Oral History as a Biographical Tool

Abstract

Although Matilda Joslyn Gage was an important theoretician and activist in the radical wing of the nineteenth-century American woman's movement, she has received only passing mention in histories of the suffrage movement. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she authored the major documents of the National Woman Suffrage Association, including the Declaration of Rights of Women of 1876 and the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage.1 Gage held offices in the NWSA roughly parallel to those of Susan B. Anthony's.2 In addition, she edited and published the official journal of the organization for four years.3 In 1889, when the executive committee of the NWSA voted to merge with the more conservative American Woman's Suffrage Association, Gage bitterly fought this move. She saw it as a takeover by a cabal of the conservative suffrage-focused forces in the NWSA, led by Anthony, which would ultimately lead to the death of the woman's rights movement.4 Unable to mobilize sufficient strength to prevent the merger, and convinced that female enfranchisement was no longer a critical issue (since women had gained many legal rights without it), she left the organized suffrage movement, and in 1890 formed the Woman's National Liberal Union. The sole function of this group was to fight the church, which Gage viewed as the primary source of woman's oppression.5 Susan B. Anthony, furious at Gage's secession,6 seems to have made deliberate attempts to write Gage out of suffrage history.7 The resulting history has generally been focused on superhuman leaders involved in an undeviating quest for the suffrage goal. Such an incomplete picture not only distorts the past, but denies us insights with which to develop and evaluate our present movement. Through studying the lives of the dropouts and supposed losers of the earlier woman's movement, like Gage, we can, perhaps, correct past historical accounts as well as help direct our own present movement with a deeper understanding of the mistakes made during the first wave of feminism. With both these goals in mind, I began to research the life of Matilda Joslyn Gage to write the first biography of her.