“A government of petticoats”

A Cherokee woman could end a marriage with one simple act: she would place her husband’s belongings outside the door. That’s it. The marriage was over. No court. No priest. No permission from her father, brothers, or male elders. Cherokee women endured. They preserved the language. They passed down stories in secret. They maintained maternal line kinship even as the state tried to erase it. When European colonizers arrived in the southeastern part of North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, they ran into something that shattered their idea of how society was “supposed” to work. They saw a sophisticated civilization where women held real power. Not symbolic. Not “respected within the home.” But genuine political, economic, and legal authority. And today, Cherokee Nation citizenship is determined through documented lineage — and in many families, maternal lines are still honored. This was not an exception Cherokee women’s power was not an accident. It is proof that a full alternative to patriarchy once existed. Proof that male domination is not universal, and not inevitable. It is a structure some societies chose — and others rejected. What it teaches us When someone claims inequality is “natural” — remember the Cherokee woman who ended her marriage with dignity, on her own land, in a nation where her voice mattered. Remember that there was once a world where: women owned property women spoke without permission women controlled resources women decided war and peace women passed down identity Other worlds existed. And what once existed can exist again — if we dare to build it. So the real question is: What kind of world are we brave enough to imagine?