(This book was converted from its physical edition to the ...)
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
(This book was converted from its physical edition to the ...)
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
Woman, Church & State: The Original Exposé of Male Against the Female Sex
(Woman, Church & State - The Original Exposé of Male Again...)
Woman, Church & State - The Original Exposé of Male Against the Female Sex by Matilda Joslyn Gage
This work explains itself and is given to the world because it is needed. Tired of the obtuseness of Church and State; indignant at the injustice of both towards woman; at the wrongs inflicted upon one-half of humanity by the other half in the name of religion; finding appeal and argument alike met by the assertion that God designed the subjection of woman, and yet that her position had been higher under Christianity than ever before: Continually hearing these statements, and knowing them to be false, I refuted them in a slight resume of the subject at the annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Washington, D.C., 1878.
A wish to see that speech in print, having been expressed, it was allowed to appear in The National Citizen, a woman suffrage paper I then edited, and shortly afterwards in “The History of Woman Suffrage,” of which I was also an editor. The kindly reception given both in the United States and Europe to that meager chapter of forty pages confirmed my purpose of a fuller presentation of the subject in book form, and it now appears, the result of twenty years investigation, in a volume of over five hundred and fifty pages.
Read it; examine for yourselves; accept or reject from the proof offered, but do not allow the Church or the State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.
Matilda Joslyn Gage was an American abolitionist, freethinker, and author. one of the most effective of the woman’s rights lecturers. She was also active in the organization of the suffrage movement.
Background
Matilda Joslyn Gage was born on March 24, 1826, in Cicero, New York. She was the only daughter of Dr. Hezekiah and Helen (Leslie) Joslyn.
Her mother was the daughter of Sir George Leslie of Scotland. Dr. Joslyn’s home in Cicero appears to have been one of the intellectual centers of the community; he was keenly interested in reform movements of every kind and made his house the gathering place for such advanced thinkers as visited the town.
The atmosphere in which Matilda spent her childhood and youth greatly influenced her character and life work.
Education
Matilda's early education was received at home, where her father instructed her in physiology, Greek, and mathematics, and taught her to think for herself. Later she completed the liberal education afforded young women of the period at the Clinton Seminary.
Career
At the Syracuse National Woman’s Rights Convention, September 8-10, 1852, Matilda made her first public appearance as an advocate of woman’s rights. As the youngest woman taking part in the convention, she attracted not a little attention.
Soon afterward, she associated herself with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, becoming one of the most effective of the woman’s rights lecturers. She was also active in the organization of the suffrage movement.
In 1869, she took part in the organization of both the New York State Woman’s Suffrage Association and the National Woman’s Suffrage Association and served both of these organizations as president, or in some other official capacity, for many years.
In 1878, Matilda founded the Woman’s National Liberal League, of which she remained the president until her death in 1898.
She published several of her speeches, contributed many articles on woman’s rights to the public press, and edited and published The National Citisen and Ballot Box at Syracuse (1878 - 81). On several occasions she addressed congressional committees on the suffrage question.
The closing years of her life were spent with a married daughter in Chicago, where the winter of 189798 found her busily engaged in the preparation of a paper to be read before the February meeting of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association - a meeting commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the organized woman’s suffrage movement.
Ill health prevented her undertaking the journey to Washington, but she sent her paper, which was read to the convention. A few days later she suffered a paralytic stroke, and the end came quickly.
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Views
Quotations:
"There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is liberty. "
"The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one-thousand generations back of them. .. Millions of women dead and gone are speaking through us today. "
"When all humanity works for humanity, when the life-business of men and women becomes one united partnership in all matters which concern each, when neither sex, race, color, or previous condition is held as a bar to the exercise of human faculties, the world will hold in its hands the promise of a millennium which will work out its own fulfillment. "
"Woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but self development, is her first duty in life; and this, not primarily for the sake of others but that she may become fully herself. "
"While so much is said of the inferior intellect of woman, it is by a strange absurdity conceded that very many eminent men owe their station in life to their mothers. "
"The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her judgment, her own conscience, her own will. "
"Both church and state claiming to be of divine origin have assumed divine right of man over woman; while church and state have thought for man, man has assumed the right to think for woman. "
"The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it. "
"Women should unite upon a platform of opposition to the teaching and aim of that ever most unscrupulous enemy of freedom--the Church. "
"From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been for this purpose. "
"When any man expresses doubt to me as to the use that I or any other woman might make of the ballot if we had it, my answer is, What is that to you? If you have for years defrauded me of my rightful inheritance, and then, as a stroke of policy, of from late conviction, concluded to restore to me my own domain, must I ask you whether I may make of it a garden of flowers, or a field of wheat, or a pasture for kine?"
Personality
On the historical status of woman, Mrs. Gage seems to have been better informed than any of her fellow crusaders, and Woman, Church, and State (1893), she considered the most important of her works, although she is now remembered more commonly as joint author and editor with Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony of the first three volumes (1881 - 86) of their great History of Woman Suffrage.
Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the “strong minded” women of her age - a woman of rare courage, energy, and character. Her portrait seems to indicate no lack of sympathetic understanding, and the possession of a saving gift of humor.
Intellectually she was without doubt among the ablest of the suffrage leaders of the nineteenth century. An excellent speaker and capable organizer, her greatest strength apparently lay in her thorough grasp of the historical status of woman through the ages.
Quotes from others about the person
“She always had a knack of rummaging through old libraries, ” said Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “bringing more startling facts to light than any woman I ever knew. ”
Connections
At eighteen, Matilda married Henry H. Gage, a merchant of Cicero, with whom she removed first to Syracuse, then to Manlius, and finally to Fayetteville, where she made her home in the same house for thirty-eight years.