Dehumanization Of Women

As the Europeans came into contact with the indigenous Americans their views of women became challenged. The white man’s Indian equaled a primitive man. Europeans did not originally view indigenous Americans as adhering to any of the cultural structure that Europeans believed they had already mastered. The culture of native Americans was matriarchal and largely unfamiliar to the immigrant community. Pueblo groups were tied to female political power and women provided for families in a way unseen in the European world.
This Orientalism – or Otherness – permitted Europeans to not only view people as less than themselves but advanced the mistreatment of non-White individuals, up to and including the trafficking of Africans into slavery. The
Once white people realized that any person could be stratified by social constructs such as skin color then all othering concepts became fuel for the subjugation of human beings. Women did not come out unscathed. Having initially emigrated to North American from predominately patriarchal societies, the natural progression of disenfranchisement saw women denied many of the rights that they had previously denied to the captives they enslaved. White women were nearly, if not as, oppressed as those of color. Laws of domestic relations explained coverture as men being in control of women’s bodies and possessions. Women were denied their homesteads and were only allowed one-third of her husband’s possessions in a widow’s dower. This law kept women in a perpetual state of minority. Attempts by women to challenge the hegemony were met with accusations of witchcraft. This reiteration of the monster justification was an explanation for why some women did not align with the ideas of puritan normality. The Ways of Her Household gives an example of application of the widows third. It also explains how the accusation of witchcraft was a powerful tool of oppression. Knowledge of others with a pentatonic watching gave those of dominance a way to be judge and jury for those that objected the status