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 is an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, feminist case study of the historical and political construction of gender and racial inequality.

Karen Anderson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University, Ontario.

Chapter 1 'Proud, Disobedient and Ill-Tempered'; Chapter 2 'The Blood of Martyrs is the Seed of Christians'; Chapter 3 'That they may also Acquire a French Heart and Spirit'; Chapter 4 'The Male is More Fitted to Rule than the Female'; Chapter 5 'This Little Fury of Hell'; Chapter 6 'Women Sustain the Families'; Chapter 7 'Among these Tribes are Found Powerful Women of Extraordinary Stature'; Chapter 8 'Death Over a Slow Fire'; Chapter 9 'Chain Her by One Foot'; Chapter 10 Conclusions;