Matilda Joslyn Gage Biography

Matilda Joslyn Gage was a prominent women’s rights activist and women’s suffrage leader of the nineteenth century. She used the pen as her weapon for fighting against the subjugation of women and wrote several speeches, feminist essays and books which put emphasis on the importance of women all through history and how their role was strategically dismissed by men. ‘Born with a hatred for oppression’, Matilda Joslyn Gage was not just concerned with the exploitation of white women but also fought relentlessly against the violence perpetuated on the African slaves, native African-American women and similar minor classes of America. She was elected as the leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association once. Gage was the contemporary of women rights activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her significance in the women’s suffrage movement was not much acknowledged because when she formed a radical suffrage organization on her own, Anthony and Stanton removed her references from their legendary book on the history of suffrage movement. Scientific historian Margaret. W. Rossiter came up with the phrase ‘Matilda Effect’ after Gage’s name.