The Religious Freedom Room

The most important work of Gage’s life, and the reason she was written-out of history, was her holding Christianity accountable for women’s oppression. Gage charged: 

• That  the Christian Church, of whatever name, is based on the theory that woman was created secondary and inferior to man, and brought sin into the world and necessitated the sacrifice of a Savior.

• That Christianity is false and its foundation a myth, which every discovery of science shows to be as baseless as its former belief that the earth is flat.

• That  every Christian Church is the enemy of liberty and progress and the chief means of enslaving woman’s conscience and reason, and, therefore, as the first and most necessary step toward her emancipation, we should free her from the bondage of the Church.

When the NWSA was absorbed into the increasingly conservative National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890, the new organization became connected with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, whose charismatic head, Frances Willard wanted women to get the vote to enact a constitutional amendment declaring Christ the author and head of the American government: “…Christ shall be this world’s King. King of its courts, its camps, and its commerce; King of its colleges and cloisters; King of its customs and its constitutions.”  A frightened Gage warned, “This looks like a return to the Middle Ages and proscription for religious opinions, and is the great danger of the hour.”

Gage left the woman suffrage movement and formed the Women’s National Liberal Union (WNLU), bringing together prison reformers, free thinkers, anarchists and other progressives to combat the organized religious fundamentalists whose goals were to keep women under the authority of men and destroy religious freedom. Read her speech at the WNLU founding convention, “The Danger of the Hour,” which is available through our online store and in our Gift Shop. 

An angry Anthony forbade suffragists from attending the WNLU convention. Ministers preached sermons against the organization; children in a Catholic orphanage were ordered to pray against it, and the government intercepted the WNLU’s mail. While opposition couldn’t destroy the WNLU, a lack of funds did. 

Undaunted, Gage turned to completing her major work, Woman, Church and State, which documented the religious war against women – from the church’s burning of untold thousands of wise women as witches to the widespread, longstanding tradition of Catholic priests sexually violating women and children – picked up by the state when canon law became the basis for common law. Woman, Church and State, is available through our online store and in our Gift Shop.