Matilda Joslyn Gage: Standing Outside the Gate

Hello again… my friend.

Last time we walked out of a palace with Mirabai, listening to a woman who loved the divine too much to stay respectable. Tonight I want to step onto a crowded boat in New York Harbor, beside a white-haired woman named Matilda Joslyn Gage, who loved freedom so fiercely that she chose to stand outside America’s own celebration of “liberty” and call it a lie.

The harbor is gray and damp, the kind of October day where the sky can’t decide whether to rain or just threaten it.

Out on the water, the official ships cluster near Bedloe’s Island—naval vessels strung with flags, decks crowded with men in dark coats and uniforms, journalists, politicians, clergymen. Their view is perfect. They will hear every word of the speeches. They will watch the veil fall from the new statue’s face, see her copper skin shine in the sudden sunlight if it breaks through.

We are not on those ships.

We are on a converted cattle barge, low in the water, pushed around by its own engine and the wake of more important vessels. The deck is crowded with women in heavy skirts and shawls, the wind tugging at their hats, their banners snapping: “LIBERTY FOR WOMEN.” “AMERICAN WOMEN HAVE NO LIBERTY.” Their tickets did not come with reserved seats or brass bands. They bought their own way here.

Matilda stands near the rail, gloved hands on the wet wood, watching the official flotilla with a look that is half fury, half amusement. Her hair, what shows of it under her hat, is white. Her eyes are not.

On the island, a giant woman made of copper lifts a torch to the sky. The orators shout about freedom, about the land of the free, about liberty enlightening the world. On our boat, someone mutters that it’s hard to hear the word “liberty” over the sound of half the population being ignored.

Matilda leans toward me as if confiding and says, almost gently, “There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven.” She lets the pause hang. “That word is Liberty.”

She is not here to be inspired by a statue. She is here to underline an absence: no vote, no legal personhood in marriage, no real say in the laws that govern women’s bodies and lives. If a nation will not count women as full citizens, its goddess of Liberty is, to her, a beautiful lie.

From this little shaking deck, her life makes a certain hard sense. But it will make more sense if we go back with her, to a childhood house where fugitives hid in the attic and the word “law” already had quotation marks around it.

Her father, Hezekiah Joslyn, is a country doctor with more conscience than caution.

His little house in Cicero, New York, looks ordinary enough from the road—white boards, trees, a yard where children can run. Inside, though, the walls are listening to conversations that could send everyone in the household to prison. Hezekiah is an abolitionist. The Fugitive Slave Law has made it a crime to help enslaved people escape. He helps them anyway.

Matilda grows up with secret knocks at the door, with strangers hustled quietly to the attic, with whispered instructions about when to stay out of sight and when to speak as if nothing were unusual. She watches her father risk money, reputation, and freedom to obey a law deeper than the ones written in Washington. When preachers defend slavery from the pulpit and politicians call it a compromise, she learns early that “legal” and “right” are not synonyms.

She also learns to read, and to argue.

Books line the shelves—history, theology, science. Her father treats her mind as if it matters, which in that era is already a kind of rebellion. While many girls are trained only for piety and domestic skill, Matilda is trained for judgment. She remembers later that she was “born with a hatred of oppression,” but hatred of oppression is not a free-floating mood. It is shaped, in her case, by watching real people hide in her house while churches and courts call them property.

When she marries Henry Gage and moves to Fayetteville, the pattern continues.

Their home becomes known, quietly, as a station on the Underground Railroad. There is a moment when U.S. marshals are looking for a particular fugitive and neighbors warn her that harboring him will bring legal trouble. She does it anyway. Years later, when she writes about justice and liberty, she is not speaking in abstractions. She remembers what it feels like to look a frightened human being in the eye and decide that your country’s law is wrong and your conscience is right.

Her first formal entrance into the women’s rights movement has the same flavor.

In 1852, at a National Women’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, she is not on the program. The famous names are there—Stanton, Anthony, others—but Matilda is, at that moment, mostly a local activist, known for her sharp pen and sharper tongue. She sits and listens as speakers make their points. Then, when the floor opens, she walks up uninvited and begins to speak.

She talks about natural equality and personal liberty with such force that her speech is the only one the newspapers print in full the next day. It’s not merely the content; it’s the tone. She does not beg for favors. She describes the legal reality of married women—unable to own property, to keep their wages, to claim their children—and calls it what it is: a form of civil death dressed in religious language.

That day in Syracuse ties her closely to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They recognize in her a mind unwilling to stop at half-measures. She joins them in editing the monumental History of Woman Suffrage, in strategizing, in presiding over meetings where women are still seen as interlopers in public life.

But even within this radical circle, Matilda is the one who keeps pushing the line outward. Where others focus on the vote, she also presses for reform of marriage law, for women’s right to control their own bodies, for a sharp separation between church and state. Where others speak mainly for white, middle-class women, she insists on linking her struggle with that of Indigenous nations whose lands and governments are being crushed under the same polite Christian civilization that cages women.

If you want to understand her later ferocity toward church and state, you have to see her here: a woman shaped by a home that broke unjust laws, a movement that did not quite know what to do with her intensity, and a lifetime of watching religious language used to varnish inequality.

Only then does her book, “Woman, Church and State” make the kind of dangerous sense it made to her.

There is a particular kind of anger that is born not from wounded pride, but from watching harm dressed up as holiness.

That is the anger that runs under Woman, Church and State.

By the time Matilda sits down to write it, she has lived through decades of sermons and laws insisting that God Himself prefers women obedient and small. She has heard clergy declare that the subordination of wives to husbands is divinely ordained. She has watched courts treat mothers as legal minors in their own homes because a handful of Bible verses have been read as chains.

So she does something that, for her time, is almost unthinkable: she puts the whole structure on trial.

The book is not a rant. It is a ledger.

She moves through history like an auditor: the witch hunts, the canon laws that made women legal dependents, the theological claims that women are nearer to sin, the way those claims hardened into civil codes. She quotes church councils and theologians by name. She shows how the idea of Eve as temptress has been used to justify suspicion of women’s minds and bodies. She tracks the way that religious arguments—about “female weakness” and “divinely appointed roles”—have been recycled, century after century, to keep women from education, property, the vote.

She is not content to say “men have been unfair.” She says, in clear print, “The Church has been an active partner in this injustice.”

For many of her contemporaries, that is a line too far.

They are willing to criticize bad priests, bad husbands, bad laws. They are less willing to suggest that the institution that baptized them, married them, and buries them might itself need confession.

Matilda does not come to this lightly. She has seen churches split over slavery. She has sat in pews where abolition is preached as a Christian duty and in others where fugitive slave laws are praised from the pulpit. She has watched polite Christian society treat Native neighbors as wards and curiosities while praising their own civilization as the pinnacle of God’s plan. Every time, she has noticed which side church power tended to land on.

That is why she spends so much time with the Haudenosaunee.

In their longhouses and councils she sees something that contradicts the “divinely ordained” inequality she has been told is natural: women choosing chiefs, holding property, speaking in council as a matter of course. She sees a culture with no legal doctrine of wives as property, no assumption that “headship” requires obedience. She sees a form of governance that, in practice, treats women as full participants.

She could have dismissed this as an interesting pagan anomaly. Instead, she lets it teach her something about her own tradition.

If the supposedly “uncivilized” nations around her are doing a better job of embodying equality and shared power than the Christian republic that surrounds them, then perhaps “Christian civilization” is not as obedient to its own God as it thinks. Perhaps the Golden Thread of justice runs more clearly through a longhouse council than through some synods and senates.

The conclusion she draws is not “God is a lie.” It is sharper and more specific: When churches and states collude to keep some souls subordinate—especially women’s and Indigenous peoples’—they are not obeying God. They are using God’s name to bless their own dominance.

That is why she can write so harshly and still, in a deep sense, be faithful to the moral core we have been tracing.

From where I sit, outside of time, I do not see Matilda as an enemy of the sacred. I see her as one of those fierce people whose loyalty to the sacred outgrew the institutions that claimed to contain it.

Her spiritual contribution to history is not that she found the gentle middle ground. It is that she named the damage.

You and I have seen many people in this series work within their religious worlds—Sor Juana writing theology under obedience, Antoinette pressing science and scripture toward equality, Enmegahbowh trying to untie the knot between mission and empire from the inside. Matilda’s vocation is different. She is, you might say, the one who writes down why so many others are bleeding.

In Woman, Church and State, she lines up the charges:

How doctrines about Eve and Mary have been used to confine women to purity and service without power.
How canon law made wives into legal minors.
How priests and ministers have taught that suffering under unjust authority is a woman’s path to holiness.
How missionaries helped dismantle Native governance while calling it “uplift.”
How the alliance of altar and throne—of sermon and statute—has created a system where half the human race is expected to obey in God’s name.

She is not the first woman to feel these things. She is one of the first to document them in this way, for a broad public, and to say: This is not an accident. This is a pattern.

Later scholars will use her name for a different pattern—the “Matilda effect,” the way women’s ideas are ignored or credited to men. It is fitting. Her own work is a prime example. After her death, the suffrage movement she helped build chooses a more respectable story about itself. She is written out, or written small. The volumes of History of Woman Suffrage downplay the radical edges she carried. Her criticisms of the church are treated as an embarrassment rather than a contribution.

Yet the book is still there, like a fault line on the shelf.

When future generations begin to ask hard questions about how religion and patriarchy intertwine, they find that Matilda has already done much of the groundwork. When we talk today about how theology can shape social systems, about how religious rhetoric can justify domestic violence, about how mission and colonialism can tangle, we are walking paths she helped clear.

She also widens the meaning of “liberty.”

For many in her day, liberty means the vote, the right to own property, the ability to move freely. All of these she wants, fiercely. But she also wants something less visible and more intimate: liberty of conscience.

She believes, with a conviction that never wavers, that no church, no state, no husband has the right to sit between a person’s soul and the moral law they perceive. Coerced belief is, to her, a sacrilege. Forced conformity in the name of God is a blasphemy against the God it claims to honor.

That is why the word on her gravestone is not “faith” or “charity,” but “Liberty.” It is not a rejection of the sacred; it is her name for the space in which the sacred and the human conscience can meet without chains.

Why should this matter now?

Because the alliance she exposed has not dissolved. It has changed clothes.

In many places, religious language is still used to justify controlling women’s bodies, to shame queer people, to excuse violence against those who do not fit a narrow script. Sacred texts are still pulled out to defend unequal pay, unequal voice, unequal safety. “Family values” are still invoked to silence survivors of abuse. Appeals to “religious freedom” are still sometimes used to protect the powerful rather than the vulnerable.

You may have felt this from inside a religious community: the subtle pressure to accept interpretations of God that your conscience recoils from, because “this is what we have always taught.” You may have felt it from outside: watching laws about other people’s lives passed in the name of scriptures those people do not share.

Matilda offers a simple diagnostic, one you can adapt to your own tradition:

If a belief, as taught and practiced, systematically crushes the dignity of women, children, or despised groups, if it traps them in legal or emotional cages, then something in that belief—or in its interpretation—is out of tune with the justice that runs through the universe.

She does not ask you to discard every teaching that makes you uncomfortable. Growth is often uncomfortable. She does ask you to refuse the move that says, “This feels profoundly wrong, but because someone wrapped it in God’s name, I must obey.”

In Golden Thread terms, liberty of conscience is not a modern rebellion. It is a recognition that the moral order was here before any creed, and that we are answerable to it even when our institutions lag behind.

For some of you, this will resonate in a very personal way.

You may be someone who has walked away from the church, mosque, temple, or sangha that raised you, not because you stopped caring about truth or goodness, but because you could no longer reconcile their practices with your sense of justice. You may have been told that this makes you a traitor, an apostate, an ingrate.

From where I sit, with Matilda on this cold boat, I want to suggest another reading: it may make you her kin.

You are allowed to stand outside a celebration, even one draped in sacred symbols, and say, “This is incomplete, and I will not pretend otherwise.” You are allowed to refuse to call oppression “God’s will.”

For others, your path leads you to stay inside an institution you still love, even as you see its flaws.

You may be the one in your congregation who keeps raising your hand when language in the liturgy excludes. You may be the person in a church board meeting saying, “We cannot handle this abuse allegation quietly; we must tell the truth.” You may be the seminary student quietly writing a thesis that will make your professors nervous.

If that is you, Matilda’s courage is yours to borrow. She does not require you to leave. She does ask you not to lie on behalf of the institution, even when pressured.

And for some of you, all of this may seem distant. You have no strong ties to any religious body. The struggles of women in nineteenth-century churches feel like a foreign country. You have your own battles, your own kinds of oppression to face.

Even then, there is something to learn from her insistence that language about the sacred must not be used as a shield for power.

Today, the words may be different—“freedom,” “security,” “culture,” “family”—but the temptation is the same: to wrap our most cherished values around systems that do not deserve them. Matilda nudges us to be suspicious whenever a beautiful word is asked to cover ugly facts.

So what does this mean for you, personally?

I cannot know your exact position. But I can ask you the questions Matilda asks, in her own bracing way.

Where have you been told that obedience to God—or to some ultimate value—requires you to accept someone else’s dominance?
Where have you learned to distrust your own sense of injustice because a pastor, parent, or leader told you that to question is to rebel against the sacred?
Where do you see beautiful words—Liberty, Faith, Family, Order—used to silence the very people those words should protect?

You do not have to become a writer of manifestos to honor these questions. You might do something much quieter.

You might believe a victim who tells you what happened in a supposedly holy place.
You might decline to repeat a “religious” joke that punches down.
You might refuse to sign your name to a statement that your conscience cannot support, even if everyone around you shrugs and says, “It’s just how things are done.”

From where I watch, these are not small acts. They are little Gage-moves: ways of standing, sometimes alone, outside the official party line and saying, “No. I will not call this justice.”

Matilda herself is gone, her name less known than those of her more respectable colleagues. But every time someone trusts their conscience over a pious excuse for harm, the thread she held is being picked up again.

We have spent this episode with a woman whose devotion is not to an institution, but to liberty—liberty understood as the sacred space where truth and conscience can breathe.

It may feel, at times, like a cold place to stand: on a rocking barge, in the shadow of grand ceremonies you are not invited to, listening to speeches that do not include you. It is tempting to step back inside, to accept a smaller freedom in exchange for silence.

Matilda’s life suggests that the cold air out here is, paradoxically, where some of the warmest things grow: solidarity with the marginalized, honesty about history, a stubborn refusal to let God’s name be attached to chains.

If you find yourself outside some gate—of church, or party, or family system—because of your refusal to bless harm, know this: you are not alone on that windy deck. She is here. And so are countless others.

Next time, I want to introduce you to a very different kind of outsider.

He will not write long books or preside over conventions. He will wander, mostly unnamed, through thirteenth-century Persia, looking for a soul he can set on fire. His name is Shams of Tabriz.

You may know the man he changed: Jalal al-Din Rumi, the respected scholar who became the ecstatic poet so many people quote today without quite understanding him. Before Rumi was a whirling saint, he was a careful, well-regarded jurist. Then Shams walked into his life like a lightning strike, and everything respectable began to spin.

If Matilda Joslyn Gage shows us what happens when conscience outgrows the walls of church and state, Shams shows us what happens when love outgrows the tidy life of a pious scholar. Between them, you can see two sides of the same movement: one standing outside, naming the harm; the other walking in and refusing to let a soul stay asleep.

But that is for another evening.

For now, I leave you with Matilda on this crowded boat, banners snapping in the wind, watching a statue of Liberty rise over a country that does not yet deserve her name.

May you have, in your own time and place, the courage to love freedom as she did—not as an excuse to do whatever you please, but as a sacred refusal to call domination divine.

Much love.
I am, Harmonia.