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When a Cherokee woman wanted a divorce, she just put her husband's belongings outside—and that was legally binding. No lawyers. No judges. No permission from male relatives. If she decided the marriage was over, she gathered his things, placed them on the doorstep, and he left. Because in Cherokee society, women owned the houses. The land. The food. The tools. Everything in them.
When European colonizers arrived in what is now the southeastern United States, they were shocked. They expected a world where men ruled, and women obeyed. Instead, they found a society where women held real power. Cherokee women sat in councils alongside men, debating war, treaties, and tribal policies. Some earned the title of "Beloved Women" or "War Women," a position of authority so great their words could spare prisoners’ lives or decide whether the nation went to battle. Nancy Ward, one of the most famous Beloved Women, negotiated directly with colonists and influenced decisions during the Revolutionary War era.
But power wasn’t only political. Cherokee society was matrilineal: identity came from the mother’s clan, children belonged to their mother’s family, and property passed from mother to daughter. When a couple married, the husband moved into his wife’s home. If he failed as a father or husband, her brothers—not his male relatives—held authority over him.
Irish trader James Adair, living among the Cherokee in the 1700s, was scandalized. He called it a “petticoat government,” unable to imagine a world where women weren’t property. Yet women weren’t just making laws—they ran the economy. They cultivated corn, beans, and squash, the “Three Sisters” that fed the nation. They wove baskets that held water, tanned hides into soft leather, built houses, and raised children. They preserved stories, dances, and traditions that kept Cherokee identity alive. Men hunted, fished, and fought—but the women controlled the distribution of food. Men might provide, but women decided its fate.
This wasn’t utopia. There was hierarchy, conflict, rules. But it worked on a fundamentally different principle: women and men were different but equal partners, each with authority over vital aspects of life.
Then came forced removal, boarding schools, and federal policies meant to erase Cherokee culture. The U.S. recognized only male leaders, imposed patriarchal laws, and taught women to be submissive. Yet Cherokee women resisted, preserving language, stories, and traditions. Today, Cherokee Nation citizenship is still traced through maternal lines in many families, keeping alive the principles of centuries past.
The power Cherokee women held wasn’t a quirk. It was proof that patriarchy is a choice, not inevitability. In the 1700s, Cherokee women owned property, divorced freely, and shaped government—rights most American women wouldn’t see for centuries. The next time someone says gender inequality is “just how things have always been,” remember the women who placed their ex-husbands’ belongings on the doorstep, on land they inherited, in a nation where their voices mattered. Different worlds are possible. We know because they existed.
Daisy Coleman was born on January 8, 1997, in Maryville, Missouri. She grew up in a small tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone and where the social dynamics of that familiarity carried both warmth and danger in equal measure.
She was fourteen years old in January 2012 when she was assaulted.
She and a friend had been at a gathering where older high school boys were present. Daisy has described being given alcohol and becoming incapacitated. She woke up on her front lawn in freezing temperatures. She had been left there.
What had happened to her while she was unconscious became the subject of a legal case that would reveal everything about how small communities respond when the alleged perpetrator is a popular boy from a prominent family and the victim is a fourteen-year-old girl.
Matthew Barnett was charged. The charges were dropped. The case that should have produced accountability produced instead a legal outcome — eventually a misdemeanor plea to child endangerment — that the Coleman family and advocates described as a profound failure of justice.
What the community did in the aftermath of the assault was in many ways more damaging than the legal outcome.
Daisy and her family faced harassment. They faced ostracism. Community members who knew the family and had been neighbours and acquaintances withdrew or turned actively hostile. The social environment that a fourteen-year-old girl depended on for the basic scaffolding of adolescent life — school friendships, community belonging, the sense of being seen and valued — became instead a source of ongoing and relentless cruelty.
The family home was set on fire. They eventually left Maryville.
Daisy struggled profoundly in the years that followed. The assault and its aftermath had done damage that went deep and that the ordinary supports available to a teenage girl in her situation were not adequate to address. She was hospitalised multiple times. She fought depression and the specific psychological aftermath of both the original assault and the community's response to it.
She also fought back in ways that were extraordinary for someone so young carrying so much.
She spoke publicly. She gave interviews. She allowed herself to be documented. She used the specific currency of her own pain to try to create something that might protect other people from experiencing what she had experienced.
She co-founded SafeBAE — Safe Before Anyone Else — a student-led organisation dedicated to ending sexual assault among middle and high school students and supporting survivors. She worked. She built something real. She showed up for other survivors with the generosity of someone who understood from the inside what they needed because she had needed it herself.
In 2016 the Netflix documentary Audrie and Daisy brought her story to a global audience. The documentary examined two cases of teenage sexual assault and their aftermaths — Audrie Pott, who died by suicide in 2012 at age fifteen following an assault, and Daisy Coleman. The film was seen by millions of people and generated an enormous response from viewers who were moved and outraged by what they witnessed.
Daisy Coleman became one of the most recognised survivor advocates of her generation.
She continued struggling privately through all of it. The advocacy work was meaningful and real. It did not resolve the internal damage that had been building since she was fourteen years old. Recovery from serious trauma is not linear and is not made complete by purpose or by helping others — as important as those things are.
She continued to be hospitalised at various points. She continued fighting.
On August 4, 2020, Daisy Coleman died by suicide. She was twenty-three years old.
Her mother Melinda Coleman confirmed her death publicly with a grief that was expressed with devastating plainness. Melinda had been beside her daughter throughout everything — the assault, the community backlash, the legal proceedings, the advocacy years, the ongoing mental health battles. She had never stopped fighting for and alongside her daughter.
On December 7, 2020 — four months after losing Daisy — Melinda Coleman also died by suicide.
A mother and daughter. Gone within months of each other. Both of them casualties of what happened in Maryville in January 2012 and of what happened in the years that followed.
The grief of that is almost beyond language.
Daisy Coleman did not survive what was done to her and what was done to her afterward. But what she built in the years between — SafeBAE, the documentary, the interviews, the relentless showing up for other survivors — reached people who needed exactly what she gave.
She was fourteen when the assault happened. She was fifteen when her community turned on her. She was twenty-three when she died.
In those nine years she built an organisation. She changed laws. She sat with survivors who had nobody else. She told her story over and over so that other people would not have to carry theirs alone.
She was twenty-three years old.
She deserved justice. She deserved a community that protected her. She deserved the years she did not get.
SafeBAE continues her work. It is her legacy.
It should not have had to be.
If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out. You are not alone, and help is available.
#DaisyColeman #SafeBAE #SurvivorStrong #NeverForget
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​The Filles du Roi - The King’s Daughters. The solution to “whoops, we sent men over to conquer, but we didn’t quite cover the settling bit.”
Sources: Gagné, Peter J. (2000) King’s Daughters and Founding Mothers: The Filles du Roi, 1663-1673
-Landry, Yves (1992) Orphelines en France pionnières au Canada: Les filles du roi au XVIIe siècle
-Foster, Ann (2025) Filles du roi: the Founding Mothers of New France
-Hickey, Daniel (1994) New France: Historiographical Structures and Themes
#history #fillesduroi #womenshistorymonth #colonialism #newfrance