Legislating Women's Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century.Abstract: Fay Yarbrough, "Legislating leg·is·late v. leg·is·lat·ed, leg·is·lat·ing, leg·is·lates v.intr. To create or pass laws. v.tr. To create or bring about by or as if by legislation. Women's Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century". 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 Pertaining to the relationship of Husband and Wife; having to do with marriage. Marital agreements are contracts that are entered into by individuals who are about to be married, are already married, or are in the process of ending a marriage. choices and official response to those choices. In particular, Cherokee women's choice of non-Cherokee marital partners, most frequently whites, and the concomitant concomitant /con·com·i·tant/ (kon-kom´i-tant) accompanying; accessory; joined with another. concomitant adjective Accompanying, accessory, joined with another introduction of outsiders into the Nation forced the Cherokee legislative branch to reformulate Verb 1. reformulate - formulate or develop again, of an improved theory or hypothesis redevelop formulate, explicate, develop - elaborate, as of theories and hypotheses; "Could you develop the ideas in your thesis" 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 descent, in anthropology, method of classifying individuals in terms of their various kinship connections. Matrilineal and patrilineal descent refer to the mother's or father's sib (or other group), respectively. . 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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