56th Issue: L. Frank Baum, Maud Baum, and Matilda Gage

Just FYI before I start, I mention some pretty racist statements a historical figure made about Native Americans in this issue. If you would like to skip this issue because of it, that is understandable and I thought I should let you all know before I start.

So lately I’ve been rereading the Wizard of Oz books. Yes, it’s a series. I remember reading the first five or six books in elementary school, because the school library had them. The first book is good, but the series is all about adventures in Oz. It’s also got a lot of sexuality and gender related subtext that I think was very modern for the time, but that is something I am happy to discuss with anyone at a later time. In the meantime, I thought I’d look into the author, L. Frank Baum. From the way that he wrote women and girls as central and important figures in the books, I thought he might have been an early feminist.
 
L. Frank Baum lived from 1856 to 1919. He wrote fourteen books in the Oz series, and dozens and dozens of other books, short stories, and scripts. He was born and raised in New York, to an upper-class family. He was tutored at home until he was twelve, when he was sent to a Military Academy, but when he daydreamed and was severely punished for it, he had a heart attack and was allowed to go back home. He wrote since he was little, and when he was twenty, he got involved in the “national craze of breeding fancy poultry”. Ten years later, he published his first book about his favorite kind of fancy poultry, the Hamburg chicken.
 
Frank loved the theater. He performed and wrote in plays his whole life, but never really made much money off of this trade. In 1882, Frank married Maud Gage, the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, who was a famous feminist activist. This is, I assume, where he got his feminist tendencies from. But I will come back to this in a minute.

 

 

 
Six years after their marriage, Frank and his wife moved to South Dakota. He opened a store he called “Baum’s Bazaar”, but he gave away too much of his product for free so he had to shut down. He then edited the local newspaper. He did write a column in 1890 that advocated for the extermination of all native American people. In 1891 he wrote another column in which he said the same thing; his reasoning being that, “Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”
 
Obviously that’s despicable, and I know that being a feminist has nothing to do with anti-racism, at least not historically, but I was taken aback by the extremeness of his opinions. I wanted to know what his wife and mother in law thought about this and whether they agreed. But let me finish talking about Frank before I get back to them. Interestingly, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Frank’s famous feminist mother in law, stayed with them for almost the whole time they were living in South Dakota. So she must have been not only aware of his beliefs, but they must have talked about it, since she was physically right there with him when he wrote them down.
 
Frank’s newspaper failed in 1891, so he moved his family to Chicago, where he got a job writing for a newspaper and founded a magazine. He also worked as a travelling salesman. He wrote and published some Mother Goose rhymes in a book in 1897, and made enough money to quit the travelling salesman job. In 1900, Frank published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which was a massive hit, and he then wrote thirteen sequels as well as dozens of other books. He then spent much of the rest of his life trying to and succeeding to get his story on stage as a Broadway musical or stage play, and later, a film. In 1905, he even mentioned trying to create an Oz themed amusement park, but that never happened. He financed other non-Oz related musicals and plays, often losing money in the process, and created a film production company in 1914. In 1919, Frank had a stroke and died the next day.
 
Maud Gage Baum was Frank’s wife. She lived in New York as a child, and went to Cornell University. She was bold and lively, and held her own as one of the 19 women in a class of 131 students. The boys teased and mocked the girls, and spread nasty rumors about Maud in particular, probably because she was so outspoken, and also because her mother was a famous feminist. At Cornell, Maud met Frank, through her roommate Josie who was Frank’s cousin. They were friends for a while, and then when she was twenty and he was twenty-five, she accepted Frank’s marriage proposal. Maud’s mom, Matilda, was upset that her daughter would sacrifice the chance of higher education to marry Frank, but eventually she got over it and became close with him. They were married in 1882. Maud was the more assertive one, and Frank was passive. Maud handled the family’s money, because she was better at it than he was. She had four sons with Frank: Robert, Harry, Kenneth and Frank. At certain points, Frank wasn’t making enough money, so Maud taught embroidery and lace-making to over twenty students, using the tuition to get by.

 

 

 
Maud’s mother Matilda spent winters at Frank and Maud’s house, which they both appreciated. Maud did have a unique parenting style. Here’s a quote:
 
“After her second son, Robert, flung from their second-story window their cat, who escaped uninjured, Maud decided to "teach him a lesson". Collaring him, she suspended him through their second-story window, "making him "screa[m] so loudly that the neighbors all rushed out and were quite horrified at the spectacle of my mother dangling me out the window". Later, he flung a cat into a barrel, whereupon Maud "promptly chucked in myself to see how I liked it”.
 
In 1906, Frank made enough money from the Wizard of Oz to travel on a six-month vacation around Egypt, Greece, Italy, North Africa, Switzerland and France. In 1910, the family moved to Hollywood, and adopted a puppy named Toto. Frank plastered one of the house’s walls with pictures of his wife, naming it the “Yard of Maud”. Maud survived her husband by over thirty years, and died in 1953 at the age of ninety-two.
 
Now to talk about Maud’s mother, and Frank’s mother in law, Matilda Joslyn Gage. How did her opinions and views of the world as a liberal feminist square with Frank’s extremely racist ideas of exterminating all Native Americans? I might not know the answer, but at least I can try to find out.
 
Matilda was born in 1826. Her father was a liberal thinker and an abolitionist. His house was a station of the Underground Railroad, and when she married Henry Gage at the age of eighteen, Matilda made her house a stop as well. She faced prison for her actions under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, but never ended up having to go to jail.
 
Matilda became involved in the women’s rights movement in 1852, and served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association.  She was more radical than her contemporaries, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. There were some conservative suffragists that wanted women to have the vote so that they could influence legislation to bring on ideas like temperance, but Matilda was against the Christian Church, arguing that it subjugated women. She also held the importance of the separation of church and state very highly.
 
Matilda was a prolific writer, and owned a newspaper, writing for it as the editor for several years. She was, as mentioned above, an activist, making sure that every woman in her area knew about their right to vote by writing them letters about it, and then sitting and observing the polls to make sure that every woman who wanted to vote could do so. When the conservative suffragists were able to take over the women’s suffrage movement, Matilda started her own group, the Woman’s National Liberal Union.

 

 

 
Here’s the part where it gets interesting, at least to me. Matilda spoke up against the brutal treatment of Native Americans, both in writing letters and columns in newspapers as well as in public speeches. She cited Iroquois society as being more equal for men and women, and spent time among them, receiving the name “Karonienhawi - "she who holds the sky" - upon her initiation into the Wolf Clan. She was admitted into the Iroquois Council of Matrons. How could someone who was so sympathetic to the issues faced by Native American populations of the time somehow also be so close to her daughter and son in law who held such repugnant ideas about the topic? I know some will say that you can separate the personal and the political, but I don’t think that would be possible, especially for a person as intimately enmeshed in activism and radical thought as Matilda was. I guess I will never know the answer to this.
 
Matilda died in Frank and Maud’s home in Chicago in 1898, and though she was cremated, there is a memorial stone in a cemetery in her name, engraved with the quote: "There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven. That word is Liberty."