When my kids were little my wife and I read most, if not all, of the Oz books to them, both those by the original author, L. Frank Baum, and by his successor, Ruth Plumly Thompson. So I was interested when I saw Finding Oz in my local bookstore. It’s a biography of Baum by Evan I. Schwartz, which makes a more or less plausible case for the sources for the Oz stories and characters (he convincingly debunks the idea that it is a disguised attack on the gold standard). Among other things, he makes the argument that Baum’s mother-in-law was the inspiration for both the Good Witch of the South and the Wicked Witch of the West. In the book, there are two good witches; the beautiful one appears only at the end, and she’s the one Schwartz feels Baum’s mother in law inspired. This might be just a tired mother-in-law sort of joke, except that this particular mother-in-law was a remarkable woman, a relatively neglected woman’s rights advocate who was a full member of a triumvirate that included Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Her name was Matilda Joslyn Gage. You can read more about her here, at the website for the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation. Baum was an early supporter of equal rights for women, quite likely influenced by Ms. Gage and her almost equally strong minded daughter. What I found interesting was the fact that she, alone among the then big three in the women’s movement, refused to make common cause with the temperance movement, which was dominated by religious fundamentalist women, and which, even then (if Schwartz is to be believed) Gage referred to as the “religious right”. She split with Anthony over the issue, and she turned out to be prescient, since the religious types abandoned the women’s movement as soon as it was no longer useful to them.
Gage believed that religion was an instrument of oppression, particularly against women, and had written extensively about the fact that the mass burning of witches had been essentially a war on women.
More from the website:
Unlike many of her sisters in the American suffrage movement, Gage was unwilling to compromise her position on the absolute necessity of religious freedom as a prerequisite for authentic women’s liberation. Specifically, Gage was not interested in forming alliances with organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union whose goals included eliminating the separation of church and state. Through her creation of the Woman’s National Liberal Union, her contributions to The Woman’s Bible, and perhaps most significantly, her publication of Woman, Church, and State, Matilda Joslyn Gage left a legacy of radical feminist analysis of the relationship between women’s oppression and organized religion. Her seminal work as a feminist, a freethinker, and proponent of a gyno-centric spirituality is striking not only because it stands so clearly in advance of the dominant thinking of her time, but because it continues to challenge sexist boundaries and assumptions in contemporary America.
While Gage’s opposition to the Church was nurtured over a lifetime, her most nationally recognized acts of defiance in this regard were accomplished in the last decade of her life. Among these was her organization of a society dedicated to the free expression of radical reform and free thought agendas which she organized after the merger of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, of which Gage had long held both intellectual and organizational leadership roles, with the American Woman’s Suffrage Association.
Matilda Joslyn Gage was furious that the new organization, the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was openly courting the support of such conservative Christian groups as the WCTU led by the legendary Frances Willard. Gage, as a champion of the separation of church and state, was intellectually and morally repulsed by Willard’s goal that “…Christ shall be this world’s King. King of its courts, its camps, and its commerce; King of its colleges and cloisters; King of its customs and its constitutions.” When Willard declared that she wanted an amendment to the United States Constitution declaring Christ the author and head of the American government, Gage was disgusted. “This looks like a return to the Middle Ages and proscription for religious opinions, and is the great danger of the hour.” In Gage’s scholarly, feminist opinion, any move toward public reform in the name of religion was a move away from the goals of women’s true freedom.
Some things never change. We could use more like her.
By the way, according to Schwartz, the Wizard was inspired, to varying degrees, by Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, John D. Rockefeller and Swami Vivekananda.
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