Frances Dana Barker Gage (pen name, Aunt Fanny; October 12, 1808November 10, 1884) was a leading American reformer, feminist and abolitionist. She worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with other leaders of the early women's rights movement in the United States. She was among the first to champion voting rights for all citizens without regard to race or gender and was a particularly outspoken supporter of giving newly freed African American women the franchise during Reconstruction, along with African American men who had formerly been slaves.
Early life and education
Frances Dana Barker was born near Marietta, Ohio on October 12, 1808, the daughter of farmers Elizabeth Dana (1771–1835) and Col. Joseph Barker (1765–1843); her family's house is still in existence and has been designated a historic site. Frances was the tenth of eleven children. In 1788 the Barkers left New Hampshire and crossed the Alleghenies with Rufus Putnam, and were among the first settlers in the United States Northwest Territory. On January 1, 1829, she married James L. Gage (1800–1863), an abolitionist lawyer from McConnelsville, Ohio. He was a Universalist and a friend of the evangelist Stephen R. Smith. Traveling Universalist preachers, like George Rogers and Nathaniel Stacy, often stayed in the Gage household.
Career
Activism
Gage wrote that her woman suffrage work began when she was ten years old, in 1818. She helped her father make barrels and her work was so well executed that her father praised her work, but then lamented her "accident of gender." Gage wrote that this was a turning point for her, the incident bringing up hatred to the limitations of sex and laying the foundation for her later activism.
Though Gage was inspired at an early age, she did not begin her activist work until after 1848. In 1850, she held a convention in McConnelsville, Ohio, which seventy people attended. Those at the convention fought to have race and gender removed from requirements for state citizenship and voting rights in the Ohio Constitution. Their work was not successful.
She was an activist in the temperance, anti-slavery, and woman's-rights movements, and in 1851 presided over a woman's-rights convention in Akron, Ohio, where her opening speech introducing Sojourner Truth attracted much attention. Twelve years later, in 1863, Gage recorded her recollection of Truth's speech, "Ain't I a Woman?." Gage's version notably differs from 1851 accounts, lengthening the speech, adding the oft-repeated "ain't I a woman" refrain, and rendering it in a minstrel-like imitation of the speech of Southern slaves – speech patterns which Truth, having grown up in New York speaking Dutch, did not possess. Despite its dubious historicity and racist undertones, her version has become the standard text and account of that famous speech.
In 1853, she moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she was often threatened with violence due to her anti-slavery views. Six months after moving to St. Louis, she was elected chair of the National Woman's Rights Convention in Cleveland in October. In 1857 she visited Cuba, Saint Thomas and Santo Domingo, and returned to write and lecture. Gage's radicalism had limited outlets in a slave state, such as Missouri. She and her family moved back to Columbus, Ohio in 1860. James' health was declining and the family had survived three mysterious fires, likely brought on by Frances' abolitionist views.
In 1860, Gage became editor of the Ladies Department for the Ohio Cultivator where she advocated for feminists and abolitionists. She also lobbied for an Ohio law for married women to have the same property rights as men, but she was unsuccessful.
When the American Civil War began she was employed by the Western Sanitary Commission; she traveled down the Mississippi River to help the injured in Vicksburg, Natchez and Memphis. From 1863 to 1864 she was the superintendent, under General Rufus Saxton, in charge of Parris Island, South Carolina, a refuge for over 500 freed slaves. While there she met and became friends with nurse Clara Barton, who was working nearby. They compared their childhoods, and discussed Universalism and literature. Gage joined the American Equal Rights Association in 1863 as a paid lobbyist and writer.