Friday, August 13, 2004
"The Panther's Scream" -- article review
By The Erudite Redneck
(written February 2002)
Carolyn Ross Johnston balanced social science with narrative history in “The Panther’s Scream is Often Heard: Cherokee Women in Indian Territory During the Civil War,” in Vol. 78, No. 1 (spring 2000) of The Chronicles of Oklahoma. In her short gender study, Johnston, professor of American studies and history at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, asserted that the Civil War and intertribal factionalism empowered women yet led to a crisis of identity among elites. By taking on roles formerly played by men, Cherokee women were unable to meet the expectations of “true womanhood” they had borrowed from white Victorian America, according to Johnston.
Johnston’s object was to explore the ordeal of Cherokee women during a time of war that, in Indian Territory, was atypical compared to hostilities played out in the Southern states. For example, Cherokee women, she contends, hated the war from the beginning, unlike many women in the South who, at least in the early days of the war, felt a shared stake in its outcome. Further, Cherokee women were drawn into the war more explicitly by economic motives than many of their white counterparts in the rest of the Confederacy, and contended intimately with “old hatreds” awakened in the tribe by the “white man’s” war. (p. 86).
Her method was to synthesize observations written in diaries and letters as events and emotions unfolded, supplement them with 1930s interviews with aging Cherokees, and rely on limited scholarly writings on the lives of women in Indian Territory. She concluded that the war “reinforced older Cherokee gender roles for the traditional and non-slaveholding women by emphasizing the male role of warrior and elevating the role of women as providers and cultivators of the earth.”
Johnston relied, perhaps to a fault, on sources that, while primary, were necessarily skewed toward the experiences of elite women. She used the diaries and letters of Sarah Watie, wife of the Cherokee Confederate Brig. Gen. Stand Watie; Mary Stapler Ross, the wife of Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross; and Hannah Worcester Hicks, who became a tribe member by marrying Abijah Hicks, son of an early eastern Cherokee chief. While technically among the elite class, Hicks, in her diary, does shed light on a common experience of non-elite women; she was a widow left with five children when her husband was killed in July 1862 (p. 92).
Johnston gave a nod to quantification, quoting just enough numbers to give the broadest context – for example, one-third of Cherokee women were widows and one-fourth of the children were orphans in 1863 (p. 84). She literally bracketed the article with these facts, repeating them at the end (p. 100). Historiographically, she looked to culture and symbolism with an approach reminiscent of latter-day scholars in the French Annales school, relying on Barbara Welter’s 1970s-era notion of “the cult of true womanhood” to give a general cultural context. Johnston ignores chronology, except for the obvious timeline of 1861-1865, the years of the Civil War.
END
(written February 2002)
Carolyn Ross Johnston balanced social science with narrative history in “The Panther’s Scream is Often Heard: Cherokee Women in Indian Territory During the Civil War,” in Vol. 78, No. 1 (spring 2000) of The Chronicles of Oklahoma. In her short gender study, Johnston, professor of American studies and history at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, asserted that the Civil War and intertribal factionalism empowered women yet led to a crisis of identity among elites. By taking on roles formerly played by men, Cherokee women were unable to meet the expectations of “true womanhood” they had borrowed from white Victorian America, according to Johnston.
Johnston’s object was to explore the ordeal of Cherokee women during a time of war that, in Indian Territory, was atypical compared to hostilities played out in the Southern states. For example, Cherokee women, she contends, hated the war from the beginning, unlike many women in the South who, at least in the early days of the war, felt a shared stake in its outcome. Further, Cherokee women were drawn into the war more explicitly by economic motives than many of their white counterparts in the rest of the Confederacy, and contended intimately with “old hatreds” awakened in the tribe by the “white man’s” war. (p. 86).
Her method was to synthesize observations written in diaries and letters as events and emotions unfolded, supplement them with 1930s interviews with aging Cherokees, and rely on limited scholarly writings on the lives of women in Indian Territory. She concluded that the war “reinforced older Cherokee gender roles for the traditional and non-slaveholding women by emphasizing the male role of warrior and elevating the role of women as providers and cultivators of the earth.”
Johnston relied, perhaps to a fault, on sources that, while primary, were necessarily skewed toward the experiences of elite women. She used the diaries and letters of Sarah Watie, wife of the Cherokee Confederate Brig. Gen. Stand Watie; Mary Stapler Ross, the wife of Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross; and Hannah Worcester Hicks, who became a tribe member by marrying Abijah Hicks, son of an early eastern Cherokee chief. While technically among the elite class, Hicks, in her diary, does shed light on a common experience of non-elite women; she was a widow left with five children when her husband was killed in July 1862 (p. 92).
Johnston gave a nod to quantification, quoting just enough numbers to give the broadest context – for example, one-third of Cherokee women were widows and one-fourth of the children were orphans in 1863 (p. 84). She literally bracketed the article with these facts, repeating them at the end (p. 100). Historiographically, she looked to culture and symbolism with an approach reminiscent of latter-day scholars in the French Annales school, relying on Barbara Welter’s 1970s-era notion of “the cult of true womanhood” to give a general cultural context. Johnston ignores chronology, except for the obvious timeline of 1861-1865, the years of the Civil War.
END
