Product Description

This classic history of women's oppression is one of the first attempts to document the legacy of injustice and discrimination against women, which is inseparable from both the history of Christianity and the evolution of the Western state.

Pioneering women's rights advocate Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) traces the patterns of male domination in both church and state that kept women in virtual bondage. Among the topics of her research are the medieval belief that women were unclean and the cause of original sin, their discrimination in canon law, their abuse in the feudal system, the witch-hunts, the virtual slave status of wives and their legal subjugation to their husbands, the debilitating drudgery of women's daily work, and the widespread opposition to women's education.

Originally published in 1893, this work was the fruit of twenty years' research. Complementing this edition is an introduction by author and lecturer Sally Roesch Wagner, who helped found one of America's first programs in women's studies. She is Executive Director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in Fayetteville, New York.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1245502 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06
• Format: Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 554 pages

Review
"a systematic, eminently readable volume [that] should enjoy ever-increasing use as a required text..." -- Feminist Collections, Winter 2003

About the Author
Matilda Joslyn Gage was born on March 24, 1826, in Cicero, New York. An only child, she was raised in a household dedicated to antislavery. Her father, Dr. Hezekiah Joslyn, was a nationally known abolitionist, and the Joslyn home was a station on the Underground Railroad.

In 1845 she married merchant Henry Hill Gage, with whom she would have four children. They eventually settled in Fayetteville, New York, near Syracuse, and their home became a station on the Underground Railroad. Although occupied with both family and antislavery activities, Gage was drawn to a new cause; the women's suffrage movement. Her life's work would become the struggle for the complete liberation of women.

Unable to attend the first Woman's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, Gage attended and addressed the third national convention in Syracuse, New York, in 1852. She became a noted speaker and writer on woman's suffrage.

During the Civil War, Gage was an enthusiastic organizer of hospital supplies for Union soldiers. In 1862 she predicted the failure of any course of defense and maintenance of the Union that did not emancipate the slaves.

Gage, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a founding member of the National Woman Suffrage Association and served in various offices of that organization (1869-1889). She helped organize the Virginia and New York state suffrage associations, and was an officer in the New York association for twenty years. From 1878 to 1881 she published the National Citizen and Ballot Box, the official newspaper of the NWSA.

In 1871 Gage was one of the many women nationwide who unsuccessfully tried to test the law by attempting to vote. When Susan B. Anthony successfully voted in the 1872 presidential election and was arrested, Gage came to her aid and supported her during her trial. In 1880 Gage led 102 Fayetteville women to the polls when New York State allowed women to vote in school districts where they paid their taxes.

During the 1870s Gage spoke out against the brutal and unfair treatment of Native Americans. She was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation and given the name Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi (Sky Carrier). Inspired by the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy's form of government, where "the power between the sexes was nearly equal," this indigenous practice of woman's rights became her vision.

Gage coedited with Stanton and Anthony the first three volumes of the six-volume THE HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE (1881-1887). She also authored the influential pamphlets WOMAN AS INVENTOR (1870), WOMAN'S RIGHTS CATECHISM (1871), and WHO PLANNED THE TENNESSEE CAMPAIGN OF 1862? (1880).

Discouraged with the slow pace of suffrage efforts in the 1880s, and alarmed by the conservative religious movement that had as its goal the establishment of a Christian state, Gage formed the Women's National Liberal Union in 1890, to fight moves to unite church and state. Her book WOMAN, CHURCH AND STATE (1893) articulates her views.

While Gage remained a supporter of woman's rights throughout her life, she spent her elder years concentrating on religious issues. A staunch supporter of the separation of church and state, she opposed the religious right's attempt to turn the United States into a Christian nation. She also concentrated on the church's role in creating and maintaining the oppression of women.

Gage died in Chicago, Illinois, on March 18, 1898, five days after suffering a stroke. Her lifelong motto appears on her gravestone in Fayetteville: "There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven; that word is Liberty."

Customer Reviews

Essential to any feminist herstory collection
Originally published in 1893, this book is back in print for the first time in 30 years. It is a major feminist work of the Nineteenth Century that identifies the sources of women's oppression as the church and its offspring, the state.

With Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the three principle U.S. suffragists. Alarmed by the conservative religious movement of the time that tried to amend the Constitution to declare the U.S. a Christian state, Gage wrote this book to articulate her views that christianity was the oppressor of women.

In the first chapter called The Matriarchate, the author tells of the rights women had in pagan pre-christian times. She talks of the Mother-rule, that preceded Patriarchy. She then shows that christianity from its beginning has worked to undermine women's rights.

The following seven chapters outline the oppression of women in the west and its sources in first the church, and later in the state that developed its ruling principles from canon law. These chapters deal with Celibacy, Canon Law, Marquette (a term that Gage uses for jus primae noctis, the right of lords to the sexual favors of their peasant women), Witchcraft, Wives, Polygamy, and Work. These chapters are filled with examples from history as well as the contemporary 19th century. The documented examples of women's oppression at the hands of ministers of the church and the law in this section are an impressive collection that makes this book a valuable source for feminist herstory.

In the last two chapters, Gage looks at the church of her day and shows that it is still bogged down in the same dogma of women's oppression. She predicts a great revolution which will liberate women and give them equal rights with men in both religion and society. I am sure the women's movement of the 1970s with its emphasis on women's spirituality would have convinced her that she was right.

Too heavy handed
Gage was an early feminist, and this is her polemic, written in 1893, showing how religion, the law, and male-dominated custom oppressed/s women. She is fierce in her criticisms--and stony cold. Reading it is like being whipped with a stick. Perhaps this is a good thing overall, but I found her approach way too heavy handed.

book is reprinted now
Woman Church and State by Matilda Joslyn Gage and edited by Sally Roesch Wagner. isbn 1-880589-27-3 -- order from: Sky Carrier Press, p o box 2135 Aberdeen SD 57402 $20.00 plus 4.95 for shipping I DIDNT KNOW HOW ELSE TO LET AMAZON KNOW WHERE TO FIND THIS BOOK THANKS