Frances Dana Barker Gage

• Frances Gage
• Born: October 12, 1808
• Died: November 10, 1884

Journalist and author, feminist, abolitionist, and temperance leader, was born on a farm in Union Township. Washington County, Ohio, the fifth daughter and ninth of ten children of Colonel Joseph Barker, a New Hampshire carpenter who had become a farmer. Through her mother, Elizabeth (Dana) Barker, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Bancroft, she was connected to notable Massachusetts families with a history of reform and literary activism. She received the limited education available, especially for girls, in a small frontier community. She engaged in the physical labor necessary to her milieu, but clashed with her father about her female role when she tried to help construct a barrel. Her father demanded that she stay “in her sphere.” “What a pity she was not a boy,” she remembered his saying, adding that at that moment “sprang up my hatred to the limitations of sex. ... I was outspoken forever afterward.”

On January 1, 1829, Frances Barker married James L. Gage of McConnelsville, Ohio, a lawyer who had been an iron founder. The marriage produced eight children—Sarah M., George. James, Charles, Mary E., Ambrose R., John, and Joseph B. While rearing this family, Gage read copiously—newspapers, magazines, and books. Perceiving connections between abolition, women’s rights, and temperance, she communicated her views in letters to newspapers. And as her reform understanding sharpened, her creative impulses began to find expression in poetry, which appeared frequently in the Ladies’ Repository of Cincinnati. At the same time, she introduced reform ideas into letters about women’s health and dress published under the pseudonym of “Aunt Fanny” in the Ohio Cultivator, a farm paper. In 1850 Gage mobilized support for the first Ohio women’s rights convention and originated a petition seeking the deletion of the words white and male from the new state constitution. She presided over a statewide feminist convention in 1852 and a national women’s rights convention in Cleveland in 1853; and she began to speak on feminism and temperance, traveling as far as New Orleans. She is said to have been an engaging, witty, and fluent speaker, received with the same enthusiasm that she imparted to her subjects.

Moving in 1853 from McConnelsville to the politically charged city of St. Louis exposed Gage to vehement antiabolitionist sentiment. Her contributions to two St. Louis newspapers were halted because of her outspoken antislavery opinions, but her activity in the women’s rights and temperance movements put her in touch with suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Once again her creative impulses bloomed alongside the political, and her poems appeared in Jane Swisshelm’s Saturday Visiter and other journals. James Gage’s health deteriorated, meanwhile, as his business suffered in the 1857 panic; and, three fires, possibly set by antiabolitionists, hastened the movement of the family to Carbondale, Illinois, and then to Columbus, Ohio. Here, Gage fought for state recognition of property rights for women and became associate editor of the Ohio Cultivator. She had now to support the family, however, because of her husband’s ill health and could not lecture outside of Ohio.

The Civil War brought a merger of her newspaper with another and the end of her editorial role, but she reactivated herself as a reformer. Four sons joined the Union Army and she plunged into work for freed blacks. With the help of a daughter and two others she took charge, in 1862, of 500 freed slaves on Parris Island in South Carolina. After thirteen months she returned home to tend her ill husband, who died shortly afterward. Then she lectured in Ohio on the needs of the former slaves, infusing her talks with dramatic illustrations and anecdotes of their condition and value as individuals. She served also as a volunteer for the Western Sanitary Commission in 1864.

Recovering from injuries sustained in a carriage accident, in September 1864, she took up postwar activity as chief agent in Ohio of the Federal Freedman’s Bureau, and she worked for the temperance movement as a paid lecturer and for the new American Equal Rights Association. In the discussion surrounding the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments she criticized abolitionists for weakening on women’s rights. When abolitionists had previously appealed to women, they had presented the issues as joined. Now the Fourteenth Amendment introduced the word male into the Constitution. “Whoever hears of sex now from any of these champions of freedom?,” she remarked of the abolitionists. More than most white feminists, Gage had created ties to the black community; she refused to join Stanton and Anthony in opposing the Fifteenth Amendment because it lacked a clause for women. “Keeping the colored men out, suffering as now, would not let me in all the sooner, then in God’s name why stand in the way?,” she argued. She joined Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association rather than the more intransigent National Woman Suffrage Association of Stanton and Anthony.

After her bucolic Poems and a temperance novel, Elsie Magoon, appeared in 1867 she suffered a confining paralytic stroke, but continued to write. Before her death from paralysis, in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the age of seventy-six, she gained a wide reputation as “Aunt Fanny” for her children’s stories, poems, and social sketches.

Nurtured by the New England tradition of her forebears, Gage brought its concerns to life in the rude Midwest, where she cultivated herself from within by her art and conscience, and without, through her social activism. This personal integration of disparate creative and didactic interests, cemented by compassion, flowered in the context of a commitment to raising her own large family. She was primarily an activist, second a writer; but most important was the activist reforming personality that produced both. The didacticism of her social reform may have quickened imaginative ferment within; both pointed toward the building of community, as did domestic caring, and thus, in its whole, her life points to the vitality of feminist reform in her period.

Biographical sketches may be found in E. R. Hanson, Our Woman Workers (1882); L. P. Brocket and M. C. Vaughan, Woman’s Work in the Civil War (1867); and J. Parton et al., Eminent Women of the Age (1869), which is somewhat amended by Gage in “Autobiography,” Woman’s Journal, March 31, 1883. See also E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 1 and 2 (1881); L. O’Connor, Pioneer Women Orators (1954); the Dictionary of American Biography (1931); and Notable American Women (1971). An obituary appeared in The New-York Tribune, November 13, 1884.