I love finding stories of women that buck the status quo, piss people off, and make no apologies for doing so. Women's history month is a great time to celebrate this history, to remember that history is not as straightforward as we have been led to believe by our high school history classes, and to draw strength from the people that have battled before us and shown uncommon courage, humility, and tenacity. These women serve as examples, to all people of all genders, that when the going gets tough, bitches get what they want.
So today we are talking about Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage, who died on this
day in 1898.
Ms Gage was raised in a strictly abolitionist household in Cicero, NY, just
north of Syracuse. Shortly after
starting her own family, Gage became heavily
While Gage was still a supporter of women’s rights, she focused much of her
attention on the issue of slavery during the Civil War, as many did. However, Gage was convinced that all struggles for freedom were inter-connected, and was a supporter of complete equality
for the sexes and races—a radical idea to some even today. Gage was involved with the local Iroquois in
her area and she noted in a series of articles that she wrote for The New York
Evening Post that within the Iroquois Confederacy the division of power was
nearly equal among the sexes. She was
adopted into the Wolf Clan in 1893 and given an Iroquois name for her work on
behalf of Native Americans. Gage had
used her writings throughout the years to highlight broken treaties between the
American government and Native nations, and to publicly speak out against the
oppression of Native Americans. In her
writing Gage noted that “that the modern world is indebted” to the
Iroquois “for its first conception of inherent rights, natural equality of
condition, and the establishment of a civilized government upon this basis.”
Indeed, after the Civil War Gage was a busy bitch! Women’s rights made up the center of her
belief system and she believed that all rights struggles were connected. On behalf of her pet issue, however, Gage attended
the third Women’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, she was arrested for voting in
a school board election in 1893, she was a founding member of the National
Woman Suffrage Association with Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
which she worked on behalf of for over twenty years and she published their
official newspaper for three years. She
wrote an analysis of Susan B Anthony’s trial for illegal voting for the Albany
Law Journal. Largely due to much of Gage’s
work organizing and publicizing the cause of woman suffrage, NY allowed women
to vote in school district elections in 1880 and Gage set to work electing an
entirely female corps of officers—and it worked. She helped to edit the first three volumes of
“The History of Woman Suffrage” and served as a women’s rights correspondent
for multiple newspapers across the US.
Women today owe Ms Gage and those in her company a debt of gratitude—for it
was much of their work that laid the foundation that we stand upon to reach
higher than we were ever thought capable.
 |
| Love her or hate her, she owes her career to women like Matilda |
In her later life, Gage turned her attention to religious freedom partly
due to her belief that deeply ingrained misogyny had its basis in the church,
and partly due to being disturbed by a religious movement seeking to establish
the United States as a Christian nation.
She found the Women’s National Liberty Union on the basis of combating
this in 1890 and worked for the next eight years to maintain the separation of
church and state, which she saw as integral to liberty, as stated in her paper “Woman,
Church and State” published in 1893, within which she gives support for a
female centered spirituality—a very hippie thought for someone writing seventy
years before the hippie movement. Still
maintaining that all struggles for freedom were connected, Gage wrote:
“Had not man been trained by his religion into
a belief that woman was created for him, had not the church for 1,800 and more
years preached woman’s moral debasement, the long course of legislation for
them as slaves would never have taken place, nor the obstacles in way of change
been so numerous and so persistent.”
She never wavered on this belief
and she contributed heavily to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Women’s Bible (required
reading for any budding feminist, in my opinion). In an opinion written to the newly formed
National American Woman Suffrage Association shortly before her death, she
derided their courting of conservative Christian groups, stating that:
“the Christian Church, of whatever name, is based on the theory
that woman was created secondary and inferior to man, and brought sin into the
world and necessitated the sacrifice of a Savior.”
Gage died on March 18, 1898, her tombstone is engraved with her most
remembered quote:
“there is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven; that
word is Liberty”
Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage was a badass that helped to pave the way for women to not only vote, but work outside the home, divorce, gain custody of their children, go to school, hold office, and partake in American society. It is important to remember, when it comes to any struggle for freedom and equal rights, that the pavement on the proverbial road is often appearance tickets, indictments, criminal records, blood, sweat, tears, and, sometimes, dead bodies.
For further reading:  |
| Matilda greatly influence the work of her son-in-law: L. Frank Baum |
http://www.matildajoslyngage.org/
Some of Gage's original writings can be found at:
http://www.matildajoslyngage.org/gage-home/womens-rights-room/gages-writing/
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