Dr. Katherine Jellison will discuss traditional Iroquois culture and its reliance on women’s productive and reproductive labor. In their central role as agriculturalists, Iroquois women held political and social power beyond that of European women, and even most other Indigenous women. Growing and distributing corn, beans and squash enabled women to determine whether Iroquois men went to war and which men would hold leadership positions. As food givers, women also stood at the center of Iroquois family life, which was both matrilocal and matrilineal. A female figure, Sky Woman, even served as the central character in the Iroquois creation story. With their elevated cultural status, Iroquois women flummoxed the first Europeans who encountered them. Unable to comprehend that women could wield so much influence, early Europeans misinterpreted what they saw and believed that Iroquois men forced their wives and daughters to perform their vital and empowering agricultural labor.
Jellison earned her PhD at the University of Iowa, where she studied with one of the pioneers in the field of U.S. women’s history, Linda K. Kerber. Jellison has received numerous research grants and fellowships and is an Ohio University Presidential Research Scholar. She is the author of Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), It’s Our Day: America’s Love Affair with the White Wedding, 1945-2005 (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and with Steven D. Reschly, Amish Women and the Great Depression (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). She is also the author of many journal articles and book chapters and frequently provides commentary on gender and politics in The New York Times and The Washington Post and on CNN, NPR and BBC.
