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- How can I find out more about Matilda Joslyn Gage?
- An excellent place to start is by reading She Who Holds the Sky by
Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner, Executive Director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage
Foundation. Short, comprehensive and easy to read, is it available in our
Gift Shop. The Foundation also has a number of
other materials for sale, including Gage’s masterwork, Woman, Church and
State, reissued for the modern reader in 1998.
- Where was Matilda Joslyn born?
- Gage was born in Cicero, NY, in 1826 to Dr. Hezekiah and Helen Leslie
Joslyn.
- Where did Matilda live during her lifetime?
- After she wed Henry Gage in 1845, Matilda and her husband lived for a short
time in nearby Syracuse and in Manlius, before permanently settling their
family in Fayetteville in 1854.
- Where is the window that Susan B. Anthony is said to have scratched her
name?
- In the upstairs library, currently a private apartment. Susan B. Anthony
was a frequent visitor to Gage’s home, especially when they worked on
compiling the first three volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage.
- Where did runaway slaves stay?
- We’re not sure; possibly in the cellar or a back room. The house has been
documented as having been offered as a way station on the
Underground Railroad.
- Were the Gages wealthy?
- When the Fayetteville house was built in the early 1850s, the Gages were
considered “fairly well off.” Later in life, Matilda was plagued by financial
hardships.
- As adults, did the Gage children stay in the Fayetteville area?
- No, all four children moved to the Dakota Territory during the 1880s, where
Gage visited often and purchased land in Aberdeen, SD for rental property.
Maud and L. Frank Baum lived in Chicago (Gage died while visiting there in
1898) before finally settling in California.
- Who wrote Matilda Joslyn Gage out of history and how did they do it?
- The increasingly conservative National American Woman Suffrage Association
wanted to distance itself from Gage and her radical beliefs about the church.
The NWSA feared alienating conservative Christian women who wanted the vote in
order to create a Christian nation, a move totally opposed by Gage, who then
formed an organization dedicated to maintaining the separation of church and
state.
- Susan B. Anthony was more famous, and she lived longer than either of her
peers, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Toward the end of
Anthony’s life, as the lone survivor of the leadership trilogy, she was
perceived as the foremother of the suffrage movement. Anthony’s biography,
Stanton’s autobiography, later volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage
(written by Anthony and her protégé), and other secondary sources all combined
to become the prevailing version of women’s history, quoted extensively by
writers and historians during the years that followed.
- Throughout her life and work, Gage did not call attention to herself --
only to issues that she cared about. She didn’t keep a journal and never wrote
her life story. Her children didn’t, either. Fortunately, her children and
grandchildren did save an extensive collection of clippings and
correspondence. It is through the research of her writings -- letters that she
wrote to family members, newspaper articles, and other primary sources -- that
historians are able to reconstruct Gage’s tremendous role in the woman’s
rights movement and restore her to her proper place in history.
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