Matilda Joslyn Gage

(1826 - 1898)

At age twenty-six Matilda Joslyn Gage, who grew up in a house in Cicero, New York, that served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, was the youngest person to speak at the National Women’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York, in 1852. She went on to cofound the National Woman Suffrage Association and led many women’s rights protests, including one at the Statue of Liberty. (She took issue with using a woman as a metaphor for liberty, given the realities of American politics at the time.) One of her five children married the struggling writer L. Frank Baum; Gage told him that he should perhaps write down the stories he told his children. Her memorial stone reads “There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven. That word is Liberty.”