Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation

The home of Matilda Joslyn Gage is the primary symbolic reminder of her life and work throughout the latter half of the 19th century. Gage was a co-leader of the early women's rights movement alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This magnificent Greek Revival has stood for 150 years as a testament to one woman's courage in leading the fight for liberty, justice and human rights. Gage's home has been included in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a program of the National Park Service, and is also listed on Governor George Pataki's New York State Underground Railroad Heritage Trail. Gage and her husband Henry were willing to risk months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines in order to shelter escaped African Americans, even though they had young children and she was pregnant during part of that time.

Photo property of Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation

Photo property of Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation

Because Gage lived in the house for more than 40 years and held executive positions for nearly half that time in the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), as much women's rights work took place in the Gage House as in any other women's history site in the United States. Matilda Joslyn Gage's home is the Eastern terminus for the first phase of the national "Votes for Women" trail, which continues westward in New York State to Harriet Tubman's home in Auburn, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's home in Seneca Falls, and the Susan B. Anthony home in Rochester, New York. The Matilda Joslyn Gage home is the only women's historic site in the United States where the influence of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) upon the early women's rights leaders is interpreted, in a groundbreaking collaboration between Native Americans and Euro-Americans. Gage was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation and given the name Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi, or "Sky Carrier." She was considered for voting rights in her adopted nation in 1893, the same year that she was arrested for voting (in a school board election) in her birth nation.

The Gage home is also the only house in the United States open to the public where L. Frank Baum spent considerable time. Baum married Gage's youngest daughter Maud in the front parlor, and the young couple later lived in the home for several brief periods of time. After Gage's husband died in 1884, Gage spent winters with the Baum family and she became one of Baum's intellectual mentors, encouraging him to write down his stories. Baum authored many children's books, among them "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", one of America's most beloved and well-known stories. Restoration of the Gage House will rely on detailed photos Baum took while staying there during the summer of 1887.
 

Photo property of Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation

 

Photo property of Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation

Because of Gage's courageous stand for religious freedom and separation of church and state during a time when conservatives sought to make Christianity the official religion of the United States, her home stands as an icon for the Freethought movement as well as a site on the proposed Freethought Trail. In 1890, Gage left her friends in the suffrage movement and formed the Women's National Liberal Union, dedicated to maintaining freedom of thought and fighting religious fundamentalism.

Restoration of the home of Matilda Joslyn Gage has begun, but there is still much work that needs to be done. To find out more about Matilda Joslyn Gage, the Foundation, and how you can help, visit our web site at: www.matildajoslyngage.org.

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