Born Criminal

"All the crimes which I was not guilty of rushed through my mind. I failed to remember that I was born criminal - a woman." -Matilda Joslyn Gage.

Before 1920, most women in the United States could not vote. They had no voice in who created the laws or who set their taxes, which is why they fought for suffrage-the right to vote. This book is about one of the many important people in the woman suffrage movement. You may not have heard of her - she was nearly erased from history. Her name is Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), and she believed in liberty for all. Together with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. She spoke to thousands, including presidents, about asserting women's right to vote.

Matilda began life in a house on the Underground Railroad, and her early introduction to the movement to abolish slavery made her value all peoples. When Matilda was fourteen, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. At the age of twenty-six, Matilda spoke at her first suffrage convention in Syracuse, New York, where over two thousand people packed the city hall. When three of her grown children moved to Dakota Territory, Matilda took the suffrage cause west, traveling from town to town promoting her ideals. At the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886, she even helped stage a protest. She argued that a woman could not represent liberty in a country where women were not guaranteed the right to vote.

Matilda's ideas were not always popular. She was seen as too radical in her call for equality in religion and politics. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony both outlived Matilda and eliminated her from their own histories of the women's movement. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States' Constitution granted women nationwide the right to vote, Matilda Gage was all but forgotten-until now.

In Born Criminal, Angelica Shirley Carpenter details Matilda's life and recounts her contributions to the woman suffrage movement. Using Gage's own words, Carpenter shows how Stanton and Anthony distanced themselves from the movement's more revolutionary thinkers, cutting them from the historical record in order to depict a more conservative movement with themselves at the center.