Matilda Joslyn Gage

Matilda Joslyn Gage (née Joslyn; March 24, 1826 – March 18, 1898) was an American writer and activist. She is mainly known for her contributions to women's suffrage in the United States, but also campaigned for Native American rights, abolitionism, and freethought. She is the eponym for the Matilda effect, which describes the tendency to deny women credit for scientific invention. She influenced her son-in-law L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

She was the youngest speaker at the 1852 National Women's Rights Convention held in Syracuse, New York. Along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage helped found the National Woman's Suffrage Association in 1869. During 1878–1881, she published and edited the National Citizen, a paper devoted to the cause of women. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, she was for years in the forefront of the suffrage movement, and collaborated with them in writing the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1887). She was the author of the Woman's Rights Catechism (1868); Woman as Inventor (1870); Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign (1880); and Woman, Church and State (1893).

For many years, she was associated with the National Woman Suffrage Association, but when her views on suffrage and feminism became too radical for many of its members, she founded the Woman's National Liberal Union, whose objects were: To assert woman's natural right to self-government; to show the cause of delay in the recognition of her demand; to preserve the principles of civil and religious liberty; to arouse public opinion to the danger of a union of church and state through an amendment to the constitution, and to denounce the doctrine of woman's inferiority. She served as president of this union from its inception in 1890 until her death in Chicago in 1898.

Family background and education

Matilda Electa Joslyn was born in Cicero, New York, March 24, 1826. Her parents were Dr. Hezekiah and Helen (Leslie) Joslyn. Her father, of New England and revolutionary ancestry, was a liberal thinker and an early abolitionist. From her mother, who was a member of the Leslie family of Scotland, Gage inherited her fondness for historic research. Their home was a station of the Underground Railroad, a place of safety for escaped slaves.

Her early education was received from her parents, and the intellectual atmosphere of her home had an influence on her career. She attended Clinton Liberal Institute, in Clinton, Oneida County, New York.

Marriage and early activism

On January 6, 1845, at the age of 18, she married Henry H. Gage, a merchant of Cicero, making their permanent home at Fayetteville, New York. She faced prison for her actions associated with the Underground Railroad under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which criminalized assistance to escaped slaves. Gage became involved in the women's rights movement in 1852 when she decided to speak at the National Women's Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York.

Writer and editor

Newspapers

Gage was well-educated and a prolific writer—the most gifted and educated woman of her age, claimed her devoted son-in-law, L. Frank Baum. She corresponded with numerous newspapers, reporting on developments in the woman suffrage movement. In 1878, she bought the Ballot Box, the monthly journal of a Toledo, Ohio, suffrage association, when its editor, Sarah R. L. Williams, decided to retire. Gage turned it into The National Citizen and Ballot Box, explaining her intentions for the paper thus:

Its especial object will be to secure national protection to women citizens in the exercise of their rights to vote ... it will oppose Class Legislation of whatever form ... Women of every class, condition, rank and name will find this paper their friend.

Gage became its primary editor for the next three years (until 1881), writing and publishing essays on a wide range of issues. Each edition bore the words 'The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword', and included regular columns about prominent women in history and female inventors. Gage wrote clearly, logically, and often with a dry wit and a well-honed sense of irony. Writing about laws which allowed a man to will his children to a guardian unrelated to their mother, Gage observed:

It is sometimes better to be a dead man than a live woman.

Women inventors

In 1870, Gage published a pamphlet called Woman as an Inventor. The pamphlet was described as 'Woman Suffrage Tracts – No. 1' and was published by the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, which Gage helped to found. In 1883, Gage published a similar essay called Woman as an Inventor in the North American Review. In both pamphlets, Gage argued that women were already competent inventors and supported her argument by citing examples of women inventors.

Gage mentioned Sarah Mather, the inventor of the deep-sea telescope; Maggie Knight, who invented a machine that created satchel-bottom bags; Barbara Uthmann, who invented pillow lace; and Angelique du Coudray, who invented a stuffed mannequin to practice midwifery. Gage also cited goddesses like Minerva, Isis, Mama Ocllo, and Leizu as example of female inventiveness. Relying on the ideas of Diodorus Siculus, an ancient Greek historian, Gage believed that goddesses began as real women who were deified because of the benefit from their inventions. Gage argued that ancient Egypt was a matriarchal society, an idea which historians today disagree with.

Gage's most controversial claim was that Catherine Greene invented the cotton gin instead of Eli Whitney. Gage also argued that a woman was responsible for the Burden horse-shoe machine.

Gage also articulated the barriers to women becoming inventors and receiving patents. Gage argued that society disapproved of women who invent, prompting them to suppress their talents, not seek out mechanical education, and patent their inventions under the names of husbands or other men to avoid ridicule. Gage also criticized laws that limit women's control over the patents they received. In 1883, she wrote:In not a single State of the Union is a married woman held to possess a right to her earnings within the family; and in not one-half of them has she a right to their control in business entered upon outside of the household. Should such a woman be successful in obtaining a patent, what then! Would she be free to do as she pleased with it? Not at all. She would hold no right, title, or power over this work of her own brain.In response to the 1883 article, The New York Times published an article, saying Gage "squarely answered" the "common reproach with which ambitious women are met, that they possess no inventive or mechanical genius." Kara Swanson argues that Gage's efforts helped to change public opinion around women inventors, though they did not convince men that women should vote.

Woman, Church, and State

In 1893, Gage published Woman, Church, and State, a book that argued the church was responsible for women's oppression throughout history. Gage believed that the church's resistance to women's equality was foundational to other church beliefs and that the church gained power through influencing marriage and education laws. Like her pamphlets about inventions, in Woman, Church, and State Gage argues for the presence of an ancient matriarchy that disappeared because of Christianity.

Mary Corey argues that Gage's book is the only historical monograph written by a suffragist that proposes a thesis and supports it with evidence.

Gage's attack on the church was considered especially radical after the 1890 creation of the more conservative National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The NAWSA officially repudiated Woman, Church, and State in 1913 and it was banned under the Comstock laws.

Activism

Gage described herself as "born with a hatred of oppression."