Sunday, March 12, 2017

Matilda Joslyn Gage - Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist

It’s easy to say that great strides have been made toward racial and gender equality in the last 150 years, yet one can’t help being struck by the parallel discourse surrounding human rights between then and now. Nowhere is this more evident than in the battles between women’s rights and the religious right. And nowhere is it more clear than in reviewing the works of Matilda Joslyn Gage.

From her first public speech, at age 26, in front of the 1852 National Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, to her culminating thoughts in the 1893 book Woman, Church, and State, Gage used philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and science to rewrite the place of women in socio-political life throughout history.

What Gage saw was that you can’t just “get out the vote.” You have to change the mythologies. New stories need to be told, even if they are the old stories that have been forgotten.

Read entire article by Brent Plate here @ USC Annenberg - Religious Dispatches

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