Ideas

00:00 All your favorite CBC Podcasts are now available on YouTube. The best in award-winning true crime investigations, hilarious comedies, vibrant pop culture conversations, and even more audio series are all available on CBC Podcasts' YouTube channel. You'll also find exclusive video first episodes, YouTube shorts, and behind-the-scenes content from our hosts and producers that you can't find anywhere else. So if YouTube is your go-to source for podcasts, just search CBC Podcasts and hit subscribe, and you'll never miss the latest updates. 00:35 Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. 00:39 It was cold, overcast and raining in New York City on October 28, 1886. Hardly ideal weather for a parade. Music And yet, thousands lined Broadway to cheer marching bands and soldiers destined for the city's harbour. 01:06 By the time the procession arrived, a thick fog had settled in, obscuring the real star of the show. 01:16 Music 01:22 The people of the United States accept with gratitude from their brethren of the French Republic the grand and completed work of art we here inaugurate. 01:32 President Grover Cleveland had been ferried to Bedloe's Island that morning to officially accept the Statue of Liberty from France. 01:40 We will not forget that liberty has here made her home. In the audience were hundreds of dignitaries, all men, except for a couple of their wives and the 305-foot guest of honour. 01:58 When the Statue of Liberty was to be dedicated, the New York State Women's Suffrage Association applied to be allowed to speak at the dedication ceremony. And they got told no, no women would speak, no women would even be allowed on the island where the statue stood. No. 02:16 But as suffragists fighting for voting rights, these women were well acquainted with hearing the word no and ignoring it. 02:24 And then they found a boat to rent, which was a smelly two-story cattle barge. And the captain promised them that he would have it cleaned before they rented it, but he did not. And so I just could never lose this picture of these well-dressed women getting onto this horrible, stinking boat in the rain. 02:46 They sailed out to the Statue of Liberty and they had megaphones. They were yelling slogans. 02:51 Votes for women. Equal rights for all. Women deserve the vote. 02:58 Leading the charge was 40-year-old mother of five, Matilda Jocelyn Gage. 03:03 She was furious that we could uphold a female representation of liberty as something that you would be able to get in America. 03:18 It is a gigantic lie, a travesty, a mockery, and the greatest sarcasm of the 19th century. 03:26 Matilda Gage was a well-known figure who led the National Suffragist Movement alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. 03:36 Gage, Stanton, and Anthony, they're the triumvirate of the National Women's Suffrage Association. 03:44 Stanton and Anthony weren't on the boat, but Matilda and fellow activist Lily Devereaux-Blake were pleased with how the day unfolded. 03:53 And they were thrilled because they made the front page of the New York Times the next day. 03:58 And yet, if you looked up the protests today, you might find a footnote, if it's mentioned at all in the story of the suffragists. Leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony have been remembered, though. 04:12 The work of Susan B. Anthony, along with her close friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, became synonymous with the fight for women's right to vote. 04:21 They're celebrated on stamps, immortalized in bronze, and minted on money. 04:26 The U.S. Mint sought to honor Anthony's legacy with a very modern tribute, the Susan B. Anthony $1 coin. 04:35 But Matilda Gage? 04:37 Matilda was effectively erased from the movement and from history. I refer to her as our erased suffragist. 04:45 She is a major, major figure. So why does she disappear from history? That's taken me years and years to finally figure it out. 04:58 Today on Ideas, the forgotten suffragist, the mystery of how a towering figure in the women's movement got erased from history, and what it took to rewrite her back into the world. 05:11 For Ideas producer Donna Dingwall, it's been a roundabout journey of discovery. 05:18 He rang that bell! We did! 05:25 My doorway to Matilda Jocelyn Gage opened up through, of all things, The Wizard of Oz. 05:33 But, as I learned, I'm not alone. 05:40 The first time I became aware of Matilda was when I wrote a book about her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, a royal historian of Oz, and found out that his mother-in-law, Matilda, had been a major leader for decades in the women's rights movement. My name is Angelica Shirley Carpenter. I'm the author of Born Criminal, Matilda Jocelyn Gage, Radical Suffragist. 06:05 Angelica Shirley Carpenter's book about Matilda Jocelyn Gage was published in 2018, but my own introduction to Matilda was more recent. 06:13 I was born here in Chinook. 06:17 I was in L. Frank Baum's hometown in central New York working on a documentary about Baum's classic American fairy tale. And what I discovered is that you can't really talk about Baum without talking about his mother-in-law, Matilda Jocelyn Gage. 06:34 In fact, one of the foremost Oz scholars told me that without Matilda, there might not be an Oz at all. 06:41 Certainly, Matilda Jocelyn Gage, Baum's mother-in-law, was one of the great 19th century feminists, and she had enormous impact on L. Frank Baum. 06:51 Michael Patrick Hearn is the author of The Annotated Wizard of Oz. 06:56 She'd be reading these various treatises, and she made sure he read them as well. 07:02 You find in her controversial book, Woman, Church, and State, she talks about witches. And she said, a witch is just a wise woman. She is good or bad, depending upon how she uses her knowledge. 07:14 Are you a good witch or a bad witch? 07:16 Are you a bad witch? Exactly. 07:19 Are you a good witch or a bad witch? Who may... 07:25 I'm not a witch at all. I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas. 07:30 And that goes to Matilda Jocelyn Gage. So Good and Wicked Witches, she defines that in that book. Instead of patriarchy, we have a matriarchy. And Baum created one in the second Oz book, The Land of Oz, where he restores the proper ruler of Oz, Ozma, a little girl, as ruler of the Kingdom of Oz. I mean, you have Dorothy, this little girl, who is extraordinarily assertive and aggressive and goes out and nothing's going to keep her from getting back home. 08:04 By now, dedicated Oz fans are pretty familiar with Matilda's impact on Baum, including how she told him to publish the stories she'd heard him telling her grandsons. 08:15 But outside of Oz circles, Gage's real work as a suffragist and abolitionist is largely unknown. That's despite the fact that her activism began when she was still a child, as Angelica Carpenter points out. 08:29 Her parents were very liberal, very fair-minded. They also treated her with great respect as a child. And they trusted her with this family secret. I mean, their house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. 08:42 Right. And you quote her later in the book saying, I've frequently been asked what first turned my thoughts towards women's rights. I think I was born with a hatred of oppression. And two, in my father's house, I was trained in the anti-slavery ranks. And I guess her father, Hezekiah, laid the foundation for a lot of this. 09:04 Well, there were three causes that were often linked together, starting maybe in her youth, abolition, women's rights, and temperance. And all three of those movements interested her father, and he supported them all. He went even further than that. He supported rights for children, which was very unusual at that time. Her father was a doctor. She wanted to be a doctor, too, and they knew that medical schools didn't admit women, but they hoped that that would change by the time she got ready for medical school. 09:37 Meanwhile, he taught her subjects that women's schools did not teach, botany, biology, science, Latin, Greek. You know, as a teenager even, she would have helped with amputations and bloodletting, and she liked it. 09:51 She wasn't squeamish. 09:53 Despite her hands-on experience, Matilda was denied entrance to medical school, solely because she was female. 10:01 She wasn't one to dwell on what couldn't be. 10:05 So when she figured out she couldn't be a doctor, she became a married woman, but also an activist everywhere she lived. And her husband also was very liberal, and he made it possible for her to go out and do things all around the country. 10:20 And he took care of the kids. 10:23 When Matilda was 22 years old, the first women's rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York. Its aim was to discuss the social, civil, and religious conditions and rights of women. Matilda had just delivered her third child and couldn't attend, but she did read all about it in the newspaper. 10:43 She watched that convention quite closely and she became interested in people like Frederick Douglass, who, of course, was a former slave and abolitionist who supported women's rights to vote. When does she sort of first emerge and speak about her views publicly? 11:00 Well, she kind of burst onto the scene, if that's possible, in 1852 in Syracuse at the Syracuse City Hall. There was a women's rights convention, and she went and took her little daughter, Helen, who was seven or eight. 11:14 And she'd never been to a convention before, had no idea what would go on there. But she had written a speech, and she When she got brave enough to go up to the platform, Matilda got up and made a speech. 11:28 This convention has assembled to discuss the subject of women's rights. 11:33 It was an unusual speech because everybody else who was talking there talked about what women might be able to do someday. But what Matilda talked about was famous women and what they had already done. 11:47 There are still many shining examples which serve as beacons of light, of what may be attained by genius, labor, energy, and perseverance combined. 11:59 She praised Semiramis, who was an Assyrian queen, Sappho, who was a Greek poet, a scientist, astronomers, and there were contemporary people she mentioned too, Queen Victoria of England, Jenny Lynn, who was a famous singer, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was an author. And the audience was impressed and amazed and wondered, why hadn't they learned about these women? Same as we wonder, why hadn't we learned about Matilda? They wondered, why hadn't we learned about those women when we were studying history? 12:30 Because women had just been written out of history. So she really made a splash with that talk, and it got published, and that she was launched. 12:38 And this is, I think, where she also meets Susan B. Anthony for the first time. But something happened after she spoke that maybe foreshadowed that contentious relationship later on. 12:49 I'm sure this started. I love this. There's no history of how they met or shook hands or whatever. And many of the women who spoke had very weak voices because it was considered wicked and immoral for women to speak in public. So they had never really gotten up in front of a crowd and spoken. And I think there were about a thousand people there. And then Susan B. Anthony, who had been a schoolteacher and had a deep voice that carried, got up and said, well, she moved that no one should be allowed to talk at this meeting who couldn't make a speech that everybody could hear. 13:21 But that got voted down because she's about the only one who could do that. 13:27 Despite the rocky start, Matilda began working with Susan B. Anthony. They'd both come from abolitionist homes, and Anthony had already befriended another well-known activist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who'd organized the Seneca Falls Convention. 13:41 Stanton wasn't so wild about the idea of public demonstrations, but Matilda and Anthony were. And Matilda was just so much fun. She said, well, you know, if they arrest me, I'll just keep on having a women's convention in jail. Matilda and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote a Women's Declaration of Independence. 14:00 And in 1876, a full 10 years before the Statue of Liberty protest, Matilda and Anthony disrupted the country's centennial celebrations in Philadelphia. 14:11 They asked permission to present it at this Fourth of July celebration and got told no. But they decided to present it anyway. 14:21 We did not know, but we might be arrested, but we cared not. 14:26 Our work was necessary and done from principle. 14:29 There were soldiers and police all around, and these very nicely dressed women are pushing up to the podium. The men got out of the way. They were polite. 14:38 We went out then through the hall and up to a music stand, which was unoccupied during the events. There Susan read the declaration. 14:47 While the nation is buoyant with patriotism and all hearts are attuned to praise, it is with sorrow we come to strike the one discordant note on this 100th anniversary of our country's births. 15:03 And I stood by her side, shading her with my parasol. 15:08 They gave this proclamation to the vice president who was presiding and ran out throwing copies of it into the stands, and they didn't get arrested. 15:19 The threat of arrest was nothing new for Gage or Anthony, or indeed other women in the movement. In the late 1860s, women had been attempting to vote in various elections, even though it was against the law. 15:32 In 1871, Matilda organized a group to cast a ballot in a school board vote. She went first, and despite the fact she was turned away, her spirits were high. 15:45 The fun of the thing was that I had nine women with me in the sitting room of the hotel. 15:52 I went down first and offered my vote. 15:54 I was refused on the grounds that I was a married woman. 15:58 Then I took down two single women who supported themselves and owned their own home. 16:03 Their votes were refused also. 16:05 Then I took down war widows whose husbands had left their bones to bleach on the field of battle in defense for their country. They too were refused. And so on through the whole nine. 16:18 With each one, I made appropriate arguments and had an attentive crowd to hear me. 16:24 It created a great stir. 16:30 She and Anthony would later try to vote in the 1872 presidential election. Matilda was refused, but Anthony succeeded in casting a ballot, as did several other women. 16:42 To this day, Anthony's trial for that crime and subsequent conviction remains a symbol of the fight for women's voting rights. 16:50 Susan B. Anthony changed the course of history for women in the United States. 16:54 At the beginning of her career, of her dedication to women's rights, she was much despised. 17:01 Her arrest for voting in the 1872 presidential election and eventual trial paved the way for women's political rights. 17:11 As a woman, Anthony knew she wouldn't be allowed to speak in court. So she took her show on the road and enlisted Matilda to help. Together, they delivered nearly 40 speeches over three weeks. That's about two speeches a day in halls and churches and parlors across the state. Matilda called her speech, The United States on Trial. not Susan B. Anthony. 17:36 You, of all the men in this great land, have the responsibility of this trial. 17:42 Your decision will not be for Susan B. Anthony alone. It will be for yourselves and for your children's children to the latest generations. 17:52 When the case was heard, it was in a federal court, so the stakes were high. A win for Anthony could secure voting rights for women across the United States. 18:03 Matilda sat next to Anthony during the two-day trial and transcribed the entire proceedings. As expected, Anthony was deemed incompetent to testify on her own behalf. 18:14 Matilda had her own thoughts about who was inept in the courtroom. 18:18 She wrote a description of the judge there. He was a newly appointed Supreme Court judge, and she called him a small-brained, pale-faced, prim-looking man. 18:28 She threw even more shade at the judge after he pulled out his ruling convicting Anthony, just minutes after the lawyers were done speaking. 18:38 This was the first criminal case he'd been called on to try since his appointment. 18:43 And with remarkable forethought, he had penned his decision. 18:48 before hearing it. 18:50 Matilda would face a similar verdict more than 20 years later, in 1893. 18:56 Well, she was home alone one night. There was a knock at the door. 19:01 It was a deputy sheriff, and he had come to arrest her. 19:06 All the crimes of which I was not guilty rushed through my mind. But I failed to remember. 19:13 I was a born criminal. 19:15 A woman. 19:17 And why was she a born criminal? Well, her crime was she had registered to vote. 19:22 And she was later found guilty in court. 19:26 The conviction was no surprise. Matilda had been recounting the injustices heaped on women by the courts for some time in her suffragist newspaper, which was called the National Citizen and Ballot Box. 19:38 She wrote about these young girls who were arrested for street walking in Fayetteville, where she lived. 19:45 Yeah, the men weren't arrested, just the girls. 19:47 Yeah. How did she kind of frame that incident? 19:51 Well, she wrote editorials about it and said, you know, why aren't you arresting the city fathers? They're the one committing the crime. These girls are just trying to eat. 19:59 And she talked about women who were being abused by their husbands and, you know, how the courts looked at those crimes as well. 20:07 I know a man got a heavier sentence for beating a horse than he would for beating his wife. It was like seven year sentence if he beat a horse and two years if he beat his wife. But actually men could beat, torture, rape and pretty much kill their wives without any kind of punishment at all. 20:25 Critics of that paper wrote both it and Matilda off as strident and humorless, but they weren't reading between the lines. When she ran an article about Russian men confessing their sins to their wives once a week, Matilda mused, would that not require a week? And after a Baptist minister declared women's voting hazardous because bad women might take part, Matilda shot back. 20:51 Well, what of it? Have bad women not equal right with bad men to self-government? 20:58 But on controversial matters like a woman's right to control her own body, Matilda's wit gave way to outrage. 21:06 My blood always boils at advice from a man in regard to a family. That at least should be the province of women alone. To say when and how often she chooses to go down into the valley of the shadow of death to give the world another child should be hers alone to say. 21:26 Not everyone in the movement agreed, but Matilda was steadfast in her belief that winning the vote for women was not the ultimate prize. 21:35 Rather, it was a stepping stone in a bigger battle against what she saw as the true enemy and oppressor of women, organized religion. 21:44 On that, she and Stanton were aligned. But there were always some differences of opinion among the three women. In the beginning, they were close together. 21:54 But Matilda and Elizabeth Cady Stanton both really resented the toll that religion took on women. You know, women were considered inferior to men. in the churches, and then also in government because of churches. And it was all because Eve had brought evil into the world that made women inferior. Well, of course, Matilda didn't believe that, and neither did Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 22:18 And I don't think Susan B. Anthony believed it either. Matilda always was for working class people, people regardless of color, people regardless of national origin. She was a big fan of American Indians. And Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton both resented it, that uneducated, eventually black men even, could have the vote over educated white women. They just didn't like that at all. And they made really disparaging comments about different races and people who weren't educated. 22:54 But Matilda believed everybody had a right to an education. She believed that prostitution was an economic problem, not a moral problem, that women had to eat and there was no other way to support themselves. So she was far more liberal than Stanton or Anthony in that manner. 23:13 Right. And quite committed to her beliefs and not willing to make compromise in the same way, I guess. 23:20 Exactly. Whereas Stanton did make compromises. 23:25 Those compromises would come at a cost. 23:31 You're listening to The Forgotten Suffragist. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. 23:40 All your favorite CBC Podcasts are now available on YouTube. The best in award-winning true crime investigations, hilarious comedies, vibrant pop culture conversations, and even more audio series are all available on CBC Podcasts' YouTube channel. You'll also find exclusive video first episodes, YouTube shorts, and behind-the-scenes content from our hosts and producers that you can't find anywhere else. So if YouTube is your go-to source for podcasts, just search CBC Podcasts and hit subscribe, and you'll never miss the latest updates. 24:10 For the latter part of their lives, suffragists Matilda Jocelyn Gage, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were more frenemies than friends. 24:20 They showed up to support one another periodically at birthdays and delivered a few flattering phrases at public events. But behind the scenes, there was simmering animosity, especially on Matilda's part. 24:35 In an 1890 letter to her friend and fellow activist Lily Devereaux-Blake, Matilda accused Susan B. Anthony of creating what today we'd call a toxic work environment. 24:47 I positively do not think a more unjust person to her co-workers lives than Susan B. Anthony. 24:54 All she cares for is self. 24:57 She was just to impress people with the idea that nothing can be done without her finger in the pie. 25:03 I think she absolutely hates any other person to do work in suffrage that will tend to bring their names before the public. 25:11 Matilda was furious that Anthony had failed to give her any credit for a book they wrote. 25:17 While I was presiding at a convention, she got up and mentioned the history which she and Mrs. Stanton had prepared, totally ignoring me. 25:28 And there I was, in the chair. 25:33 But Matilda believed her work would be remembered. 25:37 Prior to her next book being published, she wrote to her son. 25:41 Even if I should slip out, my chief life work, my women, church, and state is done. 25:50 Ready for the printer. 25:52 I hope my book will help free the world by giving it new thought. 26:00 It was impossible to think that 80 years later, a different self-described radical feminist would make it her life's work to restore Matilda's legacy. 26:11 Because by then, Matilda Jocelyn Gage had been erased. 26:16 Here's Ideas producer Donna Dingwall. 26:19 I came into, I suppose, my love for Matilda Jocelyn Gage kicking and screaming, if you will. I, as a radical feminist, really hated the suffrage movement. 26:36 The truth is that radical feminist Sally Rush Wagner couldn't have cared less about suffragists. 26:44 Because it was 72 years of teacup ladies politely asking men if they would kindly, kindly give them the vote. I was teaching in the Women's Studies Program at California State University, Sacramento. And I was teaching an introduction to the women's movement class. And this would have been in 1972 or 73. And a friend of mine... 27:14 doing research on the suffrage campaign in 1890 in South Dakota, knew that I was from South Dakota and that I grew up in Aberdeen. And she came rushing over one day and said, have you ever heard of a woman named Matilda Gage? She was an important suffragist, and she had some connection to Averdeen. So it was, oh, huh, okay, suffrage, not so interested, but Matilda Gage, my mom has a friend. I called up my mom and said, how could this be? 27:48 Your friend isn't, Matilda's not that old, is she, to be a suffragist? My mom laughed and said, no, that was her grandma. She's a really important suffragist, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And she starts telling me all this stuff. So I say, so why didn't you ever tell me about this? And she said, I guess you never asked. 28:15 Sally Rush Wagner passed away in 2025. So what you're hearing is an interview she did with the hosts of the literary podcast Book Dreams in 2021. 28:26 Rush Wagner decided to visit the younger Matilda, who by that time was in her 80s. 28:31 I walk into her house and Matilda, she was, this is my grandma's furniture. This is a picture of her. This is her. I wasn't interested in anything of that. I just wanted a good story, quite honestly. One anecdote that I could share with my class. Then she took me into her dining room. She had a big table and it was literally piled with letters that had not been opened in probably a hundred years. 28:59 letters from Matilda. There were photo albums, scrapbooks of Matilda Jocelyn Gage's writings, and I thought, oh, this would be fun to kind of leaf through it and see what's here. Picked up a letter, and I don't remember the exact words, but it was something to the effect of Mrs. Stanton is the Benedict Arnold of our movement. She is nothing compared to Susan B. who has destroyed our movement. 29:34 They have stabbed me in reputation. They are traitors, also, to women's highest needs. And Mrs. Stanton especially, I look upon in The Woman's Battle for Freedom, as I do on Benedict Arnold during the War of Revolution. 29:50 She is a traitor to what she knows is right. 29:53 I mean, that was the moment. 29:56 Wow. What are... 30:00 Stumble on. Wow. You grew up on Nancy Drew Mysteries and then you have one placed in front of you and boom, you jump. 30:09 Sally Rush Wagner did jump. And then she fell hard for Matilda Jocelyn Gage. 30:17 I have been in a relationship with a dead woman for the majority of my life, which is kind of an odd thing, but there are advantages to it. You know, we don't get in too many fights. I always win. 30:32 I went back to graduate school and got one of the first doctorates for work in women's studies because I wanted to learn how to talk to this dead woman. 30:42 Rush Wagner was hoping Matilda might help her solve that Nancy Drew mystery, the case of the missing suffragist. As she told the WCNY podcast Repeating History, Matilda Gage was becoming a bit of an obsession. 30:58 Gage at this point in 1973 in any of the women's suffrage books was not mentioned. She was not seen as a leader. She is absolutely absent from any of the scholarship that's being done at the time. These are the icons. These are the women that we're looking up to. 31:19 What in the heck is going on here? And that led me to an over 50 year journey to answer that question. I pull the letter out of the envelope and what I read changed the course of my life and changed the course of the history as we know it of the suffrage movement. 31:43 The story told by those letters, Matilda wrote, was of three women who fundamentally believed in the same thing, women's equality and liberty. 31:53 In 1869, two women's rights organizations are formed. One is the National Women's Suffrage Association. The other is the American. 32:03 National is much more progressive. National is Gage, Stanton, and Anthony. They're the triumvirate of the National Women's Suffrage Association. 32:14 They share leadership positions. Gage is president one year. Anthony is president one year. Stanton is the titular president most of the time. 32:26 They were united, at least in the beginning, in the goal of universal suffrage and in their opposition to the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would grant voting rights to African American men, but not to any women. 32:41 The National Group was also concerned with other issues, divorce laws, labor rights, equal pay and property rights, and for Stanton and Gage, the need to keep the church out of government and women's lives. 32:54 Stanton and Gage increasingly by the 1880s want to go after the church. Because they're finally saying, look, we've got to get to the foundation. What is the basis of this oppression that we continue to suffer? And every time we try anything from wearing pants to asking for the vote, it's the church that fights us. 33:19 Whether or not Anthony believed the same thing, the record shows that eventually she compromised on that particular issue. And that is where the notion of Benedict Elizabeth comes in. 33:32 And what she's talking about is that in 1890, Susan B. Anthony really effected a merger between the National and the American, very different organizations. And it becomes a states' rights movement. Gage says, I'm not part of this. 33:52 And she tries to undo the merger. She's unsuccessful. And so she goes on to form an organization to stop the culture to create Christianity as the official government religion. and also to fight fundamental Christianity. The reason she says Stanton is the Benedict Arnold is that initially Stanton says, we need to be going after the church. 34:24 Gage forms an organization to do that. Stanton initially says, I'm with you. I just don't want to be an officer. So Gage assumes that Stanton is going to be part of the organization she forms. 34:40 dangles the presidency of the merged organization in front of Stanton in Stanton Bites. 34:49 Anthony did offer Matilda an honorary role, but when the list of officers came out, her name wasn't on it, which may have been just as well given the religious direction of the new group. 35:02 The growing conservative movement, they become really much more Christian-based. They have a minister as president several times, and they also practice racism as policy. They say, give women the vote because white women outnumber Negroes. It's a way to maintain white supremacy, right? 35:26 It's also a way to maintain native-born supremacy because there's more of us native-born women than there are immigrants coming in. So you want to maintain white native-born supremacy? Give us the vote. Wink, we will work with you. 35:43 Sally Rush Wagner pieced much of this together by sifting through the vast archive of Matilda Gage in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where Gage herself spent so much time with the Baum family. 35:55 But to uncover the full story, she had to spend time in central New York where Gage was born and lived most of her life. 36:04 Rush Wagner immersed herself in that research and even took to dressing up as Matilda to deliver speeches. 36:13 Equal and exact justice for every citizen, regardless of color or sex or nationality. 36:22 That was the platform of the Equal Rights Party when Belva Lockwood ran for president in 1884. 36:29 And how proud I was to have my name as an electorate large on that party. 36:35 She was also dressed as Matilda when police arrested her for protesting at a nuclear site in the 1980s. 36:43 They arrested me and I was dressed as Matilda Jocelyn Gage and they stripped surgery. 36:49 And I'm standing and it's hot and I've got this 19th century costume on. And when Sally Rush Wagner got a grant to continue her research, she moved into Matilda's old house in Fayetteville, New York. 37:02 This weekend, after many years of work, the Matilda Jocelyn Gage Center will celebrate its grand opening in the very house that Matilda called home. How cool is that? With more on this weekend's events is Sally Rush-Wagner, the executive director of the Gage Foundation. Hi, Sally. Hi, Sally. Nice to see you. 37:17 Thank you. 37:17 This is very exciting stuff after many, many years of preparation. 37:21 Ten years. Wow. A million-dollar campaign to purchase and restore the house, and we're opening this weekend. Wow. What kind of shape was the Gage home in? well it was rental property it was suffering from deferred maintenance and if we didn't do something with it the house would not be saved so it wasn't always historical during the pandemic sally offered virtual tours uh when you enter the house you have a couple rules check your dogma at the door and think for yourself so we carry on that rule in the house and we decided you know if she was a rule breaker we should probably create a place where people can break all the rules So we invite you to break all the rules of historical museums. 38:04 We invite you to sit on the furniture, to touch all the artifacts, to eat and drink, you know, just interact with everything. 38:14 Given that ethos, it seems fitting that Susan B. Anthony decided to etch her name in the window pane in an upstairs bedroom during one of her many stays. Anthony was such a frequent guest that The Gage children named her quarters the Susan B. Anthony Room. Her handiwork, made with the help of a diamond ring, is still preserved in the house. 38:36 And as you might imagine, it's not the only time her name comes up in the tour. 38:41 When Susan B. Anthony wanted to bring everybody together, she... 38:48 effected a merger between the conservative group and the more progressive group and it ended up really turning into a case where it brought in religious fundamentalists who wanted to put god in the constitution and prayer in the public schools and put jesus christ as the head of the government So we invite people to cast their ballot. Do you want to maintain the separation of church and state or create a Christian nation? And here is your ballot and you fill it out and you drop it into the ballot box. 39:24 Matilda, of course, had voted with her feet on that one and left to form her own group, the Women's National Liberal Union. It was anti-church and pro-free thought. 39:35 At the first and only convention, Matilda called for a revolution that would overthrow the church. 39:42 But Sally Rush Wagner points out that Matilda was actually deeply spiritual. She dabbled in theosophy, a movement that combined Eastern teachings, philosophy, and mysticism. 39:53 And her entire worldview was grounded in her connection to the indigenous women she came to know. 39:59 this is where you learn how matilda jocelyn gage got her idea of what would a transformed world be not just equality but what would it look like to have a world of harmony and balance where there was an equal responsibility of duties. And she saw in her nearest neighbors the Haudenai Shalmi. She said, Never was justice more perfect. 40:29 Never was civilization higher. Under their woman, the science of government reached the highest form known to the world. The woman were the great power among the Klan. 40:40 As far back as 1875, Gage wrote articles for the New York Evening Post supporting treaty rights and indigenous sovereignty. 40:49 She said they're independent nations every bit as much as Canada and Mexico. 40:55 In 1893, three years after her decision to leave the suffragist movement, Matilda was adopted into the Wolf Clan by the Haudenosaunee Nation. 41:04 She is given a real name, Kiwanahawi, that is still used today. And she is considered, she writes to her daughter, Helen, considered for a voice in the Council of Matrons, which would give her a political voice in her adopted nation. The same year, she's arrested for voting for school commissioner in New York State. 41:31 And the backdrop to all of this was her excitement over the publication of Women, Church, and State in July of 1893. The heavily researched 551-page tome collected all of Matilda's ideas and combined them with painstaking research. It was both a historical treatise on and a scathing rebuke of organized religion and its role in destroying pre-Christian matriarchal societies. along with its continued oppression of women. 42:08 It will prove that the most grievous wrong ever inflicted upon women has been in the Christian teaching. That she was not created equal with men and the consequent denial of her rightful place in church and state. 42:23 The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards women. 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. 42:49 She also wrote about the sexual abuse of children and women by the church and exposed what we'd now call sex trafficking. And she offered a detailed takedown of how the church used witch hunts to persecute innocent women. 43:06 The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages. 43:16 The persecution, which for ages waged against witches, was in reality an attack upon science at the hands of the church. 43:27 As knowledge has ever been power, the church feared its use in women's hands and leveled its deadliest blows at her. 43:42 The book ends with a cri de corps to upend the patriarchy and the church. 43:48 When Gage says every existing institution will be destroyed, the result will be a regenerated world. What she's calling for is an end to patriarchy. And she's doing this before anybody is thinking this, really. 44:05 Gloria Steinem says, this is the woman who is ahead of the women who are ahead of their time. The fact that her vision was intersectional, we just finally have a word for that. She saw the oppression of everyone needing to be ended. She's right up there with where we are today, or maybe we're just catching up. 44:28 But at the time, the fact Matilda was forward-thinking didn't do her any favors with critics, and some of them were powerful. 44:37 Anthony Comstock was the U.S. Postal Inspector, a religious zealot, and the government's obscenity czar. He'd been sent a copy of Matilda's book, Women, Church, and State, by a Catholic school board member. 44:49 The incidents of victims of lust told in this book are such that if I found a person putting that book indiscriminately before children, I would institute a criminal proceeding against them for doing it. 45:01 Matilda responded, calling Comstock intellectually weak and mentally and morally unbalanced. She also confided to a journalist that Comstock's comments were actually a bit of a pick-me-up. 45:14 It has acted like a tonic. I have not been well through the summer, not having recovered from overwork on women, church, and state. But the moment I learned of Comstock's letter and read the falsities so freely printed in regard to my book, I grew better, and I feel myself able to meet all enemies of whatever name or nature. 45:45 A few months before Matilda died in 1898, Susan B. Anthony paid her a visit. 45:52 But she refused to accept a copy of Women, Church & State that Matilda wanted to give her. Neither Matilda Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived long enough to vote legally in a federal election in the United States. The 19th Amendment, dubbed the Anthony Amendment, even though Stanton wrote it, was ratified in 1920. It gave white women the right to vote. It would take many more years for women of color to be afforded that right. 46:21 In the years following Matilda's death, Anthony and Stanton were able to shape the story of their roles in that victory. Sally Rush Wagner believed that happened at Matilda's expense. 46:34 Gage dies. She, Stanton, and Anthony have done the first three volumes of the history of women's suffrage, 1,000 pages each. Anthony didn't do any of the writing because she had a terrible writer's block. So it's really Gage and Stanton who do the writing, and Anthony did the administrative stuff. Fourth volume comes out after Stanton and Gage are dead, and Anthony does it with her hand-picked biographer. 47:00 And in it, she says, Mrs. Stanton and I, you know, in season and out of season, worked tirelessly on the first three volumes with the helpful assistance of Matilda Jocelyn Gage. And Gage's daughter calls her out for that, writes her and says, what the heck are you up to? They know Anthony. You know, Anthony's been in their house when they were growing up. You cut my mother out of the publicity for this book. 47:30 As though she hadn't done anything. And Anthony, oh, just a simple oversight and no problem. 47:37 There's no evidence that Anthony and Stanton colluded to erase Gage. Yet, every slight, every overlooked credit, every forgotten footnote in the official record adds up over time. 47:50 And time itself has a way of shrinking a legacy. 47:54 But when it happens to someone in your own family... 47:58 It's a little more difficult to rationalize. 48:01 It's horrifying. It's sort of an example of what she was saying happens with the patriarchy, with men not acknowledging women's accomplishments, and then to see women turn against women, which is kind of what happened. You know, I think Susan B. Anthony wanted power, and she thought this was the way to get the vote and sacrifice Matilda. 48:22 And this brings us back to the connection between Matilda Jocelyn Gage and The Wizard of Oz, which was created by L. Frank Baum. 48:30 He married Matilda's youngest daughter, Maude. 48:34 And Maude and L. Frank are my great-grandparents. My name is Geeta Dorothy Morena, and I am Matilda Jocelyn Gage's great-great-granddaughter. 48:48 Do you remember learning about those members of your family? Like, do you remember who came first in terms of the family lore? Was it Frank or was it Matilda? 49:00 Well, of course, you know, I had the given name of Dorothy. So the Wizard of Oz was part of the story that I heard about myself and felt connected with and learning that my great grandfather wrote the story about I remember hearing that when I was really young. 49:17 As I got a little older, not too much, Matilda's name came up and she was talked about as being one of the early suffragists who really fought for a woman's rights to vote. What she did as a woman was part of what I was raised with. It's like you can do anything you want as a woman. And that was really interesting to feel her legacy coming through the family and then being manifested through the Wizard of Oz story. 49:44 Frank Baum ensured that women church and state stayed in print after Matilda's death. And now, 200 years after her birth, It's finally been given its due. It's been heralded by prominent feminist scholars as a seminal and groundbreaking work. Matilda's great-great-granddaughter, Gita Dorothy Morena, is heartened to see all of it transpire, and she's grateful to the self-described radical feminist, Sally Rush Wagner, for making it happen. 50:13 It was a wonderful connection to meet her early on and then really supporting her when she found the house and found a way to start to live in the house and created the foundation. And it was so wonderful to see Matilda's work be honored and valued. And she was the perfect person to do it. 50:36 She saw Matilda as a kindred spirit who broke out from that teacup dining room parlor situation and was not afraid to get a bullhorn and rent a barge that had cow manure on it to go and protest the opening of the Statue of Liberty. 50:57 Carrie Eaton is the new executive director of the Matilda Jocelyn Gage Foundation. It's a role she stepped into after Sally Rushwagner died. 51:06 This was an activist falling in love with an activist. And I think Sally really admired that for her day and age, Matilda broke the mold, just as Sally, as a 70s feminist, was trying to break the mold. She saw this woman that she could use as inspiration. 51:28 And there was... 51:31 Like she said, it was a lifetime commitment to bringing this woman, Matilda Jocelyn Gage, back into the historical record. Because she deserves to be there. 51:45 She is so resilient. Her last editorial in her newspaper, she says, we're planting the seed. The women who come after us will enter into the harvest. And she sees herself as part of a movement. 52:04 In March of 2026, we'll be celebrating Matilda's 200th birthday. We'll be installing Lifting As We Climb, which is an exhibit that focuses on Black, Brown, Asian... Indigenous women who fought for suffrage but have been completely forgotten out of the narrative. 52:27 This was Matilda's awareness over 100 years ago. She says, I see evidence of a conflict more severe than any yet fought by reformation or science. 52:39 During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of women against the tyranny of church and state. None has had its far-reaching effects. 52:52 We note its beginning. Its progress will overthrow every existing form of these institutions. 53:00 Its end will be a regenerated world. 53:03 She had the vision of where this was going. We're seeing it today in such a definitive way in the world. 53:15 The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. 53:23 They are active, capable, determined, and bound to win. They have 1,000 generations back of them. 53:33 Millions of women, dead and gone, are speaking through us today. 53:50 And Matilda Gage is not done speaking to us. On an upcoming program, we'll hear how the term the Matilda Effect was coined and how it defined a whole new generation of women whose contributions to society were erased. 54:12 You've been listening to The Forgotten Suffragists on Ideas. 54:17 This program was produced by Donna Dingwall, with technical production by Sam McNulty. 54:23 Special thanks to the podcast Book Dreams, as well as WCNY's Repeating History, and to the International Wizard of Oz Club and Binghamton University Libraries for use of interviews featuring Sally Rush Wagner. 54:40 Thanks also to Megan Cardi for giving voice to Matilda Jocelyn Gage. 54:46 Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Nikola Lukšić is the senior producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. 55:01 For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.