Part of what makes L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, such an enduring story—providing inspiration for countless other books, movies, television shows, musicals and beyond—is its compelling, dynamic, self-possessed female characters…which is all the more impressive when you remember that women weren’t even allowed to vote at the time of Baum writing it.
And yes, while the kind, compassionate, and brave Dorothy is certainly compelling in her own right, we all know that it’s the witches that really leave us spellbound. Both Glinda of the North and the Wicked Witch of the West (or Galinda and Elphaba, for Wicked fans) have given us a lasting image for the complex theme of good and evil.
But very few know that these witches, or our current views of witches in general, might have never been conjured up in the first place, had it not been for an unsung hero of the 19th-century women’s rights movement, who just so happened to be Baum’s mother-in-law—Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage.
Gage was a suffragette who co-founded National Woman Suffrage Association along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, unlike her well-known cohorts, Gage was much more outwardly combative. In 1886 she famously showed up to the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty on a cattle barge with a megaphone, shouting that it was “a gigantic lie, a travesty and a mockery” to portray liberty as a woman when actual American women had so few rights.
Unlike Anthony Stanton, Gage also supported the 15th Amendment, and sheltered runaway slaves, and became a beloved ally to local Indigenous tribes, who adopted her as one of their own.
Gage would eventually cut ties with Anthony and Stanton after they aimed to get the support of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization which wasn’t as much fighting for women’s rights as it was trying to dismantle the separation of church and state and make America a “dry and moral” country. And instead, she created a new group called the National Women’s Liberal Union.
During her time as an activist, Gage railed against religious leaders and politicians for oppressing women by accusing them of heresy and witchcraft. This is a theme most of us are extremely familiar with, thanks to her.
While writing her revolutionary manifesto Woman, Church and State: The Original Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sexin1893, Gage became an expert on the centuries long witch-hunts that forced women to be put to death by fire, hanging, torture, drowning or stoning. And she spared no expense when it came to depicting those scenes, or her thoughts about them.
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For example, she wrote about 400 women burning all at once in a French public square “for a crime which never existed save in the imagination of those persecutors and which grew in their imagination from a false belief in woman’s extraordinary wickedness.”
For Gage, the link between religion and oppression was unseverable.
“As soon as a system of religion was adopted which taught the greater sinfulness of women, the saying arose: One wizard for every 10,000 witches, and the persecution for witchcraft became chiefly directed at women.”
And how exactly did Gage’s male critics respond to her message? By calling her a “satanist” and a “heretic.” Thus proving her point, really.
Though Baum didn’t instantly win over his fierce mother-in-law, over the years she did become a spiritual mentor to him, not to mention his muse on multiple levels.
First off, Gage was the one who encouraged Baum to actually write down his whimsical tales in the first place, which previously he only spoke aloud with his children.
Second, Baum was fascinated by her evocative descriptions of witches, and the feminist ideals they represent, which we undoubtedly see in his work. His wizard coerces Dorothy into killing a fellow woman, the Wicked Witch of the West, and then is revealed to be an empty god. And then, through the help of another woman, Glinda the Good Witch, Dorothy learns the power was inside her all along.
Third, Gage introduced Baum to The Theosophical Society, which was basically an amalgamation of Buddhist and Hindu principles that spoke of following life’s golden path to enlightenment and would later be represented by the Yellow Brick Road.
Lastly, it was Gage who suggested incorporating the tornado that would take Dorothy off to Oz in the first place. Cause how else was she gonna get there?
And to think, none of this show’s up in Gage’s measly 205-word New York Times obituary, stationed below Tiffany & Co. ad which simply credits her for being “one of the earliest champions of woman’s rights in America.” In fact, it wasn’t until new research was found, mostly in the form of newspaper writings by Baum and as unpublished letters from Gage, that people began to link her to his work.
Gage’s unwavering radical views removed her from her rightful place in history, especially due to deliberate actions taken by Susan B. Anthony to distance Gage and her “dangerous” ideas from the suffragist movement altogether. But through the work of her son-in-law, she formed a different kind of legacy—one that continues to inspire women everywhere to click their heels three times and find their own courage, value their empathy, and believe in the power of their own intelligence.
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