The Political Life and Times of Matilda Joslyn Gage - Softcover

Mary E. Corey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941688608 ISBN 13: 9781941688601

Publisher: Paramount Market Publishing, Inc., 2019

Synopsis

In the early years of women's history research, Matilda Joslyn Gage was buried in superlatives. She was deemed "the most logical, scientific and fearless writer of her day, and one of the best-known writers of the day." She's admired for being "one of the most scholarly of them all," and "one of the most effective and forceful woman's rights lecturers," and "one of the most important of all nineteenth-century feminist historians." Even Gage's newspaper was judged to be "a major suffrage journal."

However, once the bouquets were thrown, Gage dropped into the background of scholarship on the suffrage movement. It's time to see why she really was called "the most," "the best," "effective," and "scholarly." 

From her first convention speech in 1852 to the publication of her magnum opus, Woman, Church and State, her speeches, writings, and advocacy were and remain an education in women's history. Gage's greatest contribution to the women's movement rests on her scholarship, based on careful research, well documented and written in the best scholarly manner. Today we can assess her as an historian, a pioneering scholar of women's history and the world history movement.

Her work as an advocate, activist, intellectual, and leader is now also being acknowledged in larger ways. And, because her story is so closely woven into the history of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, Gage's story also bears weighty insights into their stories, too.

About this title

About the Author

Mary E. Corey is an associate professor of American history and social studies education emerita at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. Her work combines scholarly interests in women s history and civil rights history.

Dr. Corey is also a faculty consultant for the Advanced Placement Exam in United States History through the College Board and served on the Board of Trustees of the Brockport Community Museum. Her work also includes workshops for secondary teachers and she has conducted AP Workshops, "Using Artifacts in the Social Studies Classroom" at The Summer AP Institute at St. John Fisher, and a walking tour of Seneca Falls, New York and workshop, "Weaving Women into the Curriculum" as part of a Teaching American History Grant. She has presented her research at the Organization of American Historian's Annual Conference and the Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Her most recent co-authored publications are the Faculty and Student editions of Before Jackie: The Negro Leagues, Civil Rights, and the American Dream and, individually, the high school text in American History for the National Center for Migrant Education. She lives in western New York State.

Review

Mary Corey's Political Life and Times of Matilda Joslyn Gage is a welcome addition to the growing body of work on this long-neglected visionary activist of the 19th century woman's rights movement. Especially notable is the author's documentation of the volume and reach of Gage's 50 years of writing, from political analysis, non-fiction and travelogues in journals and newspapers to National Woman Suffrage Association documents and much more. Corey's extensive research explores the content and impact of Gage's four-year newspaper, National Citizen and Ballot Box. She substantiates Gage's co-authorship of half of the writing produced by Gage and Stanton in the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage and demonstrates the unique importance of Gage's 1893 magnum opus, Woman, Church and State. Corey also explores in depth the 1889 merger of the two major suffrage organizations that brought in an increasingly authoritarian and conservative push for the single issue of the vote. --Sally Roesch Wagner, Executive Director, Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation Editor, Women's Suffrage Anthology, Penguin Classics, 2019

Mary Corey does an excellent job within these pages of bringing dimension to Matilda Joslyn Gage, as well as illuminating why the two women most closely associated with the suffrage movement, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, might have been motivated to diminish Gage's contributions. It would seem she was overshadowed, almost written out of history, by design. The Political Life and Times of Matilda Joslyn Gage provides the reader with a lens through which to examine how the volumes in the History of Women's Suffrage were developed and the integral role played by Gage throughout the ten-year process. The research invites us to re-examine what we might have previously taken for granted about the suffrage movement and its leaders. The manner in which Corey weaves historiography throughout to add flesh to Gage makes this a book worthy of incorporation into the study of not only the women s movement, but also the pursuit of understanding how one should go about examining any historical premise. A timely work. --Kate Kramer, M.A., Consultant for Advanced Placement U.S. History

I enjoyed reading The Political Life and Times of Matilda Joslyn Gage. It is engaging, well researched, and would appeal to both academic and non-academic readers. This political biography of Gage shows the important role women such as Gage played in the women's suffrage movement. The movement was more than Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Women like Gage were the unsung heroes of the suffrage movement. --Diane Fulkerson, Director of Information Commons, University of South Florida

Edition details

• Publisher: Paramount Market Publishing, Inc.
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1941688608
• ISBN 13: 9781941688601
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 186