Woman, Church, and State

Native American women’s suffragist, abolitionist, free thinker, and author Matilda Joslyn Gage, was originally published in 1893.

According to Gage, this classic history of woman’s oppression is one of the first attempts to document the sad legacy of injustice and discrimination against women, which she says is unfortunately inseparable from the history of both Christianity and the evolution of the Western state. Beginning in the pre-Christian era, where she finds more evidence of freedom for women than in subsequent eras, pioneering women’s rights advocate Matilda Joslyn Gage traces the patterns of male domination in both church and state that kept women in virtual bondage.