Author Description

Born among Rufus Putnam's Ohio Company settlers in 1804, Frances Gage became the state's most prominent reform advocate. She fought for abolition, temperance, and women's rights over a career that ended in 1867 when she was felled by a stroke. During that long career, Gage raised 8 children, wrote for regional and national journals, and cared for abandoned freedmen on Parris Island during the Civil War. She became a noted speaker alongside Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, and Lucy Stone. She was proud in 1850 to be the first to remove the words "white and male" from Ohio's proposed Constitution and worked tirelessly to bring her Middle Western sisters into contact with the East. Beyond her famous reprinting of "Ain't I a Woman" in 1863, the indefatigable Buckeye's reputation reached its zenith after the Civil War when she hoped to inject citizenship for all women into Reconstruction planning. This plan went awry, and the famous pair Anthony and Stanton muddied the waters by joining with George Francis Train who was a noted racist and Victoria Woodhull who was imprisoned for printing "gossip" Stanton passed on. This post-war tumult among reformers reflected their aging and the country's healing. Frances Gage watched the women's movement split into 2 factions and lose some of the public's trust. Only Temperance retained its reform vigor, so the bedridden idealist wrote several novels in its support. One of these, Elsie Magoon: or the Old Still House in the Hollow, is a vital recreation of Ohio Valley life in the 1820s. Known alternatively as Aunt Fanny to readers of Middle Western farm publications, children's books, and kin, she was a complicated and generous person who befriended Clara Barton during the Civil War.