Matilda Joslyn Gage - Founder of The Women's National Liberal Union

Founder of The Women's National Liberal Union

Gage unsuccessfully tried to prevent the conservative takeover of the women's suffrage movement. Susan B. Anthony who had helped to found the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), was primarily concerned with gaining the vote, an outlook which Gage found too narrow. Conservative suffragists were drawn into the organisation, and these women tended not to support general social reform, or attacks on the church.

The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), part of the conservative wing of the suffrage movement (and formerly at odds with the National), was open to the prospect of merging with the NWSA under Anthony, while Anthony was working toward unifying the suffrage movement under the single goal of gaining the vote. The merger of the two organizations, pushed through by Lucy Stone, Alice Stone Blackwell and Anthony, produced the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. While Stanton and Gage maintained their radical positions, they found that the only women's issue really unifying the NAWSA was the move for suffrage.

This prompted Gage to establish the Women's National Liberal Union (WNLU) in 1890, of which she was president until her death (by stroke) in 1898. Attracting more radical members than NAWSA, the WNLU was the perfect mouthpiece for her attacks on religion. She became the editor of the official journal of the WNLU, The Liberal Thinker.

Gage was an avid opponent of the various Christian churches, and she strongly supported the separation of church and state, believing "that the greatest injury to the world has arisen from theological laws – from a union of Church and State". She wrote in October 1881:

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against "Sabbath Laws", the uses of the "Bible in School", and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce "God in the Constitution." —(Reference: "God in the Constitution", page 2)

In 1893, she published Woman, Church and State, a book which outlined the variety of ways in which Christianity had oppressed women and reinforced patriarchal systems. It was wide-ranging and built extensively upon arguments and ideas she had previously put forth in speeches (and in a chapter of History of Woman Suffrage which bore the same name).