Iroquoian Women

The Author: Barbara Alice Mann, Ph.D., is a noted author and speaker on Iroquoian history and culture. Affiliated with the University of Toledo (Ohio), she co-authored Debating Democracy (1998) with Bruce Johansen and Donald Grinde, Jr., co-edited the Encyclopedia of the Iroquois (2000), and has authored major articles on various aspects of the Iroquois League and its culture. She currently teaches, writes, and works in Toledo.

«Barbara Alice Mann has written a superb book, eminently reasonable in its arguments and impeccably documented, while both eloquent and compelling in presentation. 'Iroquoian Women' is an essential corrective to the apparently endless gush of misinformation about the Six Nations issuing from the ranks of 'trolls' who infest the mainstream academic enterprise known as Iroquoian studies. So, too, is it a much-needed and powerful rejoinder to the many marxists, feminists, and other self-styled progressives who have increasingly appropriated and distorted Haudenosaunee tradition for their own polemical purposes. This is truly must reading from one of the best and brightest scholars that Native North America has yet produced.» (Ward Churchill, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder; Author of 'A Little Matter of Genocide' and numerous other works)
«Barbara Alice Mann's work has opened my eyes to the extent of influence that women possessed in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) society. It is small wonder that some of the 'Founding Mothers' of feminism in the United States (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton) drew inspiration from the Haudenosaunee way of life. With the skills, talents, and memory of a culture bearer and a historian, Barbara Alice Mann provides us with a landmark study of a political and social structure in which women chose the leaders (male and female), tended the hearth, passed on knowledge to children, and decided whether men could take their nations to war. Mann weaves an elegant account of a long-ignored and often misunderstood subject.» (Bruce Johansen, Robert T. Reilly Chair, University of Nebraska at Omaha; Author of more than a dozen works, including 'Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution')