Matilda Joslyn Gage and Susan B. Anthony: From Friendship to Fight to Friendship (1)

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From the "Sisters in Spirit" Series

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Onondaga Historical Association:
Syracuse, NY; April 19, 2009

Statement from the Onondaga Historical Association:

Join Deborah Hughes, Executive Director of the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, NY and Sally Roesch Wagner, Executive Director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in Fayetteville, NY on Sunday, April 19 at 2:00pm at the Onondaga Historical Association as they take up a 120-year old argument and, in this historic event, invite the audience to work with them on finding a resolution.

Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage disagreed in 1889 over how to get women's rights. Gage thought that Anthony destroyed the movement by working only for the vote and risked democracy by making a coalition with conservative women who wanted the vote in order to establish Jesus Christ as the head of the United States government, with their Christian God in the constitution. Anthony believed that Gage's attack on religious fundamentalists and the focus on separation of church and state were a danger to the suffrage coalition she was building.

As we develop a women's history trail, help determine how the Anthony and Gage historic home museums create a coherent interpretation of the political differences between these two leaders that respects both sides of the argument.

This classic history of women's oppression is one of the first attempts to document the legacy of injustice and discrimination against women, which is inseparable from both the history of Christianity and the evolution of the Western state.

Pioneering women's rights advocate Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) traces the patterns of male domination in both church and state that kept women in virtual bondage. Among the topics of her research are the medieval belief that women were unclean and the cause of original sin, their discrimination in canon law, their abuse in the feudal system, the witch-hunts, the virtual slave status of wives and their legal subjugation to their husbands, the debilitating drudgery of women's daily work, and the widespread opposition to women's education.

Originally published in 1893, this work was the fruit of twenty years' research. Complementing this edition is an introduction by author and lecturer Sally Roesch Wagner, who helped found one of America's first programs in women's studies.

This event is made possible through the Speakers in the Humanities, a program of the New York Council for the Humanities that creates opportunities for distinguished scholars to present free programs to the general public.

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