continuing with Women in History posts..

Suffragist, historian of women, author and lecturer, painter, woman’s rights activist and theorist, advocate for civil rights, and abolitionist, Matilda Joslyn Gage was a leading theorist and activist in the nineteenth century woman’s rights movement. Her trademark expression, ” There is a Word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven. That Word is Liberty,” summarized her life long struggle for the full equality of all humanity.

Although she operated a way station on the Underground Railroad and decried the brutal and unjust treatment of the American Indians, Gage focused most of her efforts on the woman’s movement. Her suffrage work included helping to form, being an officer in, and co-authoring many of the major documents of local, state, and national woman’s suffrage associations, editing The National Citizen and Ballot Box, the official paper of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), and running petition campaigns. Gage is, today, perhaps best known for co-authoring the 1876 “Declaration of Rights of Women” and the first 3 volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage.

In 1880, after women were given the franchise in school board elections, Gage organized the women of her village, Fayetteville, NY to run for and vote in school board positions where an all-woman slate was elected. Yet, Gage was becoming disenchanted with the quest for suffrage. When Susan B. Anthony maneuvered the merging of the more conservative American Woman’s Suffrage Association (AWSA) with the NWSA, Gage, in protest, refused to join the new NAWSA (National American Woman Suffrage Association) and she formed the formed the Woman’s National Liberal Union.

Still, as an historian of women, Gage was in a class by herself. In an era when most believed that the lives of women were slowly improving, Gage believed in an ancient, prehistoric, matriarchal society and wrote about the accomplishments of women throughout history. She wrote pioneering work on the source of women’s oppression, decrying the unequal treatment of the prostitute and her client, the “practice of non-conviction or of pardoning” in rape trials, unequal pay, the double standard, the incongruity of criminally prosecuting prostitutes and not their customers, wife battering, and the sexual abuse of female children, just to name a few.

Finally, Gage wrote Woman, Church, and State, an history of the church’s oppression of women and an analysis of the mutually reinforcing techniques that the church together with the state use to oppress women, calling it the “bulwark of woman’s slavery.”

Catherine Blake, daughter of a major figure in the NWSA, said “Mrs. Gage was a tireless student, a fine research worker, thorough in all she undertook; she had a deep sense of justice and at times an appalling frankness of speech - which I loved! One was never in doubt as to where Mrs. Gage stood…She was absolutely honest in all her dealings, and I would take her word at any time as against anybody else’s. I always loved and admired her greatly. I think that in some ways she was the greatest of those (suffrage leaders.) Someone should write an adequate life of this great leader.”

To learn about more women in history this month check out pesky apostrophe.