Gender and Sexuality 8

I told him that it was not honourable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied: “Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.” I began to laugh, seeing that he philosophised in horse and mule fashion.

Eleanor Burke Leacock (1981): Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 50. The year (1637) is an approximation.

Paul Le Jeune was a French Jesuit who lived in Canada in the mid 17th century. The Jesuits wanted to evangelise and discipline the Montagnais-Naskapi. The Montagnais-Naskapi lived on the eastern Labrador Peninsula.

The missionary is surprised by the Montagnais-Naskapi’s generosity, sense of community and indifference to status, but at the same time shocked by their contempt for concepts such as possessiveness, authority (Leacock, 1981: 49) and male superiority (Leacock, 1981: 52), and at the fact that they do not punish their children. The coloniser Hernández de Córdoba was also surprised when in 1517 he landed on an island off the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico: there were so many female deities in the temples (Federici, 2014: 277) that he called it the "Isla de las Mujeres" (island of women). Europeans often viewed a lack of male authority as a lack of civilization.

*Silvia Federici (2004): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. *Howard Zinn (2015): A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial.

1637