Matilda Joslyn Gage

American feminist

• Born: March 24, 1826
• Birthplace: Cicero, New York
• Died: March 18, 1898
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Gage was one of the three best-known American feminists of her time, but her radical views and opposition to organized religion have caused her to be underappreciated in histories of the woman suffrage movement. She saw woman suffrage not as an end in itself but rather as a tool by which to lift one-half of humanity from degradation caused by what she believed to be the fourfold bondage of women to the state, the church, the capitalist economy, and social pressures to remain at home, away from the professional world.

Early Life

Born Matilda Joslyn in a town located a few miles east of Syracuse, New York, Matilda Gage spent most of her life within a thirty-mile radius of Syracuse. She was raised in an abolitionist home that served as a station on the Underground Railroad, and as a child, she circulated antislavery petitions.

When Matilda was an adult, her home, like that of her parents, became a station on the Underground Railroad during the years immediately before the Civil War. As a young wife and mother in 1850, Gage signed a petition stating that she would face the penalty of a six-month prison term and a two-thousand-dollar fine rather than obey a newly enacted fugitive-slave law, which made a criminal of anyone who assisted slaves toward freedom anywhere in the United States. She said,

Until liberty is attained—the broadest, the deepest, the highest liberty for all—not one set alone, one clique alone, but for men and women, black and white, Irish, Germans, Americans, and Negroes, there can be no permanent peace.

Gage entered the women’s rights movement with Susan B. Anthony during 1852, four years after the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls. She made her first public speech at the third national woman’s rights convention in Syracuse during that same year and rapidly became a leader in the expanding women’s rights movement.

Life’s Work

Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage and Anthony formed the “triumvirate” of the radical wing of the women’s rights movement, the largely separatist National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which chose civil disobedience as a major tactic during the early 1870’s. Gage was one of many women who broke existing laws by attempting to vote in 1871. In 1880, she also became the first woman to vote in Fayetteville under a state law permitting women to vote in school board elections. However, she lost a suit challenging the legality of her vote, so the limited right to school suffrage was taken away from New York women.

Although busy with her state and national work, Gage always found time for door-to-door petitioning and local organizing work that was the backbone of the women’s movement. During 1880, when the New York Women’s Suffrage Association gained women the right to vote and run for office in school elections, Gage helped organize the women of her village, Fayetteville, and they elected an all-woman slate of officers.

With Stanton, Gage coauthored the major documents of the NWSA The group’s yearly “Plan of Action,” the addresses to the presidential conventions every four years, and the day-to-day formulations of theory and strategy came primarily from their pens. When the United States prepared to celebrate its centennial in 1876, the NWSA used Gage’s words to counter that “Liberty today is… but the heritage of one-half the people, the men who alone could vote.” The women “determined to place on record for the daughters of 1976, the fact that their mothers of 1876 had thus asserted their equality of rights, and thus impeached the government of today for its injustice towards women.”

Gage and Stanton drew up the “Declaration of Rights of Women” that Anthony and Gage presented at the official July 4 ceremony in Philadelphia, even though they were denied permission to do so and knew that they faced possible arrest for their action. Gage, who was fifty years of age at the time, was unmoved by the danger and declared: “We of this Centennial year must not forget that this country owes its birth to disobedience to law.”

During the 1870’s, Gage also wrote a series of controversial articles decrying the brutal and unjust treatment of American Indians. She was adopted into the wolf clan of the Mohawk nation and given the name Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi (Sky Carrier) after describing the equality of women with men in the Iroquois system of government.

In 1879, Gage’s newspaper, The National Citizen and Ballot Box published portions of History of Woman Suffrage , which she coedited with Stanton and Anthony. This publication also included Stanton’s account of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention . The newspaper was used as a prepublication forum for commentary before publication of the books in final form. Gage also worked with Stanton on The Woman’s Bible ; in 1893 she published Woman, Church and State , the most widely known publication that she wrote entirely on her own.

In “Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign of 1862?” Gage argued that this important Union military campaign that altered the course of the Civil War and was generally credited to General Ulysses S. Grant was actually the idea of Anna Ella Carroll. President Abraham Lincoln asked that the matter be kept quiet, Gage asserted, because he feared that Union troops would be demoralized if they had known that this brilliant strategy was the product not only of a civilian but also a woman.

Sometimes described as one of the most logical, fearless, and scientific writers of her day, Gage made important contributions to feminist thought in her pioneering work on the origins of the oppression of women. At a time when women’s rights advocates almost universally believed that steady progress characterized the history of the condition of women, Gage asserted that the opposite was true. She believed in the existence of prehistoric matriarchies—what she called the “Matriarchate”—in which women carried strong political influence.

According to feminist scholar Sally Roesch Wagner, the director of the Gage Foundation, Gage was fascinated by the Haudenosaunee branch of the Iroquois people because of their matrilineal society that was so unlike the male-dominated culture of nineteenth century America. Gage encountered stiff resistance to her suggestion that the downfall of womankind in the West corresponded with the rise of Christianity. She believed that ancient matriarchies were replaced, violently in some cases, by Roman Catholicism’s Patriarchate. Wagner says that, steeped in the triple doctrines of obedience to authority, woman’s subordination to man, and woman’s responsibility for original sin, Gage believed that organized religion was the primary enemy of women’s rights.

Gage died in Chicago on March 18, 1898, at the age of seventy-two years. A few years after her death, her son-in-law L. Frank Baum won enduring literary fame with his publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Significance

Many of Gage’s contributions to the women’s rights movement were literary and theoretical. Stanton said of Gage that she had a knack for rummaging through old libraries, bringing more interesting facts to light than any woman she had known. For example, in her pamphlet “Woman as Inventor,” Gage maintained that the cotton gin was not invented by Eli Whitney, but by Catherine Littlefield Greene, who had the idea for the gin and engaged Whitney to construct it.

As the suffrage campaign failed to win women the right to vote, Gage grew increasingly weary of pursuing that one issue on its own. A person who always saw common interests among disparate groups, she argued that reform measures such as suffrage were only partial solutions that left intact the underlying causes of social injustice. Increasingly, the ballot seemed to her to be an ineffective tool.

Gage’s home in Fayetteville, New York, is now utilized by a nonprofit foundation in her name. The inscription on her gravestone in the Fayetteville Cemetery was a lifelong motto with which she frequently signed autographs, including the 1876 Centennial memorial: “There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven, that word is Liberty.”

Bibliography

Anthony, Susan B., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage. Salem, N.H.: Ayer Company, 1985. Reprint edition of a major work that provided the intellectual basis for nineteenth century feminism.

Buhle, Mary Jo, and Paul Bulhe. A Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Works of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Abridged edition of the most basic sources on the woman suffrage movement. Provides useful selections from the writings of Gage and other eminent suffrage leaders.

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959. An overview of the women’s rights movement that offers insights into the intellectual origins of American feminism that remains the standard history of the movement.

Gage, Matilda Joslyn. Woman, Church, and State. 1893. Watertown, Mass.: Peresphone Press, 1980. Gage’s views on women’s oppression by the state and religious organizations, updated to the present in a new edition.