ABOUT MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE

WHO WAS MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE?

Matilda Joslyn Gage, (1826-1898) along with 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony 

formed the leadership triumvirate of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA).    The three women edited the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage and Gage published the NWSA paper for four years, 

documenting women’s 

great accomplishments despite the discrimination and oppression they faced.  A committed abolitionist who opened her home as a stop on the Underground Railroad, she challenged the laws of her nation, risking arrest and imprisonment by helping freedom takers escape to freedom.

Gage wrote about the superior position of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) women and supported treaty rights and Native sovereignty. Influenced by the Haudenosaunee egalitarian nations, she in turn influenced the utopian feminist vision of her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, in his fourteen Oz books.  A supporter of a woman’s right to her body, Gage exposed sex trafficking and sexual abuse by the priesthood in1893. Written out of history for her scathing denunciation of evangelical Christianity’s key role in the oppression of women, Gage is, according to Gloria Steinem, “the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time.”

The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation was established in 2000 when the leading Gage authority, Sally Roesch Wagner, brought together a diverse network of people with the

goal of purchasing Gage’s home as the headquarters for bringing this vitally important suffragist back to her rightful place in history.

The Gage Foundation purchased the home where Gage lived from 1852 until her death in 1898 and after a million-dollar capital campaign, opened the rehabilitated Gage Home

as the Gage Social Justice Dialogue Center in 2010.

While most historic homes tell the story of the people who lived there, each room in the Gage Center is instead dedicated to a social justice commitment of Matilda Joslyn

Gage.  Through these rooms, the activism of Gage and its current relevance comes alive.

• Haudenosaunee Room (Gage's model of a just society).

•  Women's Rights Room   (from equal pay to

  reproductive justice)

• Oz Parlor (Gage is the reason we have the Oz books)

•  Underground Railroad Room (she offered her home as a station)

• Religious Freedom Room (her challenge to Christian Nationalists)