She named the church-state fusion as constitutive rather than additive, and her own movement removed her for it.
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Matilda Joslyn Gage published Woman, Church and State in 1893, arguing that the church was responsible for women's subordination throughout its history, that its resistance to women's equality was foundational rather than incidental to its other teachings, and that it had gained its power through control of marriage.
The claim was not that Christianity added subordination to something already there. It was that the church-state fusion built the coordinates inside which woman could appear only as subordinate, which makes it a claim about the measurement and not about attitudes.
[See THE MEASUREMENT CUT · THE ESTABLISHMENT]
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WHAT COVERTURE DEFINED
Gage held that women had exercised real power in societies organized differently, and that what displaced those societies was not an improvement.
Coverture did not restrict what a woman could do. It settled what a woman was, which is why the remedies aimed at her capacities kept missing. What was presented as nature's hierarchy was a construction with dates and authors, and Gage went and found them.
[See COVERTURE · REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD · WOMEN'S BODIES AS TERRITORY]
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WHAT SHE SAW AMONG THE HAUDENOSAUNEE
Stanton, Mott and Gage all drew on Haudenosaunee practice, and Gage went furthest with it. In 1893 she described Haudenosaunee society as a matriarchate in which women held actual power, noting descent through the female line and women's property rights, and the relation between women and men that followed from both.
What she was reporting was not a reform of the order she lived in but a different one, operating, in her own century, within travelling distance of a civilization that held its impossibility as a fact of nature.
In 1893 the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation adopted her and gave her the name Karonienhawi, she who holds the sky. The name was theirs to give and it was given to her.
She did not go looking for a way to improve coverture. She had seen something else working, and the difference between reform and that is the difference the rest of her career turns on.
[See PERPENDICULAR SOVEREIGNTY · THE PRIOR OCCUPANT]
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THE WITCH TRIALS
Gage gave extensive analysis to the European witch trials, and her reading of them is not the one that became standard.
The witch was not simply a scapegoat. The witch was the name for what could not be contained: women holding knowledge that did not come through the institution, healing that did not come through the institution, standing that did not come through the institution.
The burning was not confusion about who had power. It was accuracy about where knowledge was sitting.
Her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, married her daughter Maud and wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: a country run by women in which the wizard turns out to be a frightened man operating machinery behind a curtain.
[See THE WITCH · THE GREAT HOST]
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HER ERASURE
Gage was critical of the church for her whole suffrage career, and she was pushed out of the movement's leadership and then out of its history. She opposed the merger that produced the national association in 1890 and formed her own organization instead. She was largely absent from the record until late twentieth-century scholarship, chiefly Sally Roesch Wagner's, put her back into it.
Anthony wanted the vote. Gage wanted to name the thing that made votelessness possible, and a movement that has decided to win inside the coordinates cannot carry someone who is describing the coordinates. The removal was not personal animus. It was the same compression, performed by the reform on its own member.
And in 1993 Margaret Rossiter named the pattern of women denied credit for their work the Matilda Effect, after her.
[See THE MATILDA OPERATION · PUSHOUT · THE OFFICIAL RECORD]
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NATURAL RIGHT, NOT FEMININE MORALITY
Gage broke with the temperance union's argument for the vote, and the break is the sharpest thing she did.
That argument held that women should vote because they were essentially different, and that their feminine morality would purify politics. Which accepts the sorting entirely and asks for a better position inside it: the derivative category is kept, and a special virtue is attached to it as compensation.
Gage argued from natural right, which refuses the cut that made feminine a lesser derivative of human in the first place. Not a better place on the ladder. No ladder.
[See THE REFORMIST REGISTER · THE QUEEN]
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Her gravestone in Fayetteville carries a line she wrote:
There is a word sweeter than mother, home, or heaven; that word is liberty.
Mother, home, heaven. The three coordinates through which a woman's being was to be measured, named in order and then set against the thing they were built to stand in for.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
