Matilda Joslyn Gage, 1826-1898

Matilde-Joslyn-Gage-WWP

Photo credit - Wikipedia

An author, editor, suffragist, abolitionist, and a Native-American rights activist.



Born as Matilda Electa Joslyn in Cicero, NY, to a family of intellectuals and liberal thinkers. The family was an early abolitionist, and their home was a station of the Underground Railroad. As a child, Gage was homeschooled by her parents, and when she got older, she attended Clinton Liberal Institute. At 18, she married Henry H. Gage, they settled in Fayetteville, NY, and had 5 children. Like her parents, Gage’s home was also a station on the Underground Railroad, and she faced prison time for helping escaping slaves.

At the age of 26, Gage became actively involved with the Women’s Rights Movement, making her first public speech at the 1852’s National Women’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, NY. She served in various leading positions in the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), in the same leadership level as Anthony and Stanton.

In 1880, after the state of New York allowed women to vote for school boards, as a result of the NWSA campaign, Gage led more than 100 women to the polls in Fayetteville, making sure that every one of the female residences is aware of their new right and is able to use it.

Over the years, she wrote articles related to women’s rights, suffrage movement developments, Indian-Americans’ rights, female inventors, and prominent women in history. She also edited the NWSA magazine, the “National Citizen and Ballot Box”, and co-edited with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton three out of six volumes of the book “History of Woman Suffrage”. In 1893, she published “Women Church and State”, in which she is detailing the ways Christianity is a patriarchal system that oppresses women.

Gage had strong opinions about the Christian Church, she spoke against sexual abuse of women and children by priests, and she expressed her criticism of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s believes that women deserve the right to vote for their feminine morality, and not for their natural right as human beings.

For those reasons, she tried to prevent the merger between the NWSA and the conservative American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, but failed and left to found the Woman’s National Liberal Union (WNLU) which became the platform for radical and liberal ideas of the time. She served as the president of WNLU and its official journal till her death in 1898.

Matilda Joslyn Gage

The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation speaks about the pioneering women's rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage and how her insights can still illuminate us today.

Share:

This post is also available in:
Español

 

“There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven; that word is Liberty.”

“There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven; that word is Liberty.”

Fun Facts

  • The Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation gave her the native name “Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi”, which means sky carrier.
  • Gage was the mother-in-law of Lyman Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is well believed that many of her ideas are captured in the Oz series, such as female political leadership, respect, and justice for all, and more.
  • Her house in Fayetteville is now a museum dedicated to preserving her life and legacy.
  • The term “Matilda effect” is named after her. The term refers to the social situation where female scientists receive less credit for their scientific work.

Awards

  • Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame

Creations By and About Her

We hope you enjoyed this article.
Please support us so we can publish more herstories about pioneer women.
Donate

We hope you enjoyed this article.
Please support us so we can publish more herstories about pioneer women.
Donate

Watch and Learn More



Visit Her Landmark

Matilda Joslyn Gage

The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation speaks about the pioneering women's rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage and how her insights can still illuminate us today.
Share:

This post is also available in: Español

Category: Activism & Feminism and Media
Tags: 19th Amendment Centennial Anniversary, Abolitionist, Author, Editor, Journalist, and Suffragist

Hidden

Next Steps: Sync an Email Add-On

To get the most out of your form, we suggest that you sync this form with an email add-on. To learn more about your email add-on options, visit the following page (https://www.gravityforms.com/the-8-best-email-plugins-for-wordpress-in-2020/). Important: Delete this tip before you publish the form.
Check out this fun, inspiring, and challenging activity about extraordinary women.
You'll also be subscribing to our monthly newsletter. Unsubscribe anytime.

Shop & Support


Donate & Support
 
Our feminist project of wanderlust and equality-aspired community maps the HerStories of worldwide wonder women.
Explore the website for excellent guided tours, travel tips, unique landmarks, fun girlfriend getaways, events, and in-depth articles about gender, equality, space, and (not-told-enough) female legacy.

About the Project

 

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Abigail-Smith-Adams-WWP
Activism & Feminism

Abigail Adams, 1744-1818

A Founding Mother of the United States, a Women’s Rights Advocate, and the Second First Lady.

Abigail Smith was born and raised in Massachusetts. Her father was a liberal minister, her mother was a member of the famous Quincy family mother, and she had two sisters. At a time when women were not allowed to receive a formal education, she was homeschooled and satisfied her appetite for knowledge at the family’s library, forming progressive views. After a two-year courtship, she married John Adams, a country lawyer, and became his closest advisor and partner. They settled in the house John had inherited from his father in Braintree, MA. When his practice expanded, John had to frequently travel while Abigail managed their finances, investments, household, and growing family. For a while, they even moved to Boston next to his practice. Between 1784 and 1788, Abigail joined John in his diplomatic missions in Paris and London. On March 4th, 1797, John became the second president of the United States, and she was the first lady. They lived in the Presidential Mansion in Philadelphia and later in the White House in Washington, DC. She was a politically active first lady, made frequent public appearances, and was involved in the decision-making process, paving the way for future first ladies to be proactive figures. When John lost presidential re-election, the family retired to Peacefield in Quincy in 1800. During his frequent travels before and during the presidency, the couple corresponded in more than 1100 letters, where Abigail demonstrated her talent for writing and opinionated spirit. In one of those letters, she urges her husband to consider women’s rights in the new legislation after independence, warning that if not given equal representation: “women will rebel.” He dismissed her suggestion by writing back that it makes him laugh, but her words “remember the ladies” became an iconic feminist slogan. Before her death, she wrote a will favoring her female relatives. It was an act of protest against the laws prohibiting married women from owning assets. Share:This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Ada Louise Huxtable WWP
Arts

Ada Louise Huxtable, 1921-2013

An architecture critic and a writer. Received the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Born Ada Louise Landman in NYC, an only child in a middle-class Jewish family. Growing up in Manhattan, Huxtable loved strolling along the streets, fascinated by its building, such as the Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Natural History. She studied art at Hunter College, graduating magna cum laude, and then architectural history at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. At the time, she worked in Bloomingdale’s furnishings department, where she met her soon-to-be husband, Garth Huxtable. In 1946, at 25, Huxtable landed a job as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. After five years, she left her job to study Italian architecture in Italy for a year. Upon her return, she began writing as a contributing editor for various art and architectural journals. At the age of 37, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in which she examined the structural and design advances of American architecture. In 1963, 42 years old Huxtable was hired as the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a position she held for almost 20 years. In her column, she wrote about new and old buildings, threatened buildings, and bad-designed buildings. She also mentioned emerging architects, architectural trends, movements, and exhibitions. Huxtable encouraged the everyday readers to look at buildings from a new perspective, not as an assembly of bricks and pilasters but as a public statement with history and meaning. Raising awareness of the city’s heritage, the urban environment, and civic engagement, she set the tone for modern architecture criticism, for which, at the age of 49, she was the first-ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, at the age of 60, Huxtable received a MacArthur grant that allowed her in-depth research on subjects she was interested in, such as the development of the skyscraper, the negative impact of postmodernism building, and preservation vs. modernity. At 76, she returned to writing for the public as an architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, publishing columns for the next 15 years. Throughout her career, Huxtable was involved in various committees, serving as a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Architectural Selection and Building Design Committees for the Getty Center, Getty Villa, and as a Jury member for The Pritzker Architecture Prize. She published more than 10 books on architecture, including “Kicked a Building Lately?,” “Goodbye History,” “Hello Hamburger,” and a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Huxtable died in NYC at 91. Share:This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Adelina-Otero-Warren-WWP
Activism & Feminism

Adelina Otero-Warren, 1881-1965

A suffrage leader, educator, and politician. The first Latina to run for US Congress and one of the first’s women to serve as a government official in New Mexico.

Adelina “Nina” Otero Warren was born near Los Lunas, New Mexico. Her family was among the early settlers in New Mexico, and her parents were part of the Hispanic elite. When she was 2 years old, her father was killed by an Anglo squatter. A few years later, her mother married an English businessman, and she grew up in a multicultural environment. She was influenced by her mother, who was an advocate for social and educational developments and served as the director of Santa Fe’s Board of Education. At 16, the family relocated to Santa Fe, where she became a socialite. At the age of 26, she married Lieutenant Rawson D. Warren, a cavalry officer who was nine years older than her. Though the marriage did not last long, she kept her x-husband’s last name and called herself a widow, so she would not be stigmatized as a divorced woman.   At 31, Nina moved to NYC to keep house for her brother. There, she became active in Anne Morgan’s settlement house, working alongside the famous suffragist Alice Paul and organizing crafts programs for working-class women. Two years later, her mother died, and Nina returned to Santa Fe to take care of her half-siblings. Upon her arrival, she started working for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Soon she became the first Mexican-American state leader of the Congressional Union in New Mexico, raising support from the Spanish-speaking community as well as from the English-speaking community. Using her family connections, she was a successful lobbyist for voting in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment, and she had a key role in its ratification in 1920. In 1922, at the age of 41, Nina ran as the Republican Party nominee for New Mexico to the US House of Representatives – The first Latina to run for the US Congress. During her campaign, she spoke Spanish and advocated for the improvement of education, health care, and welfare services, as well as for the preservation of Hispano heritage and culture. Ultimately, she lost the election by less than 9%, probably because it was discovered that she was a divorcee, not a widow. In 1917 Nina was appointed as the Santa Fe Superintendent of Instruction – one of the first women to serve as government officials in New Mexico. In her 12 years in office, she worked tirelessly to improve the education of Hispano. Share:This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Agatha Christie WWP
Literature & Poetry

Agatha Christie, 1890-1976

English author and playwright. Known as the Queen of Mystery for her detective novels.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, into a middle-class family. In her early years, she was homeschooled by her parents and taught herself to read at the age of five, against her mother’s wish. In 1901, at 10, she wrote her first poem, “The Cow Slip.” That same year, her father died, and not long after, her mother remarried, and the family moved to Cheadle, Cheshire. She began to receive formal education at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School but had trouble adjusting to the strict environment. At 15, she was sent to a boarding school in Paris, where she mainly had piano lessons and vocal training. Following her return to England, she began writing short stories reflecting her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These include The Call of Wings, and The House of Beauty, later published as The House of Dreams. In addition, she began working on her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which she tried to publish under a pseudonym but got rejected by six different publishers. In 1912, at 22, she began a relationship with a military officer named Archie Christie. At the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to fight in France, and the couple had to wait for his home leave to get married. During the war, she volunteered as a nurse at the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. There, she met many Belgian soldiers, which inspired her to create the character of Hercule Poirot – a former Belgian police officer “with a magnificent mustache.” He appeared in Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as the distinguished detective and later in 25 more novels and numerous short stories. That first novel was written in 1916 but was published only in 1920 after Christie signed a six books contract with The Bodley Head publication. After the war, Christie and her husband moved to London, and in 1919 she gave birth to her daughter Rosalind. She continued to write thrillers and murder mystery stories, developing new detective characters, such as Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary and Miss Jane Marple in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems. In 1926, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was an immediate best-seller, and years later was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers’ Association. Despite her literary success, she dealt with personal issues. First, her mother died, and then her husband filed for divorce after falling in love with another woman. On December 3rd, 1926, following a fight with her husband, Christie left the house without saying where she was going. The next morning, her car was found abandoned, and the mysterious disappearance of the author became a news sensation. Thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searched for her. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a medium one of Christie’s gloves to locate her, and a newspaper offered a £100 reward to the person who would find her. Eleven days later, Christie got recognized in a hotel in Yorkshire, where she registered under the last name of her husband’s lover. She suffered from amnesia and couldn’t recall who she was or how she got to Yorkshire. After the incident, she moved to London with her daughter, received psychiatric treatment, and divorced. In 1928, at 38, she took the Orient Express to Istanbul and then continued to Baghdad. While visiting the archaeological site at Ur, she befriended the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who invited her back the following year. Then, she met the archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. After they married, she joined him on his archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, which inspired many of her stories, such as the 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. She continued to publish more novels and short stories, and in 1943, after she disliked a stage adaption of one of her novels, she began to adapt her stories into plays. In the early 1970s, her health began to decline. She published her last novel in 1973 and made her last public appearance in 1974. She died two years later at the age of 85. During her life, she wrote 74 novels (66 of them are detective stories), 14 short-stories collections, 19 plays, and an autobiography. Dozens of her works got adapted into films, TV series, and stage plays. Her books have been translated into over 100 languages and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In 1976, at the time of her death, she was the best-selling novelist in history. Share:This post is also available in: Español Read more...
View all

 

*Disclaimer: Please be aware that the information on this page is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. Learn more here.