This is a short biography of Mathilda Joslyn Gage, a name we should know but mostly don't. She was a champion of women's rights.
--Kim
She was too radical for her own movement, embraced by Indigenous women as an equal, and remembered only after history finished erasing her.
On March 24, 1826, Matilda Joslyn Gage was born in Cicero, New York, into a household that treated justice as a daily practice. Her father, Dr. Hezekiah Joslyn, was an abolitionist, and their home served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. As a girl, Matilda handed out antislavery pamphlets and listened to Frederick Douglass speak. She wanted to become a doctor. Medical schools refused her because she was a woman. So she chose a different path. One that threatened far more than professional norms.
In September 1852, at the National Women's Rights Convention in Syracuse, a 26-year-old Matilda walked to the podium without an invitation. She was the youngest speaker present. She did not ask permission. She announced herself. "Let Syracuse sustain her name for radicalism," she said. Her speech was the only one printed in full by the newspapers.
For the next forty years, she stood beside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton as part of what was known as the movement's Triumvirate. She served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association. She co-wrote the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage. Anthony stayed so often at Gage's home in Fayetteville that the family called the guest room the Susan B. Anthony room.
But Gage was never content with narrow victories.
Anthony focused on the vote. Gage focused on the system that made women subordinate in the first place. Law. Economics. Culture. And most dangerously, religion.
She wrote about coverture laws that erased married women as legal persons. A wife could not own property, sign contracts, control her earnings, or claim guardianship of her own children. She wrote about forced motherhood, arguing as early as 1868 that women had never been granted control over their own bodies within marriage.
She wrote about witch trials, not as superstition, but as organized violence against women who threatened male authority. In 1893, she published Woman, Church and State, the culmination of twenty years of research. The book argued that women accused of witchcraft were often healers, scientists, and independent thinkers, and that their persecution was a deliberate attack on female knowledge. She documented wife beating, child abuse, the unequal punishment of women versus men for sexual behavior, and the systematic theft of women's intellectual labor.
It was a direct indictment of church and state.
And it was too much.
By the late 1880s, Anthony and other suffrage leaders wanted alliances with Christian organizations to gain political respectability. They believed women voters would strengthen moral order. Gage saw this as surrender. In 1890, when the movement merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Gage and Stanton opposed it. Anthony supported it.
Gage walked away.
She founded the Women's National Liberal Union, dedicated to secular government and full equality, not partial reform. The movement she helped build left her behind.
But another society did not.
Gage had spent years studying the Haudenosaunee nations of upstate New York, including the Mohawk. She observed a matrilineal culture where women controlled property, lineage passed through mothers, and clan mothers held political authority, including the power to remove chiefs. She wrote that under Indigenous women, government reached a level of justice unknown in Western civilization.
When she once tried to explain the idea of an illegitimate child to a Haudenosaunee woman, the woman was confused. How could any child be illegitimate?
In 1893, the same year Woman, Church and State was published, the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation adopted Matilda Joslyn Gage as one of their own. They gave her a name, Karonienhawi. She who holds the sky. It was one of the highest honors they could give a non-Indigenous woman.
Five years later, on March 18, 1898, Gage died in Chicago at the home of her daughter Maud and her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum. Baum would later write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Scholars believe Gage's ideas shaped his vision of powerful female figures and the radical concept of good witches, echoing her argument that women healers had been demonized to preserve male control.
After her death, the erasure began almost immediately.
Anthony and Stanton outlived her and shaped the historical record. Both destroyed personal papers before their deaths, leaving History of Woman Suffrage as the primary insider account. Conservative suffragists repudiated Woman, Church and State in 1913. The book was banned under the Comstock laws. Gage's name faded. The Triumvirate became a pair.
In 1993, historian Margaret Rossiter named the pattern of denying women credit for their work the Matilda effect. She named it after a woman who had spent her life documenting that injustice, and then suffered it herself.
In 1995, Matilda Joslyn Gage was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her Fayetteville home is now a museum. Her gravestone bears her creed: There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven; that word is Liberty.
She was not erased because she was wrong.
She was erased because she was early, uncompromising, and complete.
She understood that the vote alone would never be enough. That freedom required confronting every institution that justified women's inferiority. That equality could not be built on theology that sanctified submission. That Indigenous women already lived what white society claimed was impossible.
She co-founded a movement that later distanced itself from her. She was adopted as She who holds the sky. She inspired a world of powerful women behind a curtain. She named the crime of erasure, then became its example.
History is finally catching up.
Say her name.
Matilda Joslyn Gage.
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