is sufficient for our purpose. Undoubtedly it would be interesting to trace the development of each separate faculty.

Also reference James Axtell, "White Indians of Colonial America." The reports of Roger Williams of Rhode Island, and accounts of (among others) Mary Jemison, Mary White Rowlandson, etc.

Brutal floggings
In the early days when government policy of herding entire peoples onto reservations was being implemented, there was also a goal of compelling natives to attend boarding schools, ready or not. William T. Hagan writes that "the death rate among students was abnormally high. Stories of coproral punishment, of school jails, of young warriors shorn of their long locks heightened the unpopularity of these institutions." [p137]