From Raised to Trade to Razed by Trade: French and Native Women in the Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade

In the mid eighteenth century, women hailing from French and Native families well established in the lucrative fur trade were under siege.  For decades, these women had directed trading activities at several locations in the North American continental interior, ranging from the Laurentian Valley to the Illinois Country.  Their ability to procure the items that comprised the trade and their control of the networks by which these goods circulated had made them invaluable to their families and communities and to Euro-American and Native imperial agents.  But now, as British, French and Native nations vied for political and military control of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, the women’s commercial activities made them targets of distrust and censure from imperial authorities and even members of their own communities.  State officials attempted to control their movement and participation in trade, rebuking and at times inflicting punishment on them, or expelling them from their communities.  The women had become threats not because they did not conform to shifting notions of proper gendered behavior, but because their trade now threatened Euro-American statecraft.  This paper will consider specific cases of women who suffered as a result of these changing conceptions and circumstances, and examine how the transformation of the utilitarian and symbolic value of the goods and networks they controlled made these women dangerous in the eyes of French, British, and Native men.