Matilda Joslyn Gage

this is the picture of the woman who took on the entire system from its religion to its politics, and to the economic practices of its politics and religion. She wrote a book called "Woman Church and State". It has the academic scholarship that traces the shift from matriarchal lineage to patriarchal lineage, which has to do with the laws of inheritance of property, which are the basis for every world government.
She documents how the changing of religious "rites" always takes away "rights" both civil and economic. Her book went out of print for years.
It includes so much about american polygymy and women's free labor, it is more relevant now than ever before...


Gage was an avid opponent of the various Christian churches, and she strongly supported the separation of the church and the state, believing "that the greatest injury to the world has arisen from theological laws,-from a union of Church and State". She wrote in October 1881,

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation...the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against "Sabbath Laws", the uses of the "Bible in School," and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce "God in the Constitution." (Reference: "God in the Constitution", page 2)
In 1893, she published Woman, Church and State, a book which outlined the variety of ways in which Christianity had oppressed women and reinforced patriarchal systems. It was wide-ranging and built extensively upon arguments and ideas she had previously put forth in speeches (and in a chapter of History of Woman Suffrage which bore the same name).