Matilda Joslyn Gage: The Suffragist They Left Out

In Fayetteville, a small village about eight miles east of Syracuse, there is a house on West Main Street where one of the most important figures in American women's history lived, organized, wrote, and was largely forgotten.

Matilda Joslyn Gage was born in Cicero, New York, in eighteen twenty-six, to a father who was an abolitionist and a mother who made their home a station on the Underground Railroad. She married at eighteen and moved to Fayetteville, where she and her husband made their home another station. She faced the prospect of prison under the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty for the work she was doing, and she continued it.

She spoke at the National Women's Rights Convention in Syracuse in eighteen fifty-two, at twenty-six years old, she was the youngest speaker on the stage, and the audience was startled by her confidence. Along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in eighteen sixty-nine and co-authored the first three volumes of the monumental History of Woman Suffrage, a primary source document for American feminist history.

She was also the most radical of the three. She challenged the authority of organized religion over women's lives, argued for Native American rights decades before it was fashionable, and was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Haudenosaunee, an honor that recognized her advocacy for their sovereignty.

The standard histories of the suffrage movement tend to foreground Anthony and Stanton and leave Gage to the footnotes. She noticed this happening during her own lifetime. Her gravestone in Fayetteville carries her lifelong motto: there is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven; that word is Liberty.

The house in Fayetteville is now the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center, open to the public.