09/13/2026
Interesting how courageous, intelligent women get left out of his-story. Resurfaced decades later in Her-story ❤️
Some people are so far ahead of their time that even the revolutionaries around them cannot keep up.
Matilda Joslyn Gage was born in 1826 in Cicero, New York, in a house that was already doing dangerous things. Her father was a physician and a passionate abolitionist. Their home was a station on the Underground Railroad. While other children her age played outside, young Matilda handed out anti-slavery pamphlets and listened to Frederick Douglass speak about the humanity of enslaved people with a fire that settled permanently into her bones.
Her father trained her in anatomy and physiology. He believed she was capable of becoming a doctor. The medical school she applied to disagreed.
Because she was a woman.
She filed that particular injustice away alongside everything else she was quietly cataloguing about the world, married a dry goods merchant named Henry Gage, settled in Fayetteville, New York, had five children, and continued sheltering freedom seekers in her home despite the very real threat of criminal prosecution and imprisonment.
Then she got to work on everything else.
In 1852, at twenty-six years old, she walked onto the stage of the third National Women's Convention in Syracuse and delivered a speech that announced her arrival in the suffrage movement as a fully formed and completely uncompromising voice. She would not stop speaking for the next forty-six years.
She helped found the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. She served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association. When Susan B. Anthony was put on criminal trial for the audacious act of casting a vote in the 1872 presidential election, Matilda Joslyn Gage was the single suffragist who stood publicly beside her without flinching. She co-authored alongside Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, the foundational documentary record of the entire movement.
But Gage was always thinking further ahead than the movement was prepared to follow.
While others focused on winning the vote, she was writing about the church as a patriarchal institution. She was exposing the sexual abuse of women and children by clergy in 1893, decades before the world would be remotely ready to hear it. She was arguing for women's reproductive autonomy when the language for such arguments barely existed. She was documenting how women's inventions and scientific contributions were being systematically credited to men, a phenomenon so pervasive and so persistent that in the 1990s a scientist named Margaret Rossiter formally named it the Matilda Effect in her honor.
She was so far ahead that the very suffragists she had helped build eventually found her too radical and pushed her toward the margins of the movement she had spent her life constructing.
She did not stop.
When women were barred from the official ceremony at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty in 1886, Gage and a group of suffragists hired a boat, sailed directly into New York Harbor, and delivered their own speeches about the bitter irony of celebrating liberty for all in a country where half the population had none. Their voices carried across the water toward a ceremony they were not permitted to attend.
She publicly condemned the United States government's treatment of Native Americans at a time when such advocacy was not just unpopular but actively dangerous. She studied the governance structures of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, and wrote admiringly of nations that treated women and men as equals, models she believed American democracy had borrowed from and then deliberately chosen to ignore.
In 1893, the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation formally adopted her into their community.
They gave her a name. Karonienhawi.
She who holds the sky.
She was also, quietly and without knowing it, transforming the imagination of the young man who had married her daughter. His name was L. Frank Baum. He spent years in conversation with his extraordinary mother-in-law, absorbing her ideas about female strength, institutional hypocrisy, the courage of outcasts, and the hidden power of those the world dismisses as unimportant.
In 1900, two years after Gage's death, he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A story about a brave and resourceful girl navigating a world full of false authority, discovering her own power, and finding her way home.
Scholars have since traced Gage's fingerprints across the entire landscape of Oz.
Matilda Joslyn Gage died on March 18, 1898, just eight days before her seventy-second birthday, still writing, still speaking, still pushing at walls that had not moved yet. The suffrage movement she had given her life to would finally win the vote twenty-two years after she was gone.
She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1995. Those who eventually found their way to her work describe her simply as the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time.
A girl handing out pamphlets beside an Underground Railroad station.
A woman sailing into New York Harbor to protest a liberty that excluded her.
A thinker adopted by the Mohawk Nation and called she who holds the sky.
The quiet inspiration behind the most beloved children's story ever told.
Her name was Matilda Joslyn Gage. History buried it for over a century.
It is long past time we said it out loud.
~The History Today
