About National Citizen and Ballot Box

National Citizen and Ballot Box

The National Citizen and Ballot Box was a monthly women's suffrage newspaper published in Syracuse, New York, from May 1878 to October 1881, edited by Matilda Joslyn Gage. It began in Toledo, Ohio, as The Ballot Box, the monthly journal of the Toledo Woman Suffrage Association, and when its founder retired in 1878 Gage bought the paper, moved it to her home state of New York and gave it a national name, a national mission and a place as the voice of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Each edition carried the declaration that the pen is mightier than the sword, and for three years Gage used that pen on suffrage, women's legal disabilities, Native American citizenship, women inventors and the role of the church in women's oppression.

The paper was the journalistic platform of one of the suffrage movement's three great leaders. Gage stood alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a cofounder of the National Woman Suffrage Association, served as its president, and co-edited the first volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage; contemporaries ranked her with Stanton and Anthony, though later generations forgot her, in part because her views on religion were too radical for the movement that survived her.

The Toledo Ballot Box, 1876 to 1878

The paper began in 1876 as The Ballot Box, started by Sarah R. L. Williams, editor of the women's department of the Toledo Blade, as the monthly journal of the Toledo Woman Suffrage Association in Ohio. It was dedicated to the advocacy of equal rights irrespective of sex. For two years it served its local association, reporting suffrage work and arguing the cause to Ohio readers.

When Williams decided to retire in 1878, the paper was sold to Matilda Joslyn Gage. Gage renamed it The National Citizen and Ballot Box, later shortening it to The National Citizen, and brought it to Syracuse, New York. The new title announced her intention: the question, in her view, was not a local or state favor but a matter of national citizenship, to be protected by national law.

Gage's prospectus

In the prospectus printed in the first issue of May 1878, Gage set out her positions plainly. The paper would advocate the principle that suffrage is the citizen's right and should be protected by national law, and that while states might regulate the suffrage they should have no power to abolish it. It would support no political party until one arose based on the exact and permanent political equality of man and woman.

The same opening issue showed the breadth of her concerns. Alongside the prospectus, Gage published an article on Indian citizenship, arguing for the rights of Native Americans, a cause she championed throughout her career and for which she was adopted into the Mohawk nation. The paper's especial object, she wrote, was to secure national protection to women citizens in the exercise of their right to vote, and to oppose class legislation of whatever form; women of every class, condition, rank and name, she promised, would find the paper their friend.

Matilda Joslyn Gage, the editor

Gage brought unusual preparation to the editor's desk. Born on March 24, 1826, in Cicero, New York, she was the daughter of Dr. Hezekiah Joslyn, an abolitionist whose home served as a station on the Underground Railroad and who educated his daughter in Greek, mathematics, anatomy and physiology. She married Henry H. Gage in 1845 and settled in Fayetteville, New York. In September 1852 she made her first public address, as the youngest speaker at the National Women's Rights Convention in Syracuse, and she was a cofounder, with Stanton and Anthony, of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and a contributor to its paper The Revolution.

Gage's gifts were chiefly literary and organizational. She served as president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association and, in 1875 and 1876, as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association before chairing its executive committee. With Stanton she drafted the Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, presented at the Philadelphia Centennial celebrations in 1876. Anthony credited her with bringing more startling facts to light than any woman she knew, a researcher's tribute that the National Citizen's learned, wide-ranging columns bore out.

Contents: history, invention and law

The National Citizen and Ballot Box published regular columns about prominent women in history and about female inventors, extending Gage's pamphlet Woman as Inventor of 1870, which had argued, among other cases, that a woman, Catharine Littlefield Greene, had invented the cotton gin. Recovering women's achievements was for Gage a political act: a sex told it had invented nothing and governed nothing could be answered from the historical record.

The paper also ranged over subjects other suffrage journals handled gingerly. It published articles on the treatment of women prisoners, on prostitution, a topic that could risk prosecution merely for being mentioned in print, and on the role of Christianity in the oppression of women. Gage wrote clearly and logically, often with dry wit. Discussing laws that allowed a man to will his children to a guardian unrelated to their mother, she observed that it is sometimes better to be a dead man than a live woman, in her January 1879 article All the Rights I Want.

The final issues and the break of 1881

Gage edited the paper for three years, from May 1878 to October 1881. Its closing issues carried some of her most characteristic work, including A Sermon Against Woman in September 1881 and God in the Constitution in the final number of October 1881, essays that pressed her argument that religious teaching was a foundation of women's legal subjection. She left the paper in 1881 to devote herself to editing, with Stanton and Anthony, the History of Woman Suffrage, whose first three volumes appeared between 1881 and 1886 and became the movement's monumental archive.

The paper's end coincided with the closing of Gage's era at the movement's center. When the National Woman Suffrage Association merged with the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, Gage judged that the united organization had compromised too many principles and left to form her own group, the Woman's National Liberal Union, whose journal, The Liberal Thinker, she edited from 1890. In 1893 she published her book Woman, Church and State, expanding the critique the National Citizen had pioneered.

Gage and Syracuse

The paper's Syracuse base was fitting. Gage was a central New Yorker by birth and lifelong association: born in Cicero, educated in part at the Clinton Liberal Institute, married and settled in Fayetteville, and launched as a speaker at the Syracuse convention of 1852. Bringing The Ballot Box from Toledo to Syracuse placed the National Woman Suffrage Association's voice in the region that had hosted the movement's early conventions and in the hands of its most scholarly editor.

Syracuse and Fayetteville remained Gage's home territory for the rest of her life, and Anthony was so frequent a guest at the Gage house in Fayetteville that the family called its guest room the Susan B. Anthony room. Gage died in Chicago on March 18, 1898, while visiting family, six years short of the century in which her paper's demands would finally be met.

Her pamphlets and the recovery of women's history

The National Citizen did not exist in isolation; it was the periodical expression of a research program Gage had pursued in pamphlet form for a decade. Her Woman's Rights Catechism of 1871 set out the movement's claims in question-and-answer form for ordinary readers. Her 1880 pamphlet asking who planned the Tennessee campaign of 1862 argued that the Union's strategy in that Civil War campaign had been designed by Anna Ella Carroll rather than by Ulysses S. Grant, another case, like the cotton gin, of a woman's work absorbed into a man's reputation.

These writings, widely read in their day, supplied the National Citizen with its distinctive historical columns. Gage was building, article by article, an archive of women's achievement that could be cited against the claim that women had no history worth enfranchising, the same archive she would help expand into the first volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage after the paper closed.

Legacy

The National Citizen and Ballot Box lasted only three years, but it carried the most intellectually ambitious editorship of any American suffrage paper of its generation. Its prospectus stated the federal theory of suffrage, protection of the citizen's vote by national law, that the movement eventually won through the Nineteenth Amendment, and its columns widened the suffrage argument into law, history, invention, Native rights and theology.

The paper is also central to the modern recovery of Gage herself. Long overshadowed by Stanton and Anthony, she has been restored by scholars to her place in the movement's triumvirate, and the National Citizen, which survives on microfilm, is among the chief sources for her thought in her own words, a record of the pen she believed mightier than the sword.