Gage, Matilda Joslyn
GAGE, MATILDA JOSLYN. Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898), suffragist, abolitionist, and religious radical, was born March 24, 1826, in Cicero, New York, and spent her entire life within a thirty-mile radius of nearby Syracuse, raising her family of four with her husband, the merchant Henry H. Gage. Gage was the youngest member of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) leadership triumvirate (with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony), presiding over the Executive Committee of the NWSA for most of the 1870s and 1880s while heading the New York State Suffrage Association. The three women, editors of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1887), "will ever hold a grateful place in the hearts of posterity," predicted the Woman's Tribune in 1888.
A prolific writer and thorough researcher, Gage edited a suffrage newspaper for four years (The National Citizen and Ballot Box, 1878–1881) and contributed as correspondent to newspapers across the country. She wrote about the superior position of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) women while she supported native sovereignty and treaty rights. Gage was a chief architect of the campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience in the 1870s that saw NWSA women refusing to pay their taxes, voting illegally, and petitioning Congress for relief from their political disabilities. Gage dropped out of the suffrage cause after what she perceived as a conservative takeover of the woman's movement in 1889, which she unsuccessfully moved to prevent.
The greatest danger at the time, Gage believed, was an attempt by Christian fundamentalists to place God in the Constitution and prayer in the public schools. Turning to what she believed was her grandest, most courageous work, Gage formed the Woman's National Liberal Union (1890) to challenge the religious right's drive to merge church and state. The organization, which lasted only a year, also strove to free woman from the "bondage" of the church, which "enslaved her conscience and reason."
Gage published her magnum opus, Woman, Church, and State in 1893, and Anthony Comstock, the press censor of the United States Postal Service, immediately banned the book from public school libraries, threatening to arrest anyone who made the book available to children. A powerful indictment of the church's primary role in the oppression of women, the book also exposed the institutionalized sexual abuse of women and children by the priesthood and documented gynocidal witch-burnings (nine million European women, Gage estimated, murdered by the church and later the state over a 500-year period). Gage argued that the early church had accepted the equal feminine nature of the divine, and women served at the altar and administered the sacrament until 824, when the Council of Paris removed women from religious duty. Women were then slowly forced out of the priesthood and the female in the godhead was removed.
Beginning in the 1870s, Gage charged in her writing and speeches that the foundation of the Christian church became the theory that woman brought sin and death into the world. The result was idolatry, a worship of the masculine, Gage told the International Council of Women in 1888. God punished Eve's sin by putting woman in subordination and servitude to man; women's second-class position in all areas—political, legal, educational, industrial, and social—resulted from this mythological story, Gage explained. The church required women to pledge obedience to their husbands in the marriage ceremony. When canon law became the foundation for common law, married woman's subordinate position rendered her "dead in the law," without rights or even legal identity.
The great underlying creative principle is female, Gage reasoned, a fact recognized by all ancient nations, where goddesses were seated everywhere with gods, and often considered superior to them. Gage believed that returning the motherhood of God to the place of sacredness from which it had been removed by the patriarchal Christian overthrow was critical to elevating the position of women. Women were not the only victims of Christianity; the authority of the Bible had been used to justify slavery and oppose science, art, invention, and all reform movements. Considering religious belief tantamount to the death of the soul, Gage celebrated the greatest lesson of her life—to think for herself—given in childhood by her father. She embraced moral relativism, believing that no absolute moral standard exists, but that what is considered right changes over time and from culture to culture.
While nominally a church member throughout her life—she joined the Baptist Church in childhood and her name stayed on the church rolls until shortly before her death—Gage's religious journey took her through membership in the American Theosophical Society (1885) and a serious investigation of the paranormal.
A contributor to the Woman's Bible, which Elizabeth Cady Stanton edited (1895–1898), Gage moved from her interpretation of the Bible as history or mythology to a reading of it as an occult work of ancient mysteries written in symbolic language. She suggested that the Book of Revelation, understood from this perspective, may be read as a work about woman's spiritual powers.
Gage remained hopeful about the future of women who were rising up against the "tyranny of Church and State" in the most important revolution the world had yet seen. It "will shake the foundations of religious belief, tear into fragments and scatter to the winds the old dogmas upon which all forms of Christianity are based," she predicted at the conclusion of Woman, Church, and State. The result "will be a regenerated world."
Gage died March 18, 1898, and was buried in the Fayetteville, New York, cemetery under a tombstone blazing her motto: "There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is Liberty."
Gender and Religion; Politics and Religion.
Bibliography
A full-length comprehensive biography of Gage's life and work has yet to be written. Sally Roesch Wagner's monograph, Matilda Joslyn Gage: She Who Holds the Sky (Aberdeen, S.Dak., 2002), and Leila R. Brammer's Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist (Westport, Conn., 2000) pave the way. Several reprint editions of Gage's magnum opus, Woman, Church, and State, are available, including one from Humanity Books (Amherst, N.Y., 2002); the Modern Reader's edition, published by Sky Carrier Press (Aberdeen, S.Dak., 1998) and edited by Sally Roesch Wagner, is the only one containing a bibliography documenting Gage's extensive research. Gage's papers are available on microfilm from the Schlesinger Library, and her woman's rights scrapbooks from the Library of Congress, Rare Books Division. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Gage edited the first three volumes (1881–1887) of History of Woman Suffrage (reprint, Salem, N.H., 1985). Gage's important address, "Woman in the Early Christian Church," was delivered at the International Council of Women's Religious Symposium (Report of the International Council of Women, Washington, D.C.: National Woman Suffrage Association, 1888, pp. 401–407). In addition to the newspaper she edited, the National Citizen and Ballot Box (1878–1881), Gage wrote extensively for The Revolution (1868–1871). Two good sources for her religious views are The Index ("The Church, Science, and Woman," April 29, l886) and The Woman's Tribune ("The Foundation of Sovereignty," April 1887).
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