Book Review: Born Criminal

Carpenter, Angelica Shirley. Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist. South Dakota Historical Society Press, Pierre, SD: 2018.

I considered Matilda Joslyn Gage one of my favorite suffragists even before reading this book — and this biography confirms it. She was anti-racist (unlike many white suffragists) and recognized certain Native tribes as non-patriarchal — and a tribe adopted her. She was radical —

probably the first to acknowledge and analyze the misogyny and patriarchy of Xianity — and wrote the book Woman, Church and State.

Unfortunately, though she was a major suffragist, MJG has been largely ignored. Even during her lifetime, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony stole her thunder and succeeded in coming across as the most important suffragists. They didn’t give her enough credit for her contributions to the four-volume history of suffrage, and when they wrote about MJG, they did so briefly and diminished her work. As Ani Difranco would say, Susan B. Anthony was “a fucking Napoleon.” I try to give Anthony slack because she was a lesbian, but she’s disappointing — between the overtly racist things she said in response to the movement to give black men the vote before women, plus how she treated Gage, and the way she underplayed Gage’s part in the movement and stole from her.