03/21/2026
March is Women's History Month! 💃🏾
March 21st: *check out the article!* 👇
She grew up in a house full of secrets — and all of them were acts of courage.
Matilda Joslyn was born in Cicero, New York in 1826, the daughter of a physician who was also a passionate abolitionist. Her childhood home was a station on the Underground Railroad. While other children her age played in the yard, young Matilda handed out anti-slavery pamphlets and listened to speakers like Frederick Douglass argue for the humanity of enslaved people with a fire that never left her.
Her father trained her in anatomy and physiology, preparing her for medical school. The medical school refused to admit her.
Because she was a woman.
She filed that injustice away alongside everything else she was learning 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.
And then she got to work on everything else.
In 1852, she stepped 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 uncompromising voice. She was twenty-six years old. 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. She was the single suffragist who publicly stood beside Susan B. Anthony when Anthony was put on criminal trial for the audacious act of casting a vote in the 1872 presidential election. 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 Matilda Joslyn Gage was always thinking further ahead than the movement was ready to go.
While others focused on winning the vote, Gage 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 ready to hear it. She was arguing for women's reproductive autonomy. She was documenting how women's inventions and scientific contributions were systematically credited to men — a phenomenon so pervasive that in the 1990s, scientist Margaret Rossiter named it "The Matilda Effect" in her honor.
She was so far ahead that even the suffragists she had helped build eventually found her too radical and pushed her to the margins.
She didn't 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 into New York Harbor, and delivered their own speeches about the bitter irony of celebrating "liberty for all" in a country where women had none. The speeches echoed across the water toward a ceremony they were not permitted to attend.
She publicly and repeatedly condemned the United States government's treatment of Native Americans — particularly the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy — at a time when such advocacy was not just unpopular but actively dangerous. She studied their governance structures and wrote admiringly of nations that treated women and men as equals — models she believed American democracy had both borrowed from and then deliberately ignored.
In 1893, the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation formally adopted Matilda Joslyn Gage into their community. They gave her a name: Karonienhawi. She who holds the sky.
She was also, quietly, 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 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, resourceful girl navigating a world full of false authority, finding her own power, and coming home.
Scholars have 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. The women's suffrage movement she had spent her life building would finally win the vote twenty-two years after her death.
She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1995. She is described by those who finally found her as "the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time."
A girl who handed out pamphlets as a child.
A woman adopted by the Mohawk Nation as "she who holds the sky."
A thinker whose ideas live on in the most beloved children's story ever told.
Her name was Matilda Joslyn Gage. And history owes her a debt it is only now beginning to acknowledge.
