Louis Philippe was king of France from 1830 to 1848. He traveled to the United States in 1796–97. Louis Philippe’s moralistic commentary on the Cherokees in 1797 emphasized the sexual freedom of the women. Cherokees accepted sexual activity before marriage, and although they expected fidelity afterward, they had an interesting attitude toward adultery. In 1807, Major John Norton remarked that, in contrast to the Creeks, “the Cherokees have no such punishment for adultery; the husband is even disgraced in the opinion of his friends, if he seeks to take satisfaction in any other way, than that of getting another wife.”

Although he recognized Cherokee women’s sexual autonomy, Louis Philippe portrayed Indian women more generally as drudges. This image of Indian women as degraded and overworked persisted into the nineteenth century. Euro-Americans did not realize that Indian women’s strenuous work brought them power and control over the products of their labor.

The other distinct image of the Indian woman was that of the princess—a woman such as Pocahontas, a beautiful daughter of a chief. Thus, when Europeans encountered Cherokees, who possessed a radically different gender system from theirs, their misconceptions about gender were used to justify campaigns to civilize American Indians and eventually remove them from the Southeast.¹

In the following excerpt, Louis Philippe portrays Cherokee women as drudges but emphasizes their sexual freedom as well.

…The Cherokees, on the other hand, are exceedingly casual. If a Cherokee’s woman sleeps with another man, all he does is send her away without a word to the man, considering it beneath his dignity to quarrel over a woman. And all Cherokee women are public women in the full meaning of the phrase: dollars never fail to melt their hearts.

It is notable that this freedom of concubinage, this polygamy, invariably renders the women contemptible in the men’s eyes and deprives them of all influence. That is an awkward forecast for Frenchwomen; new divorce laws have made their marriage an Indian concubinage. It is quite true that women can free themselves from the dependence due to their weakness only by the nobler feelings they arouse in men, and not by the pleasures they offer. If these pleasures are not to degrade the emotions, they must serve exclusively to heighten the affections of a man who loves and believes himself loved. But if they are lavished on legions, the magic of the emotion vanishes, and women fall into degradation and thence into dependence. But back to my story: the Indians have all the work done by women. They are assigned not only household tasks; even the corn, peas, beans, and potatoes are planted, tended, and preserved by the women. The man smokes peacefully while the woman grinds corn in a mortar (this mortar is not more than a h[o]llowed tree trunk, and the pestle is a long piece of wood, one end about as wide as the hollow).²

ENDNOTES

¹ Fogelson, “On the ‘Petticoat Government,’ ” 169. See also Rayna Green, Women in American Indian Society (New York: Chelsea House, 1992), 47, 51; Charles Hudson, Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 260, 319–20.

² Louis Philippe, Diary of My Travels in America: Louis-Philippe, King of France, 1830–1848 (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977), 72–73.