Frances Dana Baker Gage
*Frances Dana Barker Gage was born on this date in 1808. She was a white-American reformer, feminist, and abolitionist.
Frances Dana Barker was born near Marietta, Ohio, the daughter of farmers Elizabeth Dana and Col. Joseph Barker, the tenth of eleven children. Baker 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 for the limitations of sex and laying the foundation for her activism.
On January 1, 1829, she married James L. Gage, 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. From 1863 to 1864, under General Rufus Saxton, she was the superintendent in charge of Parris Island, South Carolina, a refuge for over 500 freed slaves.
She worked closely with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and 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 regardless of race or gender. She was a particularly outspoken supporter of giving newly freed Black women the franchise during Reconstruction, along with Black men who had formerly been slaves. Frances Dana Baker Gage died on November 10, 1884.
