Matilda Joslyn Gage

March 24, 1826 – March 18, 1898

Matilda Joslyn Gage was the third of the Woman’s Suffrage "triumvirate," which included Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. All were instrumental in the cause, but Gage is forgotten today due to her later stances against formal religion.

Gage was born in Cicero, NY, located near Syracuse, to Dr. Hezekiah Joslyn and Helen Joslyn. Dr. Joslyn was a noted abolitionist, and he educated his daughter to be a freethinker, even though she remained associated to her church until she died. She learned to question everything, and her father encouraged the questioning by answering every question she asked. He also taught her some anatomy and other aspects of medicine, and her father thought she might be one of the first women to go to medical school. She never did go to medical school; she married Henry H. Gage, a dry goods merchant, and eventually moved to Fayetteville, NY where he set up a business.

Gage did not go to first National Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, but went to Syracuse, the third national convention in 1852. She gave a speech so eloquent that Lucretia Mott called for it’s printing and distribution amongst the other literature about the suffrage movement. Gage was attacked in the local paper by a local reverend after the paper had reprinted her speech. She attacked the clergyman back, using the bible he had used to attack her to illustrate that he was being hypocritical.

After the Civil War, the Equal Rights movement was tied together with the Woman’s Suffrage movement. After some disagreements within the Equal Rights Association, the Gage, Anthony and Stanton decided to form their own organization with other “radical” feminists called the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA). The NWSA developed a platform of civil disobedience; women went to vote even thought they were told they could not. Gage tried another tactic, which showed that just about any man could vote, including convicted felons, but taxpaying landowners that happened to be women could not vote.

Gage wrote several works that showed that women were actually responsible for such ideas as the cotton gin and the war campaign in Tennessee. She was also one of the first to believe in the matriarch system, and that it was actually used in prehistoric times. She also noted that the decline in this system came about when Christianity was on the rise.

Gage began to be more and more disillusioned with the NWSA, and eventually broke with it when Anthony underhandedly was able to combine the NWSA with the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which had combined with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Gage was not against temperance; she had in fact worked for the movement back in the 1850’s. But she disagreed with the WCTU plan to make prayer mandatory in public schools and to change the Constitution to have Christ be the true head of the government. Gage thought this was outrageous, and after Anthony betrayed the NWSA, she created a new organization called the Woman’s National Liberal Union (WNLU). This organization worked toward the separation of church and state, and recognized that religion has been the oppressor of women.

Gage wrote her most influential work called Women, Church and State in 1893. In it, she showed how canon law became US law and was therefore repressing women’s rights. She also established that the Church had not only planned subjugating woman, it had done so willingly and purposefully.

Gage lived her last few years in Chicago, with her daughter Maud and her husband L. Frank Baum (the author of the Wizard of Oz), and died March 18, 1898. Anthony outlived her, and subsequently wrote a fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage in which Anthony became the major writer of the first three volumes, and Gage relegated to a researcher. Gage was written out of much of the later history because it revolved around Anthony. Subsequently, because Gage stood for her convictions, she became an outsider to the mainstream movement, and is therefore forgotten today.

"The Church and civilization are antipodal; one means authority, the other freedom; one means conservatism, the other progress; one means the rights of God as interpreted by the priesthood, the other the rights of humanity as interpreted by humanity. Civilization advances by free-thought, free speech, free men."

Women, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman Through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate by Matilda Joslyn Gage. Second edition. New York, The Truth Seeker Company, 1893.