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  • What a Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist Can Teach Us About Women's Rights vs. the Religious Right

     

    If America is currently being “taken back” and made “great again” we seem to be landing somewhere in the late 19th century. 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. Today, her colleagues Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are better remembered—invoked in recent marches, and even a Saturday Night Live skit—but Gage offers helpful lessons for examining the gender inequalities of religion.

    [Read the rest at Religion Dispatches]