Remembering Matilda Joslyn Gage, the woman who was ‘born criminal’

Recently I have been studying the life of Matilda Joslyn Gage. She was a leader in the early women’s rights movement, well known in her lifetime, but now forgotten.

In 1893, when Matilda was 67, a deputy sheriff knocked on her door in Fayetteville, New York. He had come to arrest her.

“All of the crimes which I was not guilty of rushed through my mind,” Matilda wrote later, “but I failed to remember that I was a born crimina l— a woman.” Her crime: registering to vote. The verdict: guilty as charged.

Matilda felt proud to be arrested; publicity about her case brought attention to the cause she had championed for decades. When Matilda was a girl in the 1830s, women were banned from higher education and most professions — even women who needed to work for a living. Women could not vote, speak in public, serve on juries or testify in court, even against abusers or rapists. If a woman owned land, however, she had to pay taxes on it.

Marriage was expected, but married women had to give up even the few rights their single sisters enjoyed. Wives could not own property or sign contracts. Anything they earned or inherited belonged to their husbands, who could beat them, rape them, have them locked up in jails or asylums, or turn them out with nothing. If a marriage ended, the woman had no right to her children. If a husband died, his children went to the beneficiary named in his will.

In 1852 Matilda joined Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the fight for women’s rights: suffrage, equal pay for equal work, the right to control their own bodies, and a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women equality. The three worked together for many years, building organizations, hosting conventions, staging demonstrations, and writing books and newspaper articles that improved conditions for women in the United States. But after a falling-out late in their lives, Matilda’s so-called friends wrote her out of history. I hope that my new biography, “Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist,” will help to write her back in.

As I worked on this book, I told colleagues about Matilda. Sometimes they surprised me with stories of other little-known feminists. “My grandmother, Elizabeth Selden Rogers, was arrested in 1914 for picketing in front of the White House,” my friend Anthony H. Horan told me. “She was sentenced to 60 days in a work house, but Woodrow Wilson pardoned her after three days.”

Maybe you know about a woman like this from your family or your hometown. California was the sixth state to grant women the right to vote, in 1911, after years of campaigning. How did this come to be? Who led the effort? Do you have a connection to anyone who was involved?

Not until 1920, with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, did women in all states win the right to vote. Each year, Women’s Equality Day, Aug. 26, celebrates the certification of this amendment. Happy 98th anniversary to us! Many organizations are planning major celebrations for the centennial in 2020.

It’s sad to note that even now the United States does not have equal pay for equal work or a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equality for women. Access to birth control and abortion are still limited. And around the world, women are still “born criminal” for wanting freedom of movement, access to education and health care, and the ability to make their own life choices about marriage and work.

Take time today to ask your friends and family about women they know who changed history. Think about who will continue the struggle — will you? New leaders are needed to change the world. New historians will record their efforts.

Matilda Joslyn Gage said, “The longer I work, the more I see that woman’s cause is the world’s cause.” Matilda died in 1898, but her cause continues.

This story was originally published July 27, 2018 at 7:00 AM.