Feature: Shifters

Don't be tempted by the shiny apple
Don't you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
--All That You have is Your Soul,
Tracy Chapman

Herstory; coming around to repeat itself.......herstorically interesting

By Melinda Grube http://www.matildajoslyngage.org/right.htm

Slavery and prostitution, persecutions for heresy; the inquisition with its six hundred modes of torture; the destruction of learning; the oppression of science; the systemized betrayal of confiding innocence; the recognized and unrecognized polygamy of man; the denial of woman of a right to herself, her thought, her wages, her children, to a share in the government which rules her, to an equal part in religious institutions-- all these and a myriad more, are parts of what is known as a Christian civilization.

Among the most important contributions Matilda Joslyn Gage made to the women’s rights movement was her bold challenge to the Church. A fearless and brilliant theoretician in this regard, she identified the misogyny of the historical and contemporary Christian Church as one of the great barriers to the cause of women’s freedom. During a time in which a woman’s virtue and worth were often tied to the strength of her (Protestant) Christian faith, Gage spoke and wrote openly of her beliefs in the separation of church and state, and of her support of alternative spiritualities and realities such as those found among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), the Theosophists, and pre-Christian civilizations. Her writing, particularly that describing the “Matriarchate” in Woman, Church, and State prefigured the advent of the women’s spirituality movement nearly a hundred years after her death.

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.

Following the termination of the Woman’s National Liberal Union, Matilda Joslyn Gage dedicated herself more fully to the completion of her major intellectual accomplishment, Woman, Church, and State, published in 1893. While Victorian morality forbade the discussion of human sexuality and its abuses, Woman, Church, and State exposed thriving child pornography and prostitution trade and the history of physical and sexual crimes against women and children in the Western world. Her descriptions of the sexual abuse of children earned her the attention of Anthony Comstock, renowned for his enforcement of obscenity laws. Gage was outraged by the moral hypocrisy of a “Christian” nation that would neglect its responsibility to protect children from sexual violence and then condemn her for bringing it to its attention. She saw this degradation of the bodies of children and women directly related to the Church’s attitudes toward human sexuality and its assertion of the inferiority and sinfulness of the female sex. As an historian, she unflinchingly chronicles the Church’s history of violent abuses of its power.

As a woman who had achieved much of her greatest and most important work in her post-menopausal life after her children were reared, and as a person who believed in the intrinsic worth of an individual unrelated to their usefulness to patriarchal design, Gage condemned the abuse of elderly women as much as that of young women and children. Her commentaries on the medieval witchcraft persecutions are not only an indictment of the witch trials, but also a commentary on the prevailing attitudes toward aging women in her time, and sadly, of our own. Additionally, her sympathies lie with the women persecuted as witches not just because they were innocent victims, but because many of them may indeed have been persons possessing woman-centered, pre-patriarchal wisdom, a wisdom Gage understood as fundamental to the wholeness of human expression, and a danger to patriarchal religion denying woman’s claim to herself.

"We discover a reason for this intense hatred of old women in the fact that woman has chiefly been looked upon from a sensual view by Christian men, the church teaching that she was created solely for man’s sensual use. Thus when, by reason of declining years, she no longer attracted the sensual admiration of man, he regarded her as having forfeited her life."