It is a conspicuously downplayed fact that, as men are being shot by male police officers, the mothers and wives of slain sons and husbands have been typecast by the media as grieving war widows and tragic hangers-on. Although it seems these days that it is more important to be in the headlines than what the headlines actually say, this image of women has disempowered them precisely when social empowerment of women is what is needed. None of us should be surprised, really. European history going back to the dawn of civilization has been a tale of putting women into social barns and silos in the same manner as cattle and grain were put in real ones, so men could engage in the manly business of solving the world's problems without the opinions of women getting in the way.
There have been moments of greater enlightenment of course. The Law Code of Gortyn, the eponymous and earliest example of ancient Greek law, grants women comparatively liberal social status on matters of self-determination such as divorce, property ownership and general independence from men. Unfortunately, things tightened up for women after that. In his Corpus Juris Civilis, Justinian’s famous law code from the mid-6th century B.C.E., women were a far more legally articulated socioeconomic group, but to their detriment relative to the Greeks.
Sadly, the Corpus is a landmark in the rapid devaluation of women in the upcoming millennia to little more than a set of reproductive organs to be scrutinized, stigmatized and generally burned alive if found wanting by the male body politic. Even the United States didn’t get around to trusting them with having a say in politics beyond the dining room table until less than a century ago, and by-and-large, even having just achieved the first female nominee for America’s highest office, when in unfamiliar social territory men revert to the comfortable familiarity of placing women in the front row rather than inside the ring ropes.
I bring up the United States because it is precisely on this continent that there lived a people who recognized women as wholly indispensable in the politics of maintaining peace, and therefore politics in general. The Six Nation Confederacy (at one point only five) of the northeastern Iroquois was bound by a compact known as The Great Law of Peace of the Longhouse People. Although it existed largely as oral tradition and wampum record, it was a proper constitution that structured the political relationship between the six tribes, and the parliamentary practices to be observed. Its existence is no small historical consequence. Benjamin Franklin studied it intently in preparation for the drafting of the United States Constitution, and it also served as a foundational document for the United Nations. Although mythologically stylized, it is a republican philosophy comparably worthy of, if not superior to, Classical Greece. Unfortunately, dating its origin is virtually impossible, but it is very likely the earliest large-scale example of women being politically empowered on a level approaching that of men by over a thousand years.
Perhaps the most progressive aspect of the document is the part that whites wouldn’t be prepared to accept until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While men held office, women were the caretakers of their titles.
“…the strings shall be the token that the females of the family have the ownership to the chieftainship title for all time to come…”
The very right to rule was ultimately held in their possession, and not only did they have the right to petition the council for redress of grievance, but in the event that they demanded the Council of the League depose a chief, they themselves selected the candidate to replace him. Women, as the Great Law of Peace requires to be said of them when they pass away, “held a sacred position as mother of the Nation [sic].” In fact, when the trust of a chieftainship was transferred to another sister family, it was ceremonially said, “We trust that you, our mothers, will always guard it and that you will warn your chief always to be dutiful and to advise his people to ever live in love, peace and harmony that a great calamity may never happen again.”
The great realization of the Iroquois is that it's not a question of whether peace and social stability does or does not occur without women. It cannot occur. And today, whether in Texas, Minnesota, Missouri or anywhere else where culture and power collide, it will not.
This insight would serve us well today as we watch men bludgeoning and killing each other in the streets. The male and female characters temper each other, and when one is marginalized the worst aspects of the other tend to dominate. Of course, this is not intended as some trite “If women ruled the Earth…” quip that artificially progressive male feminists lob out into the political sphere for the purpose of gaining mindless and hollow applause. The problem is one of imbalance, not reinvestment of power, and frankly, that kind of garish bravado which reduces women's issues to something so utterly forgettable doesn't exactly assist women in being taken seriously.
It must be said that, if women are to play an integral and vital role in the resolution of minority and police violence, it will unfortunately require women to stop waiting for things to happen and start making them happen. The current climate on the issue is not conducive to role-reversal, and America is not a country where political power is achieved by realization, but by persuasion and claim staking. Furthermore, the media must stop portraying women as collateral damage and begin assisting in their empowerment by giving voice to grief in the form of leadership. Where are the female pastors and female police sergeants who are being given the microphone? Are they out there? Do they even exist in any effective capacity in their respective circles? This is a question that has deep social implications worthy of introspection. Finally, it must be the women of both sides — police officers and blacks — who inform, check and balance the brokerage of peace and reconciliation, not merely call for men to come to their senses. When the peace of men has failed, we cannot expect their voice to restore it.