Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898)
Filed under the name Matilda · May 6, 2026
Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the leading voices of the 19th-century women's rights movement, writing and organizing at a time when doing that kind of work came with real personal and financial risk, not just social disapproval. I don't trust either political party to have lived a life like mine, but I do trust people who put in the actual unpaid, unglamorous work of building a movement from nothing, because that's a kind of labor I recognize even from a completely different century and situation. Nobody was paying Gage a salary to fight for suffrage; she did it on top of whatever else her life required, the same way I clean houses on weekends on top of a full retail week. History remembers the leading names of that movement, but I always wonder about all the women alongside her who did the same work and got none of the credit at all. Gage at least got her name written down. A lot of people who do that hard, thankless organizing work never do.