Angelica Shirley Carpenter

This is SUCH an important book about a key figure who was written out of women's history. Gage was born in 1826 to parents who were active abolitionists, their home an underground railroad stop when she was growing up, as was her home after she married. She became involved in the women's suffrage movement in 1852.

Gage was considered more radical than Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who she knew extremely through their joint work for the National Woman Suffrage Association. Gage was very well educated, and particularly interested in shining a light on forgotten women in history and women's inventions. Anthony and Stanton, who out-lived Gage, are the key people responsible for writing her out of history. Both took credit for Gage's writings and research at various times before and after her death, Anthony most egregiously. Gage's writing was often praised, and her book Woman, Church, and State garnered a personal letter from Tolstoy with the back handed compliment "It proved a woman could think logically."

Gage was other L. Frank Baum's mother-in-law, and it's thought that she greatly inspired how he wrote women and girls, particularly in the Oz books and the books written under his Edith van Dyne pseudonym. Given that Baum had only sons, I think this is probably quite true.

Highly recommend this book, or at least doing a good Wikipedia dive.… (mais)