e-Book Kaahumanu: Molder of Change download

Fantastic!

Good product. recommended

This is an uncomplicated, informative, and easy to read book about about a very sophisticated and complex woman. Unlike other reviewers I never really regarded the 'feminist' concept relevant to the story. What was relevant was that Kaahumanu was raised as chattel to a ruling ali'i, Kamehameha, despite the fact that she was of very high rank and treated with the greatest of care. Her inferior status to males around her was clear to her at all times. Even as she became Kamehameha's chief counselor she was forced into traditional roles demanded by the Kapu system. This book, as well as others on the topic, Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence, Linnekin, and Island Queens and Mission Wives, Thigpen, among them, make it clear that the Chiefly women of the era, once exposed to the ways of the outside world, saw the Kapu system as a demeaning system based on threat, control and physical aggression. From comments recorded by explorers (both Cook's and Vancouver's records contain references to local women and their hate for the enforcing chiefs) and traders (who regularly took women on board, lived with them and grew to understand their thoughts--Whatever the moral and economic questions of these arrangements, Hawaiian women often came away regarding their own system as limiting.). A growing distrust and dislike for the Kapu system was a common view among women of Hawaii of all statuses during the decades of Kamehameha.

The traditional Kapu system, the highly controlled religious political state, was destined to fall once its gods were proved ineffective against the outside world. Perhaps Kaahumanu as a result of her upbringing and rank understood this before others. She was certainly in a position to guide its fall in a way she felt best. This was exacerbated by the fact that the second and third Kings of Hawaii were dissolute, ineffectual, and pretty much exhibited little or no leadership. (After the death of Kamehameha, Kamehameha II was too drunk to even preform the proper rituals at the heiau, thereby making a mockery of the service.)

Silverman effectively points out that, contrary to today's popular sentiment, the practice of infanticide was a severe enough to require the chiefs to become openly vocal about it, and pass laws to limit it. Kaahumanu's basic legal tenants were based on the ten commandments. They were limited at first, but over time the essential laws of land reflected this structure. In addition she moved to protect individual rights, commoner as well as Ali'i.

Kaahumanu was there to insure that the country ran, the laws, whatever they might be, were enforced and people understood there was a ruling body. Chaos would have ensued if she had not been the strong member of the Royal house. Those who cling to Mitchnerian-Bali Hi myths of Hawaiian history would no doubt dispute the great good she managed and demean the Christian influence, but they likely only saw the movie or limited clips, never even managed to read that book--or any other for that matter--, and have founded their understandings on a couple of songs lamenting 'lost' times that never were. The point being that popular concepts of Hawaiian history are grossly inaccurate, and pander to modern day racists, cultural fanatics, cartoon viewers, and simple thugs.

This book very effectively casts Kaahumanu in the changing roles she assumed in her life. It explains the changes that occurred, attempts to delve into her reasoning, and explains how it was her decision making that largely changed things for the better. Others; Chiefs, Missionaries, Traders, Foreign Powers, were all secondary to the power this woman exercised in remaking Hawaii into a nation that attempted to distribute the law equally among its people and had freed them from the threats of an ancient but barbaric system of rule.

Her success a Kuhina Nui is exemplified by the fact that for many years after her passing the office was a mandated part of the government structure, and two of her nieces succeeded her.

Kaahumanu and her husband Kamehameha the Great are the first well-defined personalities in Hawaiian history.

The definitions are open to more than one interpretation, however. Jane Silverman chooses to define Kaahumanu as Hawaii's first feminist. There is no evidence that Kaahumanu thought of herself in that fashion. None of the laws that she imposed upon her society were presented in terms of differences between the sexes, for example.

It is true that Kaahumanu took on roles that probably no woman in Hawaii ever had before, and that she initiated changes that removed tremendous disabilities from Hawaiian women. But there is no reason to believe that she burned the old gods on behalf of women. She burned them, it appears, for the benefit of all, in the service of what she regarded as a new truth, and especially for the benefit of Kaahumanu.

For she was not first a feminist, nor a stateswoman nor a politician, although she was all of these. First, she was an aristrocrat.

"In an undefined space on the boundary of two cultures, Kaahumanu created a role for herself that she would not have been permitted within either culture," Silverman writes. This is too selective. No man, not even Kamehameha, could have done what she did without the solvent of the outside world. and even in the special conditions of her times, no woman but an aristocrat could have done what she did.

None of that detracts from her accomplishments, for after all there were other women with even higher mana who did not seize power the way Kaahumanu did.

Societies vary in their ability to resist intrusion from the modern world. The old Hawaiians were essentially receptive to new things, some of them good for them and some not. It was unfortunate for them that Kaahumanu replaced the violent old religion with a narrow-minded and repressive new one.

It was easier for her, however, since she refused to be repressed herself. Like aristrocrats everywhere, she did as she pleased.

This was true to an extent even before the impact of the outside world hit Hawaii. Silverman overstates the case when she says, "Kaahumanu, the most favored women of her society, lived within rigidly prescribed boundaries."

The rules were right enough, but enforcement was not. It never is in aristocracies.

Overall, the outside impact that Kaahumanu sponsored must have been liberating. The common people, at least, accepted it with a minimum of protest. Looking back, the picture seems more complicated. Whatever the judgment, Kaahumanu deserves to be ranked with the great social innovators and leaders of all time.

she was a contemporary of Napoleon and just as able. If her nation had been as important as France, she would be as famous.

All of this is well set out in "Kaahumanu: Molder of Change." The book reads well and is accurate as to facts. But the feminist spin that Silverman puts on every interpretation is anachronistic. At its worst it leads here to such absurd statements as, "These missionary women were not narrow in their outlook." And at the least it jars because Kaahumanu was not a modern political operator. She broke traditions, but she could not break the context of her own life.

...but Jane Silverman moves us closer to that goal by adding to the first foundation of what we know for sure about Queen K. She mines journals and letters to provide descriptions of events that were not witnessed by anyone else, offering us the first cogent summary of Queen K's actions as regent for so many years.
I found Silverman's suggestion that Queen K was some sort of proto-Feminist unpersuasive. She never acted on behalf of women generally. She broke rules for herself, when it suited her. Her observations about religion and the law were more compelling. Steeped in a tradition where the priests and kings set out the rules of life, she tried to use that same approach in governance. Substituting puritanical Christianity for the old kapu system seemed only natural.
Not a great book, just a good one, but one of the only references if you really want to know more about Queen Kaahumanu and her reign.