Woman, Church & State: The Original Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex

Matilda Joslyn Gage spent twenty years researching a history the world did not want told. The result is an 1893 masterpiece of feminist scholarship that argues Christianity did not elevate women, it shattered them. Gage traces the arc of female power from ancient matriarchies through the rise of patriarchal religion, documenting how male-dominated church and state conspired to strip women of autonomy, property, education, and bodily integrity. She examines the medieval worship of celibacy as proof of woman's 'uncleanness,' the witch burnings that targeted independent women, the legal annihilation of wives, and the church's systematic opposition to female learning. But Gage is not merely a historian mourning what was lost. She is a radical who sees clearly that fundamental institutions must be dismantled for equality to exist. Writing decades before most of these issues entered public discourse, she names what others refused to acknowledge: marital rape, unequal pay, the sexual abuse of children, the differential treatment of prostitutes versus their clients. This is not a relic. It is an uncannily prescient document that reveals how many battles we are still fighting.