Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century |
Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century
Journal of Social History
Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2004
E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2004.0144
Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation passed many laws to regulate marriage and sex. This essay first contemplates the gendered aspects of such laws by exploring the importance of Cherokee women’s marital choices and official response to those choices. In particular, Cherokee women’s choice of non-Cherokee marital partners, most frequently whites, and the concomitant introduction of outsiders into the Nation forced the Cherokee legislative branch to reformulate Cherokee women’s relationship to the production of new citizens in the Nation. Then the essay turns more explicitly to the laws’ racial implications and examines who could marry in the Cherokee Nation and why by first examining Cherokee laws regulating marriage with people of African descent. Cherokees increasingly excluded people of African descent from membership in the Nation through legislation prohibiting legal marriage between Cherokees and people of African descent. Lastly, this essay considers Cherokee legislative provisions to include whites as marriage partners and citizens in the Cherokee Nation. Ultimately, this essay finds that Cherokee officials were redefining Cherokee Indians racially and used marriage laws to write and reinforce this new definition.
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Tags: Fay A. Yarbrough, Fay Yarbrough, Journal of Social History, marriage