His accounts of Native American culture reveal that women were treated like animals. Note how women are pursued in the wedding ceremony; such pursuit would have been symbolically even more powerful in a culture which engaged in, and relied on, constant hunting. Clearly, the men were "hunting" the women. Beyond the hunting motif, the behavior toward women in this culture was aggressive and perhaps even violent. The manner in which a boy would capture a young woman after overtaking her in the chase must have been painful. Women in this Native American culture were objectified into passive recipients of aggression and violence; to be grasped by the nipple - instead of any other body part - was to turn the women into a sexual object, was to force her obedience by means of pain, and to identify the women as that body part.
Women in this Native American community are public property - they are forced to dance naked, and the marriages are forcibly consummated in public. These cultural practices are designed - consciously or not - to chip away at the women's sense of personal identity, sense of personal freedom, and ability to make meaningful and consequential decisions in their lives. The Jesuit's account reveals the systematic humiliation of the women:
The ceremonies of their heathenish weddings are not fit to be described in detail. I shall only mention the more decent. They gather together, old and young, and the young men and marriageable women are placed in two files. At a given signal the latter begin to run, and at another signal the former to follow them. When the young men overtake the young women each one must take his mate by the left nipple and the marriage is made and confirmed. After this preliminary ceremony they devote themselves to dancing, and as I remember to have heard, brides as well as bridegrooms dance in the costume of primitive innocence. Then all at once they take mats of palm tree leaves, which are prepared beforehand, and without further ceremony each couple is placed on a mat, and the rest of the people go on rejoicing.
It might be easy to dismiss the Jesuit's narrative as being colored by mere prudery, if it were not clear that there was an absolute imbalance of power. To be sure, the Jesuit was influenced by his European heritage, which caused him to recoil at the scenes described.
By the mid-1700's, European culture had embraced the ideal of a marriage on the basis of mutual consent, a relationship of bilateral respect and affection. Admittedly, Western Civilization sometimes failed to live up to this ideal - although women were no longer bought and sold like cattle, marriages were still sometimes arranged for financial and political reasons; ironically, women in the upper classes were more vulnerable to losing their freedom in choosing a spouse. The landless peasants at the bottom of European society had nothing about them which would cause anyone to want to arrange their marriages: no political or economic influence was at stake. But possibly among the aristocrats, and certainly among the dynasties, some marriages were constructed with an eye to power rather than to affection.
Again, while imperfectly implemented, the European tradition had also at least recognized that violence against women was wrong. Wife-beaters were socially ostracized, and wife-beating was considered a sin. By contrast, the Native American society had institutionalized and ritualized physical abuse.
By the time the Jesuit recorded his observations in the mid-1700's, Europe had already seen Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegard of Bingen, and Queen Christina of Sweden: women whose social, political, economic, and culture influence was significant and beyond dispute. Maria-Theresa was the Habsburg Holy Roman Empress and Queen of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, and held her own against Frederick the Great of Prussia. (A note on orthography: Queen Christina was 'Kristina Augusta' on the throne of Sweden, and 'Christina Alexandra' afterward, also sometimes spelled 'Christine'; Maria-Theresa's dynasty is sometimes spelled 'Hapsburg'.) It was impossible for Native American women to attain any role of such significance, or even any role of even a fraction of such significance.
Western Civilization still had some way to go: it would not be until 1869 that the Territory of Wyoming would give the vote to women, and female suffrage would not become nearly universal until the early twentieth century. Despite these shortcomings, however, the European tradition had already embarked on the path of recognizing women in way which was inherently impossible for the Native American cultures. Within the framework of European culture, it was at least possible to conceptualize women as fully enfranchised participants in politics, economics, arts, and culture; it was possible to formulate personal relationships in which women expressed their full humanity. It didn't always consistently happen, but it was possible. It was not possible in the Native American societies which were premised upon the axiom that women essentially were objects, treated as property, and subject to an institutionalized humiliation at the hands of men. The humiliation of women was a foundation of Native American society.
