Ohio History Journal

CAROL STEINHAGEN

The Two Lives of Frances Dana Gage

 

 

 

In the year before her death, Frances Dana Gage (1808-1884) wrote an auto-

biographical sketch for Woman's Journal, the organ of the American Woman

Suffrage Association.¹ It seems appropriate that the infirm and isolated vet-

eran of so many antebellum woman's rights campaigns would want to create

a link to the younger generation of reformers, and to mark her place in the

history of nineteenth-century reform movements. Gage might have character-

ized herself as an important messenger of woman's rights ideology in the

West, a woman who delivered "reformatory" lectures in remote areas where

the only platform was a schoolhouse. She might have characterized herself as

an abolitionist who not only spoke for but worked with slaves on the Sea

Islands plantations that were part of the Port Royal experiment. She might

have characterized herself as a writer whose poetry and newspaper correspon-

dence reached out to the working class so often overlooked by reformers. But

Gage, in one of her last public communications, had another aspect of her life

in mind. She wanted to assure readers that she was not the daughter of a

cooper.

The provocation for this seemingly petty concern was the publication, fif-

teen years earlier, of a tribute to Gage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  In this

tribute Stanton identified Gage's father, Joseph Barker, as "a farmer and a

cooper," and went on to explain that Frances had "assisted her father in mak-

ing barrels and I have heard her often tell that, as she would roll out a well-

made barrel, her father would pat her on the head and say, 'Ah, Fanny, you

should have been a boy!'^"2 The story may have appealed to Stanton because

of its similarity to her own childhood experience.³ For Frances Dana Gage,

however, the story as Stanton told it was a distortion of history in general and

of a personal history that she had repeatedly made part of her public corre-

spondence and lectures.  In the  strident rebuttal  written for Woman's

Journal, Gage declared, "As far as my knowledge goes, my honored sire never

put a hoop even upon a water-bucket." She went on to review his accom-

 

 

 

Carol Steinhagen is a Professor of English at Marietta College.

 

1. "The Autobiography of Frances Dana Gage," Woman's Journal, March 31, 1883.

2. "Frances D. Gage," in James Parton et al., eds., Eminent Women of the Age (Hartford,

Conn., 1868), 383.

3. Stanton's efforts to please her father by acting as would a son are recounted in Elisabeth

Griffith. In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 1984), 7-13.

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The Two Lives of Fances Dana Gage                                        23

 

plishments--Ohio legislator, judge, carpenter, inventor, pioneer settler of the

trans-Appalachian region, and farmer. Her experience as a cooper, she re-

ported, was limited to making one barrel. For this accomplishment her father

reprimanded her severely and sent her back to the house. As she returned to

her proper place she heard him say to the cooper, "What a pity she was not a

boy!"

Why was it so important for Frances Dana Gage to tell the story of the bar-

rel-making episode in an autobiographical sketch that concentrated on her an-

cestry more than on her accomplishments? The answers to this question re-

flect not only on Gage's role as a pioneer female activist but also on her

generation of antebellum reformers. One answer lies in considering the im-

portance of autobiography for Gage and her colleagues. They established,

through stories of personal history, the collective historical basis for rejection

of social and legal barriers to women's advancement. At the conclusion of

her story Gage declared, "Then and there sprang up my hatred to the limita-

tions of sex. Then and there the foundation was laid for all my woman suf-

frage work, which began in 1818, when I was ten years old." Such claims

were not unique to Gage. As Blanche Glassman Hersh observes of feminist-

abolitionists, "Most were characterized as 'rebellious' and 'strong-minded' be-

cause they insisted on sharing in their brothers' play and work. ...  Bright

and achieving, most had been told by a parent: 'What a pity you were not a

boy!'"⁴ This prototype of female experience was so important to Gage that

she repeatedly told her barrel-making story, each time with variations, until

it stands as a legend in her own history.⁵

In addition to legitimating rebellion, however, Gage's story established her

identity as part of a dynamic nation's ruling class. Just as Gage embedded her

personal story in a celebration of her pioneer father's heritage and achieve-

ments, so, according to Hersh, did her fellow feminist abolitionists take pride

in their Yankee roots. "Their sense of heritage gave them an aura of righ-

teousness and superiority, but it also contributed to feelings of security and

self-confidence which enabled them to survive in the face of hostility and dis-

 

 

 

4. The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana, Ill., 1978), 134.

5. Variations and/or repetitions of the legend may be found in Frances D. Gage to S. S.

Barry, Una, December 1853; "Address of Frances D. Gage," Proceedings of the First

Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association Held at the Church of the Puritans, New

York, May 9 and 10, 1867 (New York, 1867), 66 [Cited hereafter as Proceedings.]; Celia

Burleigh, "People Worth Knowing-No. 2," Woman's Journal, July 9, 1870; Phebe A.

Hanaford, "Women Reformers," Daughters of America, or Women of the Century (Augusta,

Maine, 1883), 340; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds.,

The History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 2 (Rochester, N.Y., 1889), 224; Nettie T. Henery, "Aunt

Fanny Gage: The Story of a Famous McConnelsville Woman," Typescript written for the

Morgan County Herald, December 28, 1937, 6, Simpson Morgan Country Library,

McConnelsville; Eugene Roseboom, "Frances Dana Gage," Notable American Women, 1607-

1950, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 2-3.

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24                                                     OHIO HISTORY

 

approval."⁶ Thus, the very "lords of creation," whose command of laws and

customs provoked their granddaughters' and daughters' rebellion, were also a

mainstay for those defiant descendants.

Surely Gage, in celebrating her rebellious spirit and the authority of her fa-

ther, was not consciously aware of contradiction. Nor was she consciously

aware of the conflict underlying the reform enterprise to which she devoted

much of her adult life. That conflict, however, is echoed in her autobiograph-

ical sketch and may help to account for her fixation on the barrel-making

story. In the image of the precocious ten-year-old rejecting the boundaries of

the sphere designated for her sex is also the image of a girl whose identity

was shaped by those boundaries. Surrounded by the environment she loved,

the legendary young Fanny Barker is an apt model of her real-life adult coun-

terpart and many other women who challenged "the limitations of sex" in the

second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. On the one hand Gage and

her cohorts defied the restrictions imposed by law and by woman's sphere ide-

ology, and sought access to public spheres as a means of overcoming these

restrictions. On the other hand they found in the woman's sphere a source of

legitimacy, stability and solace. In repeating the story of her introduction to

the public arena of woman's rights activism, Gage revealed her dependence on

the woman's sphere-the home and the patriarchal system that established the

home as a sanctuary for women. The seemingly strange focus of her autobi-

ographical sketch represents the double life she lived as a public figure. She

was committed to rejecting the concept of separate spheres of action for men

and women, but she developed a public persona that represented the virtues of

domesticity promoted by woman's sphere ideology.

Gage's ties to the woman's sphere were established by her experience in

two homes that shaped the fundamentals of her character. Her original home

was the farm on the banks of the Muskingum River outside Marietta, Ohio,

where the barrel-making story was set. This home fostered her essential val-

ues. Here she developed an appreciation for the importance of her Barker and

Dana ancestors' role in settling what was, after the Revolutionary War, the

West. Here she developed gendered values, inheriting from her mother and

grandmother Dana a sympathy for the oppressed, and from her father an appre-

ciation of the intellectual heritage of England.⁷ Here she came to relish in-

vigorating labor, for, although she was discouraged from cooperage, she was

allowed to milk cows and plow fields.⁸ Such experiences, which she later

 

 

6. The Slavery of Sex, 121-22.

7. "The Autobiography of Frances D. Gage"; L. P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan,

Woman's Work--in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism and Patience (Philadelphia,

1867), 683-84; "Memoir of Frances Dana Barker," Janney Family Papers, Mss, 142, Box 3/7,

Ohio Historical Society.

8. Burleigh, "People Worth Knowing"; Frances D. Gage, "Woman's Sphere--What Mrs.

Jones Said About It," Ohio Cultvitator, January 1, 1851.

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The Two Lives of Fances Dana Gage                                25

characterized as early steps beyond the woman's sphere boundaries, reflect the realities of agrarian life unrefined by the guidelines for appropriate gender be- havior that were popularized in ladies' magazines. In the Barker household agricultural and domestic tasks were closely integrated.   According to Frances's sister Catherine, "Many girls that I knew were smart enough, to spin and weave flannel and exchange it for calico for dresses. My mother thought it not good economy for us, but we milked the cows and made butter and cheese to do it."9 Living on a farm on the banks of the Muskingum also gave Fanny Barker a literal sense of freedom. Here she had "ample opportunity for indulging her love of outdoor life," which she preferred to the "dull monotonies of indoor life."l0 Freedom for young Fanny meant rushing through lessons in order to have "time to play and be in all sorts of mischiefs and every bad scrape that turned up in school."ll  But it also meant hiding in the garret, "where thoughts could flow free," to write.12 If Fanny Barker was a "pest" and "the worst child that ever lived,' 13 she also impressed her neighbors (unfavorably) as a girl who "will want to get her side saddle on a comets tail and ride after a     9. Catherine Barker, "Written by Hand," Autobiography ms. B-57, Vol. 1, 8, Dawes Library Special Collections, Marietta College. 10. "Memoir of Frances Dana Barker," Janney Family Papers. 11. Barker, "Written by Hand," Vol. 1, 11. 12. Ibid., 12. 13. Burleigh, "People Worth Knowing."

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26                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

bit."¹⁴ Although her country home did not shelter her from criticism of be-

havior inappropriate for a girl, it did foster energy and nourish "her lofty aspi-

rations." 15 It was a home she yearned for throughout her life.¹⁶

Her second important home was a large brick house called Mount Airy that

loomed over the village of McConnelsville, Ohio.17 Here Frances Dana

Barker Gage lived a fairly conventional life in the first two decades of her mar-

riage to attorney and entrepreneur James Lampson Gage (1800-1863).

Married at the age of twenty on January 1, 1829, she had eight children by

July 1842.18 The early years of her marriage were consumed with the tasks

of mothering and keeping house, which included taking in boarders. As she

complained to her sister Charlotte,

 

I have had no girl [housekeeping assistant] for 2 months chick nor child but have

done

My washing baking brewing

Frying boiling roasting          all myself.¹⁹

Scrubbing sweeping stewing

Whipping scolding toasting

 

Although full-time housekeeping and mothering gave Frances Gage a large

measure of the "dull monotonies of indoor life," she boasted that "few could

perform half the labor in the same time, none plan so well, or meet more

readily every emergency."²⁰ In this home too Gage thrived, finding ample

occupation for her energies.

Proud as she was of her accomplishments at Mount Airy, Gage wanted, as

she liked to put it, to "say my say." The opportunity to write poetry and let-

ters for local and regional newspapers meant that she no longer had to hide in

a garret to "scribble." Writing for the papers in the late 1840s allowed Gage

to test the boundaries of the domestic sphere. "If I can't make a commotion

in the midst of the sea, I can throw my pebble into the edge of the ocean, and

who knows but the eddying ripples may widen their circles, till they reach ...

the enormous verge of the waters of life," she declared in 1852.21  Her desire

to enter the "ocean" of political activity was heightened when, on a trip to the

 

14. Barker, "Written by Hand," Vol. 1, 14.

15. "Memoir of Frances Dana Barker," Janney Family Papers.

16. This yearning is a major theme of Gage's poetry.

17. So fond was Gage of Mount Airy that she gave this name to the family's second St. Louis

home, where she tried to recreate the conditions of the first Mount Airy.

18. Genealogical information about the Gages' children may be found in Richard Dana

Benton, compiler, The Danas and the Dana Farm (privately printed, 1991), Washington County

(Ohio) Historical Society.

19. Gage to Charlotte C. Barker, n.d. [probably late 1832], Collection of Jerry Devol.

Devola, Ohio. Note: Gage's letters were never dated by year, and some lack any date. Dates

inferred from internal evidence will be bracketed.

20. "Memoir of Frances Dana Barker," Janney Family Papers.

21. Gage to Amelia Bloomer, Lily, 4 (March, 1852), 19.

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The Two Lives of Fances Dana Gage                                 27

 

Northeast with her husband and father-in-law, she read a newspaper account of

the Seneca Falls convention of July 1848, the first convention organized to

advance the cause of women's rights. Later, in her address to the Massillon,

Ohio, Woman's Rights Convention of 1852, Gage reported that her friends

thought her "crazy" for wishing she had gone to Seneca Falls. She, however,

could see the convention only as a sign of hope that she could soon escape

from her "straight jacket." This metaphor aptly characterizes the whalebone

corsets she wore in compliance with fashion dictates and her sense of being

restrained by censure of her audacious opinions.²²

Even in the village of McConnelsville, far from eastern cities where wom-

an's rights advocates found allies and guidance among organized abolitionists

and temperance reformers, Gage was able to make inroads into the public

sphere of politics. Before moving to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1853, Gage was

instrumental in organizing three woman's rights conventions in rural Ohio

(McConnelsville, Chesterfield, and Mount Gilead), and she presided over two

important urban conventions in Akron and Massillon.²³ Her characterization

of the reputation she gained from such activities is not only an interesting ad-

dition to the public record, it also reflects her self-consciousness about her in-

cursions into the public sphere.

Gage's official entry into southeastern Ohio politics was the May 29,

1850, woman's rights convention that she and three other McConnelsville

women organized. They were able to attract some seventy women to the

Masonic Hall and write a memorial requesting that the words "white" and

"male" be omitted from the new Ohio Constitution.²⁴ Both the local Morgan

Herald and the Marietta Intelligencer took respectful notice of the proceedings.

The Intelligencer estimated a crowd of one to two hundred, "an array of

beauty" such as no political convention ever assembled could boast.²⁵  The

Morgan Herald reported that the resolution calling for woman suffrage on the

principle of no taxation without representation "called forth considerable dis-

cussion," but that objections were addressed and "briefly and ably answered"

by F. D. Gage. The Herald added that the memorial to the constitutional

convention was signed "by nearly all present."²⁶

In recalling the McConnelsville convention years later, however, Gage took

a less sanguine view of her persuasive skills.  She remembered only forty

signatures on the memorial, and emphasized her alienation from the commu-

nity. "My notoriety as an Abolitionist made it difficult for me to reach peo-

 

 

22. George Gage, "Diary, 1848-49," Ms. 2385, Ohio Historical Society; Anti-Slavery Bugle,

June 5, 1852.

23. Ibid.; History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 1, 112-18.

24. History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 1, 117. The other women were Hettie M. Little, Mary

T. Corner, and Harriet Brewster.

25. Marietta Intelligencer, June 6, 1850.

26. Morgan Herald, June 6, 1850.

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28                                                             OHIO HISTORY

 

pie at home. and, consequently, I had to work through press and social circle

.... For years I had been talking and writing, and people were used to my

craziness.' But who expected Mrs. Corner and others to take such a stand!

Of course, we were heartily abused."²⁷ This characterization, like her remarks

about local reaction to her interest in the Seneca Falls convention, empha-

sizes the punishment Gage suffered for taking unpopular public stands. A

tribute she wrote for her husband reinforces the idea that to be a reformer in

McConnelsville was to be alienated. "In those days, on the very borders of

slavedom, it required much nerve to be true, and to stand alone. No Anti-

Slavery Society gave its support to the isolated Abolitionist, who . . . stood

as it were the picket guard upon the outpost of Freedom."²⁸    This statement

ignores the active network of Underground Railroad agents and supporters in

the area, as well as the Western Anti-Slavery Society, which, apparently,

Gage neverjoined.²⁹ When she moved to St. Louis she felt even more iso-

lated, complaining to fellow reformer Rebecca Janney, "I have no helpers or

workers here, not the half you have in Ohio . . . and they treat [me] in the

main as if I were a wild beast.^"30  Later Gage claimed, in Woman's Work in

the Civil War, that "it never seemed to her to require any sacrifice to resist the

popular will." yet she went on to detail several such sacrifices. She reported

that her bold stands on behalf of abolitionism caused her to be fired as a corre-

spondent from   three newspapers, the Ohio State Journal, the Missouri

Republican and the Missouri Democrat. She also claimed that her bold ex-

pression of political views in St. Louis had provoked personal threats and

three acts of arson against the Gages' property.³¹

Certainly Gage did suffer public and personal rebuke for her advocacy of

feminist, abolitionist, and temperance sentiments. But her self-characteriza-

tion as a crazy lady and wild beast overlooks her reputation as genial Aunt

Fanny, "a 'womanly woman,' highly appreciated by the common people,"

 

 

27. History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 1, 117. A record of the "abuse" of which Gage speaks

is found in a June 27, 1850, letter to the Morgan Herald from three unnamed men who belittled

the report of the convention and called Gage a "very sarcastic" woman who made "unnatural

assertions" and "violent censure."

28. National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 6, 1864.

29. Information about Underground Railroad activities in Morgan County may be found in

Eck Humphries, The Underground Railroad (McConnelsville, Ohio, 1931) and Wilbur Henry

Siebert, The Mysteries of Ohio's Underground Railroads (Columbus, Ohio, 1951). No record

of Gage's involvement is found in reports of the Western Anti-Slavery Society in the Anti-

Slavely Bugle throughout the 1850s.

30. Gage to Janney, May 11 [1855], Janney Family Papers, Mss. 142, Box 4/5.

31. Brockett and Vaughn, 684-88. The claims of arson are difficult to substantiate. A

search of the Missouri Republican and the Missouri Democrat yielded only one instance of fire

damage to Gage property. This, as reported in the Democrat, September 2, 1856, was a fire

ignited in either tenements or a stable that spread to, among other places, James Gage's

foundry. It seems unlikely that a politically motivated arsonist would have burned poor peo-

ple's lodgings to send a message to Frances Dana Gage. It is possible, though, that arsonists

started small fires too insignificant to be reported in the papers.

• 7
 

The Two Lives of Fances Dana Gage                                   29

 

"so well and favorably known throughout the country, as a chaste and beauti-

ful writer, and as one of the ablest advocates of reform known to the Press."³²

Her emphasis on the cost of taking unpopular stands reflects her admiration

for defiance of public opinion in the name of truth and duty. The call to "dare

to 'stand alone,"' issued in the poem "Stand for the Right" and similar poetic

proclamations, expressed approval of the kind of public stands that merit cen-

sure and rejection.33 But such proclamations may have masked her desire to

be accepted. As Gage revealed in a letter to Susan B. Anthony, she hoped

that she, like Lucretia Mott, would be able to work long for the cause of

woman's rights and be loved by the people for what she had done.³⁴ The po-

sition of one who stands alone is fundamentally at odds with this desire and

with the image of Aunt Fanny upon which her contemporary reputation

rested.

What emerges in Gage's declamatory poetry and her personal stories of au-

dacity is a consciously crafted image of a woman committed from her youth

to break out of the boundaries of the woman's sphere in order to do her moral

duty, regardless of the personal costs. This self-image underscores Gage's be-

lief that she and all women, divinely designated as they were to determine the

mental, moral, and physical character of every human being, had a responsi-

bility to work publicly on behalf of reform. "Come out, then, Oh! my sis-

ters, from the quiet sheltered nooks of domestic life," she called, urging

women to agitate on behalf of temperance legislation. The ideal consequence

of such work would be the spread of woman's influence beyond the home,

where it was of limited value, and into the political and social arenas, where it

could effect sobriety, equality, and improved education.35 What the declama-

tory poetry and personal stories do not reveal, however, is Gage's apprehen-

sion that public arenas undermined the security and assurance of moral superi-

ority that was nurtured within the home.

Gage gave veiled expression to this apprehension in the poem "I Live Two

Lives.^"36 Overtly, the poem contrasts two visions: one (stanzas one through

seven) informed by a perception of all the nation's ills--intemperance, slav-

ery, war, female irresponsibility; the other (stanzas eight through thirteen) in-

formed by faith in God that these ills will be rectified when the domestic

virtue of love "blends" with the call to duty. This blending of love and duty

 

 

32. W. H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley: Historical and

Biographical Sketches (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1891), 280; Missouri Democrat, April 2, 1855.

33. First published in the Morgan Herald, June 13, 1850. According to Woman's Work in the

Civil War, 685, this poem was written in answer to a Congressman who wanted Gage to use her

influence in getting her husband "to yield a point of principle."

34. Gage to Anthony. March 7, [1856], Frances Dana Gage Papers, Schlesinger Library,

Radcliffe College.

35. Gage to New York Woman's Temperance Convention, Lily, 4 (May, 1852), 37-38; Gage

to Amelia Bloomer, Lily, 4 (April, 1852), 26.

36. National Anti-Slavery Standard, February 7, 1862.

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30                                                        OHIO HISTORY

 

would signal the ideal union of the private and public spheres, a union that

would allow a reformer like Gage to live one life governed by laws and cus-

toms shaped by female influence. The poem, however, emphasizes disunity

rather than unity, two lives rather than one. Although its vision of faith is

overtly triumphant, its structure isolates this vision from descriptions of "the

inebriate's hell," the "groans of bondmen," and the "red thunder" of war, mak-

ing these evils seem resistant to the influence of faith and love. Gage's

rhetoric reinforces the division. The first half of the poem employs the over-

wrought language characteristic of contemporary reform rhetoric. The second

half is imbued with the sentimental rhetoric that was conventionally used to

promote the virtues of domesticity. The image of "dear woman" "lifting the

lowest to our God still nigher / Making all earth more beautiful" by

"watching, tending / On all the weak who fall" is Gage's version of the do-

mestic savior. The domestic ideology of her time dictated that this savior

confine her mission to the home. Although Gage was committed to extend-

ing the range of her mission, she had difficulty envisioning a time in which

"dear woman" was not isolated and protected from the world she was destined

to save.

A more overt expression of Gage's apprehension about entering the public

sphere is found in a series of reports to the Missouri Republican on an 1854

trip to New Orleans.³⁷ The series as a whole suggests the disjunction of her

two lives in that it omits any reference to her historically significant speech

in New Orleans, the first woman's rights lecture given in the Deep South.³⁸

While she freely discussed the lecture in Una, "A Paper Devoted to the

Celebration of Women," she cleansed her Republican reports of overtly polit-

ical content.39 One episode within the series is especially significant because

it concentrates on fear of the mobility that was crucial to the success of the

reform enterprise. Usually Gage took the difficulties of travel in stride as she

made her way from one lecture or convention site to another, even when the

overturning of a carriage in September 1864 left her seriously injured.⁴⁰  In

this report, however, she revealed her ambivalence about assuming the free-

dom to go where she pleased.

Noting the benefit of travel for developing her philosophical perspective on

"the migratory portions of our restless world," she went on to report one of

 

 

37. Missouri Republican, March 24, 26, 27, 30, 1854, and April 2, 1854.

38. Diane Van Skiver Gagel, "Ohio Women Unite: The Salem Convention of 1850,"

Women in Ohio History (Columbus, Ohio, 1976), 6-7. As Gage admitted in a May 1854 report

to Una, and as the New Orleans Daily Picayune of March 17, 1854, reported with some satis-

faction, her audience in Lyceum Hall was very small. She spoke on the social, industrial, and

civil disabilities of U.S. women.

39. Una, May 1854. It is possible that her editors excised a report of her New Orleans

speech, but such self-censorship was characteristic of Gage's newspaper correspondence in

St. Louis.

40. National Anti-Slavery Standard, October 22, 1864.

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The Two Lives of Fances Dana Gage                                   31

 

the "unavoidable, but very unpleasant" accidents to which the traveler is vul-

nerable. She had found herself alone on the steamboat Martha Jewett when

her traveling companion, her son, had failed to get on board. Contemplating

the prospect that no one would miss her if she disappeared, she was drawn to

the inscription over the ladies' saloon: "Be kind to the loved ones at home,"

and a plaque containing the boat's name. Discovering this to be the name of

the captain's sister, Gage felt bolstered by the power of domestic virtue.

Ah! thought 1-the man who can thus consecrate himself to the holiest tie of life,

and put the name of a beloved sister where it will be an hourly remembrancer of

childhood, of innocence, of home; the mind that would conceive the idea of plac-

ing that beautiful sentiment . . . ever before the gaze of the pleasure-seeking,

money-loving crowd, must be kind and sympathizing.⁴¹

 

This overt expression of the consolation of domestic ideology shows how

Gage could make public use of the concept of private virtue. It also shows

her appreciation of the power of female influence, as it was defined by this

ideology, to oppose the acquisitive values associated with the marketplace.⁴²

She was not alone among her political colleagues in appreciating the concept

of separate spheres of influence for women and men. As Paula Baker points

out, the social construct of the home sphere was congenial to many nine-

teenth century women because "it encouraged a sense of community and re-

sponsibility toward all women, and it furnished a basis for political action."⁴³

Underlying the concept of separate spheres was the post-Revolution principle

of republican motherhood, which promised a measure of empowerment for

women in the emerging nation by recognizing mothers' role in educating the

future leaders of the republic.⁴⁴ When Frances Gage entered the public arenas

of the press, lecture sites, and convention halls, she could draw on this his-

tory of respect for female influence without seriously violating contemporary

notions of woman's proper place. She could ask Ohio Cultivator readers if

they had made themselves fit for the "great work" of becoming mothers of

"the agriculturist, the mechanic, the manufacturer, the artisan, the statesman,

the professional man, and laborers of both sexes."⁴⁵ As long as she empha-

sized maternal prerogatives, she did not risk being labeled crazy, and she could

keep her public and private lives in balance.

 

 

 

41. Missouri Republican, April 2, 1854.

42. For a summary of the relationship between domestic and marketplace values see Nancy

Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, 1977), 67-70.

43. "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,"

American Historical Review, 89 (June, 1984), 632. See also Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the

Mother: American Writing About Domesticity, 1830-1860 (New York, 1982), 111.

44. Sara M. Evans, in Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York, 1989),

57, offers a lucid definition of this concept.

45. "Life Springs of Health and Usefulness," Ohio Cultivator, February 1, 1859.

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32                                                       OHIO HISTORY

 

Such balance, however, depended upon a community receptive to female in-

fluence, a community that was an extension of the homes of which it was

composed. Gage's temperance fiction allowed her to create such a commu-

nity.⁴⁶ The background of the novel Elsie Magoon, for instance, is based

upon her memories of the Marietta area in the early nineteenth century,

memories shaped to allow the novel's female protagonists to gain moral sway

over the community. Elsie Magoon was empowered by the grief that liquor

brought to her world to take charge of her family and play a role in the com-

munity.

 

And so she toiled on, patient and strong, striving to her utmost to rectify her hus-

band's mistakes; to think for him and plan for him-working earnestly for the

good of all, conscientiously believing that what was for the happiness of the

neighborhood, was for the happiness of her household. Hence she was often com-

pelled to take a bold stand against what seemed to be the immediate interest of her

husband.⁴⁷

 

Beyond the world of fiction, however, such an ideal balance of private and

public spheres did not exist. As Gage made bolder strides into the political

arena she lost touch with the community of pioneers that she liked to ideal-

ize, the community where "No party feuds or politics / Disturbed their quiet

joys" and neighbors "lived [like] a band of brothers."⁴⁸ The Gage family's

move to St. Louis in 1853 confirmed the loss. This move deserves examina-

tion not only because it broke Frances Gage's ties to her most significant

homes, but because it represents the general sense of dislocation that attended

entrepreneurial activity and westward expansion in the antebellum years. Just

as this move aggravated the division between Gage's two lives, so the mobil-

ity of a growing nation aggravated the conditions that gave rise to the separate

spheres.

The historical context of women's-sphere ideology, now commonly called

the cult of domesticity, was the beginning, in the 1820s, of the long and

gradual process of the nation's shift from an agrarian to an industrial econ-

omy. The movement to cities necessitated by this shift weakened rural com-

munities like McConnelsville. The cult of domesticity helped the nation to

reconcile itself to change dictated by economic forces because it emphasized

the home as an unchanging moral force in society. As Mary P. Ryan ex-

plains, "The cult celebrated and prescribed intense and tenacious bonding with-

 

 

 

46. It should be noted that not all Gage's temperance fiction had the feminist slant discussed

here. Much of it rehearsed the conventional temperance format, outlining the process of a

man's bringing his family to ruin by giving into the temptation of social drinking.

47. Elsie Magoon, or The Old Still-House in the Hollow, A Tale of the Past (Philadelphia,

1867), 74.

48. Frances D. Gage, "When This Old Ring Was New," Missouri Republican, May 29, 1853.

• 11
 

The Two Lives of Fances Dana Gage                                        33

 

in the newly constituted, mobile, nuclear family as a compensation for the

network of kin and neighbors left behind."⁴⁹

As the private correspondence of both Frances Gage and her sister Catherine

Barker reveals, the Gage-Barker network of kin in Morgan County was af-

fected by economic insecurity.50 When Catherine and Francis Barker, hoping

to recover from their debts, moved their family to Iowa, Frances Gage hoped

to follow them.⁵¹ Her husband's interest in the prospects of the West is indi-

cated by a letter he submitted to the Morgan Herald from a California immi-

grant who described the economic potential of the state.⁵² Indeed, James L.

Gage might be seen as an embodiment of the restless spirit of the time.

During the years he lived in McConnelsville he served as prosecuting attor-

ney, associate judge, mayor, and foundry owner.⁵³ The failure of his business

did not dampen his entrepreneurial spirit; he looked to the railroad industry in

St. Louis as a new source of opportunity.              Here he established the first car

wheel foundry west of the Mississippi.⁵⁴                      His celebratory attitude toward

progress is revealed in his prediction in a local newspaper that the "real

Pacific road . . . will be more lasting than the Pyramids of Egypt, or the

Chinese Wall."⁵⁵

Although Frances Dana Gage had written a popular poem, "Don't Go to

California," that admonished opportunity seekers to "Stay home and gather

gold," and although she dreaded leaving her ancestral land for a slave state, she

generally espoused progressive views.⁵⁶ The move to St. Louis heightened

her enthusiasm for the prospects of westward expansion, and she reported to

the "Cultivator girls" in Ohio successful business ventures that exemplified

the virtues upon which achievement rested: industry, perseverance, and sobri-

ety.⁵⁷ Her public correspondence frequently contained blatant advertising for

products whose efficiency, she claimed, would enable women to devote their

time to pursuits more profitable than drudgery. The report entitled "Woman's

Rights and Patent Washing Machine" illustrates her faith in machinery as an

agent of reform.⁵⁸

 

 

49. The Empire of the Mother, 45.

50. Catherine Barker's autobiography includes descriptions of her husband's attempts to get

established in business and correspondence from her sister that reveals Frances's ongoing con-

cern about her husband's debts. See especially Vol. 2, 65; Vol. 3, 93-94.

51. Ibid., Vol. 3, 9.

52. Letter from Erastus Everett, November 26, 1852.

53. Charles Robertson, History of Morgan County, Ohio, with Portraits and Biographical

Sketches of some of its Pioneers and Prominent Men (Chicago, 1886), 256.

54. Annual Review of the Commerce of St. Louis, for the Year 1854 (St. Louis, 1855), 33.

55. Missouri Republican, September 3, 1854.

56. Ohio Cultivator, May 15, 1852. Frances D. Gage to Rebecca Janney, October 29,

[1852], Janney Family Papers.

57. Ohio Cultivator, July 1, 1855. July 15, 1855.

58. Frances D. Gage, Missouri Republican, December 30, 1853.

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34                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

Unfortunately for the Gages, the personal and cultural hopes represented by

the move to St. Louis were dashed by the failure of James's second foundry,

and the Gages joined a general exodus back to the East that was precipitated

by the financial panic of 1857.⁵⁹    The home to which they retreated in

Carbondale, Illinois, was "unpapered, unplastered, unlathed," and surrounded

by "a wilderness of dry bones, old rags, [and] shoes"-a sorry mockery of the

Mount Airy Gage had lovingly described in the Ohio Cultivator.⁶⁰   As Gage

struggled to support the family that remained with her by seeking lecture en-

gagements and opportunities to publish her writing, she became acquainted

with the practical demands of the world beyond the home.⁶¹ Access to public

spheres was not only a right she sought as a female reformer, it was a neces-

sity for economic survival.⁶²  Historical and economic forces combined to

leave Gage, on the eve of the Civil War, without the home and community

that had sustained her hope for an ideal union of domestic virtue and public

responsibility.

These conditions, however, spurred Gage to do the most effective public

work of her life. She was never one to remain despondent for long, and, as

she told her friend Rebecca Janney, "when one resourse fails I can & will turn

to another-even [if] it has to be the wash tub."⁶³  The invitation to edit the

Home Department of the Ohio Cultivator saved her from the washtub and

brought her back to her native state. In Columbus she appeared before the

Ohio Senate to promote legislation protecting married women's rights,⁶⁴ and

was engaged in a variety of efforts to aid the Union cause. When she was re-

leased from her Cultivator contract because of the paper's reduced circulation,

she sought a more active role in the war. For the first time in her public ca-

reer, Gage gave the cause of the slave her greatest attention. Learning of the

efforts to educate the "contraband" population of the Sea Islands after the

North had recaptured this area in 1861, she wrote to freedmen's associations

in Boston, New York and Philadelphia seeking permission to go to Port

Royal. Finding no support from this quarter, she wrote to such politicians as

 

 

59. The failure of the foundry is discussed in, among other sources, Hannah M. T. Cutler's

eulogy for Gage, Woman's Journal, December 13, 1884; and "Aunt Fanny's Greeting," Ohio

Cultivator, January 1, 1861. The aftermath of the panic of 1857 is described in Jeffrey S.

Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum

St. Louis (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 151-52.

60. Frances D. Gage to Charlotte Fowler Wells, May 21, [1860], Fowler and Wells Families

Papers, #97, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. (The

quotation is punctuated for clarity.)

61. Frances D. Gage to Charlotte Fowler Wells, February 12, [1860], Ibid.; Gage to William

Lloyd Garrison, June 17, [1859], Ms. A 1.2.29.63, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department,

Boston Public Library; Gage to Rebecca Janney, July 7, [1860], Janney Family Papers.

62. "Address of Frances D. Gage," Proceedings, 65.

63. Gage to Janney, n.d. [1859], Janney Family Papers.

64. Ohio State Journal, February 2, 1861. J. Elizabeth Jones and Hannah M. T. Cutler also

spoke to the Senate at this time.

• 13
 

The Two Lives of Fances Dana Gage                                 35

Salmon P. Chase, Benjamin F. Wade, and Edwin M. Stanton for authoriza- tion and a ten-dollar donation. After she "got leave to go and do and be any- thing [she] pleased," she was appointed by General Rufus Saxton to the post of General Superintendent of the 4th Division, Paris Island plantations.65 Her work in supervising the education of former slaves, her lecturing on their behalf, and her efforts to help establish the American Equal Rights Association after the war cap a public career that was halted when Gage had a stroke on July 26, 1867.66 When the accomplishments of Frances Dana Gage's public life are consid- ered along with those of her more famous colleagues, it seems fair to say that     65. Burleigh, "People Worth Knowing": Cutler, Eulogy for Frances D. Gage; "Address of Frances D. Gage," Proceedings, 26. 66. Burleigh, "People Worth Knowing": National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 24, 1867. Even though her mobility was limited by the stroke, Gage supported the causes of woman suf- frage and temperance by writing supportive letters to conventions and submitting commentary to Woman's Journal. In 1873, 1874, and 1875 she was able to attend some conventions.

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36                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

she did not fulfill her desire to be revered as was Lucretia Mott. Nor did she

have the ideological grasp of issues evident in the writings of Elizabeth Cady

Stanton, or the management skills and singleness of purpose attributed to

Susan B. Anthony. Gage's chief contribution to the cause of woman's rights

may lie in her means of addressing the conflict between her two lives, private

and public, and the two lives of all her contemporaries who sought to expand

women's opportunities without undermining the cultural basis of respect for

woman. She did this by making her private self public, by creating a public

identity based upon her experience as a housekeeper, mother, and reformer.

By the time she was widely known as "Aunt Fanny," in the early 1850s, she

could appear in the press and on the platform as Frances Dana Gage and still

be recognized as the woman who had initially communicated with the public

as if they were part of her kinship network. In this manner she compensated

in part for the loss of home and community that such activism intensified.

She found in newspapers, even those unsympathetic to her politics, a fo-

rum for making public her personal life. Newspapers that espoused liberal

causes were a more congenial forum, for in these she could freely express her

political sentiments.  In communicating to the National Anti-Slavery

Standard about her work with the freedmen, for instance, she could integrate

the political and the personal. Reporting on the success of a late- 1863 speak-

ing campaign in upstate New York, she warned Standard readers that "the

work of emancipating the slave is only part of our duty; he must be taken by

the hand and taught the ways of freedom, as we would teach the child the

ways of life." Condescending as this rhetoric may seem, it reflects Gage's ex-

tension into a public sphere of her sense of maternal duty. (She also called

the nation as a whole children.⁶⁷) In the same report she revealed her sadness

over the loss of her husband and the scattering of her children. Her lament

that her sons were on the battlefield and her old home was in the hands of

strangers gave a sense of personal commitment to her interest in making citi-

zens of former slaves.⁶⁸

The forum most congenial for Gage's public performance of self was the

letter format she developed for readers of a Whig paper, the Ohio State

Journal, and an agricultural paper, the Ohio Cultivator. The political paper

seems an anomalous context for Gage's contributions-both her poetry,

which was primarily sentimental, and her series "Letters from the Kitchen,"

inaugurated in March 1850. But the political context of her personal com-

munication aptly represents the conjunction of her two lives. In writing the

letters from her home, she borrowed consciously from the popular epistolary

 

 

 

 

67. See, for instance, "A Few Thoughts About the War," National Anti-Slavery Standard,

August 1, 1863.

68. Ibid., December 5. 1863.

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The Two Lives of Fances Dana Gage                                   37

 

style, especially Jane Swisshelm's "Letters to Country Girls."⁶⁹  She wrote

from the kitchen because it was the site of some of her best hours, because

she wanted to show the necessity and dignity of women's domestic duties, and

because she wanted to prove, by teaching means of efficient completion of

household tasks, that women in the home could be devoted to "higher and

more intellectual duties."⁷⁰ Her choice of a political outlet rather than one of

the fashionable woman's periodicals, she explained, was based on her lack of

notoriety and a desire to appeal to the common people, for the fashionable

magazines appealed to "the upper ten thousand."⁷¹  A similar sentiment and

sense of mission informed her letters to the "Cultivator girls" from Aunt

Fanny. In the Ohio Cultivator she enjoyed the support of editor M. B.

Bateham's wife Josephine, whose Ladies' Department addressed issues of edu-

cation, health, work, wages, peace, temperance, and woman's rights, as well

as more traditional woman's fare such as recipes and household advice.⁷²

Aunt Fanny was one of several contributors who assumed kinship titles or

domestic pseudonyms such as "Garden Mary" or "Chamomile" to address their

extended family of readers.

In letters directed to working class women, Gage was able to integrate as-

pects of her two lives and create a bridge between her circumstances and those

of a large segment of the society she endeavored to reform. By promoting the

importance and dignity of work done in the home, and by showing through

personal anecdotes that such work need not consume all a woman's energies,

Gage grounded in meaningful experience her desire to make "woman herself .

. . more earnest for her own freedom."⁷³ She made feminist issues of tasks

like raising apples, washing clothes, and making butter, appealing to women

to take pride in and demand just wages for their labor. From a specific topic

like butter making, she could move to consideration of larger political issues:

"One of these days we women folks will get better wages for our work, if we

still do it well."⁷⁴ Just as work was necessary for Gage and women of her

class, so was consideration of work essential to her concept of woman's

rights. She believed that their unsalaried "unappreciated labor has taught

women to depreciate themselves," and that "women must set a true value on

themselves" if they are to assume the full measure of their rights.⁷⁵  The

Cultivator letters represented Gage's best opportunity to appeal to women to

 

69. Frances D. Gage, "Letters from the Kitchen #1," Ohio State Journal, March 1, 1850.

70. Ibid.

71. "Letters from the Kitchen #4," Ohio State Journal, April 27, 1850.

72. Albert Lowther Demaree, The American Agricultural Press, 1819-1860 (New York,

1941), 162-63; Frances W. Kaye, "The Ladies' Department of the Ohio Cultivator, 1845-1855:

A Feminist Forum," Agricultural History, 50 (April, 1976), 416.

73. Frances D. Gage, Letter to Ohio Woman Suffrage Association, qtd. in Woman's Journal,

July 14, 1883.

74. "Letter from Mrs. Gage," Ohio Cultivator, May 1, 1854.

75. "Aunt Fanny Responds," Ohio Cultivator, May 15, 1860.

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38                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

"prove by our works that we can ... fill the places we ask for, and answer to

the needs of our natures."⁷⁶

The Aunt Fanny persona did not allow Gage to address the most fundamen-

tal issues underlying her commitment to the political emancipation of

women. Most notably, it did not allow her to analyze the cost to women of

the loss of their cultural status as morally superior beings. Nor did Aunt

Fanny or Frances Dana Gage come to terms with the inherent contradiction

between promotion of women's legal equality on the basis of their home-cul-

tivated virtue and promotion of that equality as a natural right. Although she

was nominally an advocate of natural rights philosophy, Gage did not ques-

tion the assumptions of woman's sphere ideology that allowed her to believe

in the power of female moral influence. But she did question the social and

political restrictions on that influence. By making herself the exemplar of a

woman who could transcend some of these restrictions, by making public her

attempts to live two lives, Frances Dana Gage helped to lead women of the

postbellum United States beyond the boundaries of the woman's sphere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

76. Frances D. Gage, Letter to Ohio Woman Suffrage Association.

• 17