Matilda Joslyn Gage Center (5/30/2025)

Friday, May 30, 2025

Shuffling off to Buffalo with a stop at the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center, with the House Museum and Center for Social Justice Dialogue.

Historical Marker outside her home in Fayetteville, NY

Gage House at 210 East Genesee Street

Photo of the original parlor, and the December 2024 issue
of Smithsonian Magazine that featured an article on
Matilda Joslyn Gage and her influence on her
son-in-law, L Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz

The parlor today focuses on L Frank Baum
and his wife Maud Gage

Yellow Brick Road quilt (2010, by Towpath Quilters Guild
and Calico Gals especially for the Gage Foundation
is sharpened by the camera

The former dining room displays a Women's Rights
Timeline that starts in 909 with the founding of the
indigenous Haudenosaunee Confederacy with its
matriarchal society where women have equal political voice
with men, and rights to their own bodies and possessions;
Matilda Joslyn Gage advocated for Native Americans
and spent time with the Haudenosaunee, learning from
them and becoming an honorary member of the Wolf Clan

The Center was setting up for a tea, and had a few
of these Votes for Women cups and saucers

Copy of the book Women, Church and State (1893, by
Matilda Joslyn Gage) where she criticizes Christianity
for fostering the inferiority of women and strongly
advocates for separation of church and state

The timeline continues; you will note in
the previous Timeline photo that is "ends"
in 2023, when women still do not have the
equal rights guaranteed in the Constitution
and 100 years after the introduction of
the Equal Rights Amendment/ERA

Period dress for Haudenosaunee,
and American suffragists

Sprout (c 2010, by Akwesasne Mohawk artist
Natasha Smoke Santiago) is one of three paintings each
illustrating one of three trimesters of pregnancy,
three seasons of crop growth, and three generations

Rofanies: a "new" art form combining the
Tuscarora beadwork of Rosemary Hill and
quilt-maker Stephanie Drehs to honor Gage's
friendship with the Haudenosaunee women

Missing Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the
Matilda Effect series by Lynette Charters

The "Matilda Effect" was a label originally created by historian Margaret W Rossiter, referencing suffragist and author Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) who publicized the work of important but forgotten women in science, that is, women erased from history. Matilda herself suffered this effect after she worked with Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the leadership of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association/NWSA, and also with whom she wrote History of Woman Suffrage, and Declaration of the Rights of Women. Gage left the NWSA when it merged with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, a move Anthony believed would more quickly gain the right to vote, but Gage wanted separation of church and state.

The Gage family was involved with the
Underground Railroad and this ceiling
mural lists Freedom Takers

A bench from the Ontario County Courthouse, the location
of the 1873 trial of Susan B Anthony for voting in the
1872 presidential election; Gage spoke in her defense