“Made women”

“Made women” is a disparaging expression Natty Bumppo uses for the Delawares and Mohicans, referring to their being bound by a treaty that curtailed their independent use of arms. The phrase turns political subordination into an accusation of lost manhood, yet the novel repeatedly places it beside an account of colonial dispossession and insists that the supposedly disarmed peoples remain capable of courage and resistance.

Meaning and First Use

During the journey toward Fort William Henry, Natty rejects the idea that a Mohawk guide can be trusted merely because he serves the British. He contrasts the Mohawks with the Delawares and Mohicans, whom he regards as honest, and claims that their enemies, the Maquas, had made them women by depriving them of the right to fight. Duncan Heyward responds that the Delawares have laid aside the hatchet and are content with that status. Natty’s phrase therefore enters a disagreement about tribal loyalty, military reputation, and who has the authority to define Indigenous character.

Treaty, Dispossession, and Resistance

At Fort William Henry, Natty expands the argument. He calls the Delawares’ peaceful reputation a lie and attributes their treaty to Dutch and Iroquois stratagems intended to disarm the people with the strongest claim to the country. He distinguishes the Mohicans, who did not enter the same bargain in their dealings with the English, while maintaining that the Delawares resumed their own martial standing once they recognized the treaty’s consequences. His account links the expression not to an inherent lack of courage, but to political pressure and the loss of land and autonomy. He recalls the breadth of the Mohican family’s former hunting grounds and contrasts it with the precarious future left to their descendants.

The phrase also belongs to Natty’s broader habit of resisting blanket judgments about Indigenous peoples. He objects when Heyward treats every foreign-speaking Native as an enemy, and argues that the Delawares’ reputation for cowardice serves the comfort of those who would rather not acknowledge the injustice done to them. The expression is thus double-edged: it repeats a gendered insult, but Natty uses it to condemn the treaty and to challenge the claim that political restraint proves cowardice.

Magua’s Account of Humiliation

Magua gives the expression a different, personal force when he explains his grievance against Colonel Munro. He says that, during the war between the English and French, he fought against his own people under Mohawk command. After drinking fire-water, he entered Munro’s quarters, violating the colonel’s rule against intoxicated warriors. Munro punished him publicly. Magua accepts that the rule had been made, but rejects the justice of punishing him for conduct he attributes to the liquor; he presents the humiliation as an injury that must be answered. His appeal to reciprocal good and evil makes vengeance, rather than a negotiated settlement, the governing logic of his claim.

In this account, being treated as a woman is not the treaty-bound political condition Natty describes, but a mark of personal shame inflicted by colonial authority. The two uses meet in their concern with imposed status: one describes a people deprived of military agency, the other a warrior who understands public punishment as an assault on his standing. The novel presents Magua’s explanation as his own case for revenge, not as proof that his retaliatory actions are justified.

Racial Hierarchy and the Expression’s Wider Resonance

Elsewhere, Colonel Munro reveals that Cora’s mother descended remotely from an enslaved African population in the West Indies. Duncan Heyward, who seeks to marry Alice, denies that prejudice guides him, yet admits that he feels it deeply; Munro confronts him with the possibility that he regards Cora’s ancestry as a reproach. This episode does not use “Made women,” but it places the phrase’s language of diminished status beside another hierarchy in the novel: racialized ancestry shapes marriage, social esteem, and the judgments people make while disavowing prejudice.

Across these episodes, the expression exposes the gap between imposed classifications and lived political realities. Natty deploys it to contest a stereotype and remember dispossession, while Magua’s story shows how humiliation can become fuel for retaliation. The phrase’s force rests in that tension: it names subordination in the language of gendered shame even as the narrative provides grounds to read the condition as the result of colonial power, not an innate loss of courage.