ABSTRACT
I n ethnographic tradition, the Iroquois have sometimes been regarded as a quasi-matriarchal society because of the important role women played in the formal political organization. An Iroquois tribe, of several thousand persons, was typically divided into several sibs, each of which in turn was divided into lineages. Inheritance of lineage, and therefore of sib, membership was matrilineal. A town was usually composed of members of a number of lineages, from several different sibs, each lineage owning a house (the so-called "longhouse"). The occupants of a longhouse were (theoretically) all of the living female members of the lineage in that locality, plus their unmarried sons and their husbands of the moment. Marriage was monogamous, but a woman might have a number of hus bands in the course of her life. Residence after marriage was in the wife's longhouse. The women of a lineage are believed collectively to have worked their own cornfields near the village. The men of the village were responsible for hunting, for trading peltries, for warfare, and for diplom acy, all of which kept them away from their households for long periods of time, and all of which were essential to the survival of Iroquois society. An expedition of any kind was apt to take months or even years, for the 15,000 or so Iroquois in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ranged over an area of great size, on the order of a million square miles (literally, from the Hudson and Delaware rivers on the east to the Mississippi on the west, and from Hudson's Bay on the north to the Carolinas on the south). I t is not an exaggeration to say that the full-time business of an Iroquois man was travel in order to hunt, trade, fight, or talk in council.
