Matilda Joslyn Gage on Christianity’s Role in the Suppression of Women

My introduction to Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) goes back to my long-standing interest in her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum. I regularly teach Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) in my children’s literature courses, and I always point out the book’s feminist qualities. When I first started teaching this book, I wondered what caused Baum, a male writing in the late 19^th century, to write such a feminist book. One day, while preparing for class, I came across a reference to Gage. This reference stated that Gage was a leading suffragette during the second half of the 19^th century and that she lived with Baum and his family in Chicago when Baum was launching his career as a children’s author. After reading a biography of Baum, I realized that Gage played a major role in shaping Baum’s non-traditional views on gender roles (Rebecca Loncraine, The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum, 2009). However, I was still not sure what role she played in the development of women’s rights.

I had studied the women’s suffrage movement when I took American history courses in college, but Gage was not mentioned in any of these classes. I started doing some research on her, and I was surprised to learn that Gage worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton during the early days of the women’s suffrage movement. However, her views on the patriarchal underpinnings of Christianity caused her to be viewed as the most radical of the three, although Stanton shared some of Gage’s concerns about the patriarchal passages in the Bible and addressed these concerns in The Woman’s Bible (1895/1898). As a result, Gage’s role in the women’s suffrage movement was downplayed

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by her contemporaries as well as by those who carried on the movement during the 20^th century (Leila R. Brammer, Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist, 2000).

Gage’s most important book, Woman, Church, and State, came out in 1893, but the book was judged to be too radical to be embraced by the leaders of the suffrage movement at the time of its publication, and it has since fallen into obscurity. Having now read Gage’s book, I am convinced that it did not find a broad audience when it first appeared in part because it was just way ahead of its time. During the late 19^th century, Americans were simply not ready to consider Gage’s critique of Christianity’s treatment of women. However, now that many Americans are moving away from organized religion, there appears to be a greater willingness to question religious dogma and dictates, including religiously-based assumptions about the subjugation of women (Nancy T. Ammerman, “Spiritual but Not Religious? Beyond Binary Choices in the Study of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 52.2, 2013, 259). As I see it, the views that Gage expressed in Woman, Church, and State resonate in powerful ways with today’s movement to speak out against sexual abuse.

Gage first articulated her thoughts on the relationship between Christianity and the status of women during a speech that she delivered at the annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1878. In this speech, Gage spoke out against “the wrongs inflicted upon one-half of humanity by the other half in the name of religion” (Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State, 1893, 5). Over the next 15 years, she continued to conduct research on the history of this topic, paying particular attention to the status of women in pre-Christian societies. Her research culminated with the publication of Woman, Church, and State.

Part historical treatise and part political manifesto, Woman, Church, and State traces the impact of religion on the status of women from ancient times to the late 19^th century. The book begins with a discussion of the “liberty woman enjoyed under the old civilizations” prior to the rise of Christianity. Gage calls this period in human history the “Matriarchate” (Woman, 11). She then goes on to argue that with the rise of Christianity, women were relegated to an “inferior and secondary position” as compared to men. She calls this period in history the “Patriarchate” (49). She critiques the theological underpinnings for this change, especially the supposi-

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tion that a woman was the cause of original sin.

Gage devotes most of her book to examining the ways in which the rise of Christianity affected women in terms of marriage, legal rights, education, and work. As she points out in nearly every chapter, throughout the history of Christianity, religion was often used to justify the abuse of women on the grounds that women’s subordination to men was divinely ordained. For example, in her chapter titled “Wives,” she writes about the dismissal of court cases in Chicago in which wives were the victims of crime. She goes on to denounce the “tendency of magistrates to ignore crimes perpetuated by men against women” because the magistrates saw such behavior as “being the natural result of the teaching of the church in regard to woman” (Woman, 333).

Gage concludes her book with a rousing chapter titled “The Church of Today” in which she issues a call to action. She argues that in order for women to achieve full equality with men, women need to reject the teachings of Christianity regarding gender roles and the status of women. She writes, “In knocking at the door of political rights, woman is severing that last link between church and state; the church must lose that power it has wielded with changing force since the days of Constantine, ever to the injury of freedom and the world” (Woman, 534). For Gage, this struggle has an internal dimension. As she sees it, the struggle for equality is made more difficult when Christian women accept on faith the teachings of the church. Gage does not reject religion outright, but she calls for women to think critically about the gender-biased assumptions behind Christianity. Even in her dedication to the book, Gage implores “all Christian women and men… to Think for Themselves” (3).

In my opinion, the arguments that Gage makes in Woman, Church, and State relate to today’s headlines about women speaking out against the sexual violation of women by powerful men. Often called the “#MeToo Movement,” this recent social/political development is often attributed to the rise of social media. There can be no doubt that women are making use of the tools provided by social media to denounce sexual aggression by men. However, I think that the willingness of many contemporary women to use these tools might also reflect the type of paradigm shift that Gage calls for in the conclusion of her book. With the gradual decline in the influence of organized religion in American society, perhaps America is now coming closer to Gage’s vision of a society in

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which women think for themselves without feeling compelled to accept the dictates of institutionalized Christianity (Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown, Religion and Politics in the United States, 2014, 5). In the process, perhaps these women are now more inclined to condemn the type of male power and privilege that has so long been sanctioned by Christian dogma.

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