Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage

Born: 1826

Died: 1898

Country of Birth: USA

Nationality: USA

Ethnicity: White

Clinton Liberal Institute

""It is sometimes better to be a dead man than a live woman." (Wikipedia); "In not a single State of the Union is a married woman held to possess a right to her earnings within the family; and in not one-half of them has she a right to their control in business entered upon outside of the household. Should such a woman be successful in obtaining a patent, what then! Would she be free to do as she pleased with it? Not at all. She would hold no right, title, or power over this work of her own brain." (Wikipedia); "The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages. The persecution which for ages waged against witches was in reality an attack upon science at the hands of the church. As knowledge has ever been power, the church feared its use in woman's hands, and leveled its deadliest blows at her." (Wikipedia); “The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards woman,” she wrote in 1893, “a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgment, her own conscience, her own will.” (nps.gov); “The public must be aroused to a full sense of the justice of our claims. Beside the duty of educating our children, so as to make the path of right, easy to their feet, is that of discussion, newspaper articles, petitions: all great reforms are gradual. Fear not any attempt to frown down the revolution already commenced; nothing is a more fertile aid of reform, than an attempt to check it; work on.” (matildajoslyngage.org); “I like an active life and one with freedom from money troubles,” Gage wrote. “I like to be independent in every way. But fate or Karma is against me.” (smithsonianmag.com); “We all must die, and I pray to go quickly when I leave,” she wrote in an 1897 letter. “I would a thousand times prefer Black Death to long-term paralysis. … The real suffering comes from lack of knowledge of real things—the spiritual.” (smithsonianmag.com);"

— Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage

Field of Study: Abolitionist; Author

Institution/Corporation: Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation

Degrees & Memberships: Member: National Woman's Suffrage Association (1869); Woman's National Liberal Union (1890); NYS Woman's Suffrage Association (Founder, 1869);

Awards: 1995 National Women's Hall of Fame; 2022 a National Votes for Women Trail Marker was unveiled in Saratoga Springs in her honor;

Achievements: with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage helped found the National Woman's Suffrage Association in 1869; served as a top officer in the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) for twenty years; her childhood home was a stop on the Underground Railroad; wrote about the superior position of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) women and supported treaty rights and Native sovereignty; influenced by the Haudenosaunee egalitarian culture; is the eponym for the Matilda effect, which describes the tendency to deny women credit for scientific invention; 1878–1881 published and edited the National Citizen, a paper devoted to the cause of women; with Anthony & Stanton wrote the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1887); also was the author of the Woman's Rights Catechism (1868); Woman as Inventor (1870) (;in which she credited Catherine Littlefield Greene with the invention of the cotton gin) Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign (1880); and Woman, Church and State (1893); broke with NWSA & founded founded the Woman's National Liberal Union when her ideas became too radical for NWSA; along with twenty-four other women composed The Woman’s Bible in 1895; with Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States,” which became an official part of the proceedings of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876; 1880 with other activists formed the Equal Rights Party;