Matilda Gage

From Philosopedia

Gage, Matilda Joslyn (24 March 1826 - 19 March 1898)

Gage was born in Cicero, New York. The father of this ranking national suffrage leader and outspoken freethinker was Dr. Hezekiah Joslyn, whose home was a station on the underground railroad, and who advocated abolition, women's rights, freethought, and temperance. Matilda married at age 18 and gave birth to five children, one of whom died in infancy. A founding member and onetime President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Gage worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Indignant over "the wrongs inflicted upon one-half of humanity by the other half in the name of religion," she delivered a major address, "Woman, Church, and State," at a suffrage convention in 1878. By popular response, she later turned this address into a book of the same name in 1893. It documented woman-hating abuses stemming from such religious doctrines as celibacy, including the witch-hunts.

The activist organized protest voting campaigns for women, addressed Congress, edited the National Citizen and Ballot Box for four years, and was an honorary member of the Council of Matrons of the Iroquois. Gage convened the historic Woman's National Liberal Union in 1890, the first feminist group devoted to the promotion of the separation of church and state. Gage's warning of a union of Catholics and Protestants whose agenda was to put God in the Constitution and attack secular schools, is eerily timely today: ". . . in order to help preserve the very life of the Republic, it is imperative that women should unite upon a platform of opposition to the teaching and aim of that ever most unscrupulous enemy of freedom - the Church." Carved on her tombstone in Fayetteville, N.Y., is Gage's well-known motto: "There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven; that word is Liberty." She also wrote,

• During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of the Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects. We note its beginning; its progress will overthrow every existing form of these institutions; its end will be a regenerated world.
• The most important struggle in the history of the church is that of woman for liberty of thought and the right to give that thought to the world.

Gage was the mother-in-law of Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - his intellectual mentor, she had advised him to write children's stories. An obituary in the Fayetteville, NY Weekly Recorder mentioned, not knowing she was no longer a Christian, that she had

• been retained on the roll of membership of the Fayetteville Baptist church the past thirty-five years. She never lost faith in the old fundamental truths of religion, and while not adopting in full the theories of any of the new schools of thought, she claimed to be an investigator on those fields, especially of psychology and theosophy.

Gage, an atheist, was President of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. She had written,

• The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

With Anthony and Stanton, she considered the Church the great obstacle to woman’s progress.

{BDF; CE; EU, Gordon Stein; JM; Lois K. Porter, “Matilda Joslyn Gage,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1993; PUT; RAT; RE; TYD; WWS}