Born in Cicero, New York, on March 25, 1826, Matilda Joslyn received an advanced education from her father and completed her formal schooling at the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York. In January 1845 she married Henry H. Gage, a merchant, with whom she settled in Fayetteville, New York. Domestic duties largely filled the next several years, but in September 1852 she attended the National Woman╒s Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York, and made her first public address, a task she found exceedingly difficult. Her youth and stylish dress attracted notice, however, and helped offset the conventional notion of feminists. From its founding in 1869 she was a member of Elizabeth Cady Stanton╒s National Woman Suffrage Association and a contributor to its newspaper, the Revolution. In the same year she helped found and became vice-president and secretary of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association.
Never comfortable on the platform, Gage was an effective advocate with her pen. Her writings included the pamphlets Woman as Inventor, 1870, Woman╒s Rights Catechism, 1871, Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign of 1862? Or Anna Ella Carroll vs. Ulysses S. Grant, 1880, and The Dangers of the Hour, 1890. In 1875 she was elected president of both the state and national suffrage organizations, but she relinquished the national post to Stanton in 1876; she retained the state presidency until 1879. With Stanton and Susan B. Anthony she drafted a ╥Declaration of Rights╙ for women that was presented at the Fourth of July observance at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. During 1878╨1881 she edited the monthly National Citizen and Ballot Box published by the National Woman Suffrage Association. She was a coauthor with Stanton and Anthony of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, 1881╨1886. In 1880 she lobbied the national conventions of the Republican, Democratic, and Greenback╨Labor parties in an unsuccessful attempt to have them include woman suffrage in their platforms.
In 1890, after several years of growing friction within the National Woman Suffrage Association, Gage broke away to found the Woman╒s National Liberal Union, of which she was thereafter president. The Union was more radical than the older suffrage groups, and it reflected in particular her belief that the established churches were a major bulwark of male supremacist teaching, a view she expanded on in her book Woman, Church, and State, 1893. In her later years her public involvement in the suffrage movement gave way to declining health. She wrote but could not deliver an address to the fiftieth anniversary convention of the women╒s rights movement in Washington, D.C., in February 1898. She died in Chicago on March 18, 1898.
