In the native state. (Reviews).(Sisters in Sprint: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists)(Book Review)

Sisters in Sprint: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists by Sally Roesch Wagner (Summertown, Tenn.: Native Voices, 2001, ISBN 0-57067--121-4) 126 pp. Paper $9.95.

As the extensive biographical notes included in this slim volume suggest, Sally Roesch Wagner--longtime champion and chronicler of the women's rights crusaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton--is, herself, something of a pioneer in her own field of women's studies. One of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in the subject, she has done much over the years to resurrect and reexamine the long-neglected history of the fight for women's suffrage in this country and has been a frequent contributor to such PBS programs as Ken Burns's celebrated documentary on Anthony and Stanton, Not for Ourselves Alone. How fitting, then, that she has now chosen to further our understanding of these women's efforts by illuminating yet another important, equally overlooked, aspect of their story: namely the very real influence that Iroquois women (known to themselves, and to Wagner, as "Haudenosaunee") and their enlightened matrilineal society had on Stanton, Anthony and their lesser-known contemporaries, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Lucretia Mott, all of whom lived and worked in upstate New York in the 1840s and 50s and had ample opportunity to interact with Haudenosaunee women and to profit from their inspiring example. Very much a piece with recent revisionist attempts to demonstrate the Founding Fathers' debt to the Iroquois Confederacy in fashioning our own constitutional government, Wagner's book not only makes a significant new contribution to her own discipline, but offers an equally ground-breaking interdisciplinary addition to …