In this highly original volume of social history, Karen Anderson makes a provocative claim: the subjugation of women in seventeenth century New France was linked with the brutal colonization of native Indian populations. Before colonization, the Huron and Montagnais tribes lived in gender-egalitarian societies. The domination of women by men was only one effect of French civilization'--along with warfare, disease, famine and Jesuit proselytization--which combined to destroy Indian culture and sexual equality. Anderson's interdisciplinary, cross-cultural study is an impressive feminist case study of the historical and political construction of gender and racial inequality.
