Joslyn Gage Quotes

A rebel! How glorious the name sounds when applied to a woman. Oh, rebellious woman, to you the world looks in hope. Upon you has fallen the glorious task of bringing liberty to the earth and all the inhabitants thereof.

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution.

Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (2004), the female-led clan councils set the agenda of the League—“men could not consider a matter not sent to them by the women.” Women, who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot.

There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven. That word is Liberty. —Matilda Joslyn Gage

The woman who possesses love for her sex, for the world, for truth, justice and right, will not hesitate to place herself upon record as opposed to falsehood, no matter under what guise of age or holiness it appears.” —Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State

To give you a flavour of this, let’s look at Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–98), considered in her lifetime one of the most prominent American feminists. Gage was also an anti-Christian, attracted to the Haudenosaunee ‘matriarchate’, which she believed to be one of the few surviving examples of Neolithic social organization, and a staunch defender of indigenous rights, so much so that she was eventually adopted as a Mohawk clan mother. (She spent the last years of her life in the home of her devoted son-in-law, L. Frank

who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot.

The Emerald City, the Yellow Brick Road, magical slippers, a brave farm-girl protagonist, and, of course, the good and bad witches are all now seemingly timeless icons from what some have called “the first American fairy tale.” But several of these ideas were not invented by Baum out of whole cloth. In fact, a great many of them can be traced to the influence of his mother-in-law, the suffragist and equal rights pioneer Matilda Joslyn Gage.

IF W.I.T.C.H. IS an example of feminist politics borrowing from the realm of mythos, then it should come as no surprise that feminist spirituality began to get more civic-minded in turn. Though there is evidence that some American Pagan covens existed as early as the 1930s, and Gardnerian Wicca had reached the States by the 1960s, the 1970s brought about a new style of witchcraft that was intent on “combining political and spiritual concerns as if they were two streams of a single river,” as Margot Adler put it. It took the framework of Wicca but gave it a much fuller emphasis on worshipping goddesses and honoring the female body. It also more blatantly reclaimed the witch as an icon of resistance against the patriarchy, following the sentiments of earlier pro-witch thinkers like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Margaret Murray, and the writings of radical feminists like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin.