Frances Dana Barker Gage (October 12, 1808-November 10, 1884), a lecturer, political activist, journalist, and novelist, was an outspoken advocate of women's rights, temperance, and abolition before and immediately after the Civil War.
Frances was born near Marietta, Ohio to frontier farmers Elizabeth Dana and Col. Joseph Barker. Coming from New Hampshire, in 1788 the Barkers had crossed the Alleghenies with Rufus Putnam and wrested land from the Indians. Elizabeth, from a liberal Massachusetts family, taught her children to admire individual liberty. Elizabeth's mother, Mary Bancroft Dana, had also moved to the West and lived 14 miles south of her daughter, on the Ohio River which bordered the slave states of Virginia and Kentucky. All three generations of the Dana women assisted escaping slaves. Frances often paddled a canoe to her grandmother's house where she helped provide the refugees with food and comfort. Shortly before she died, Frances remembered feeling slaves' hurts as though they were her own and disgust with other pioneer children who chided her for sympathizing with escaping Negroes.
In her youth Frances was disciplined by her father because she had assisted a visiting barrel maker. Such labors, he said, were not part of a girl's domestic sphere. "What a pity you were not a boy so that you could be good for something," he lamented. From that moment she was determined to overcome the limits that had been set for women.
Frances's parents were more liberal in their religious beliefs than their neighbors. She much later wrote, "I never could accept the belief or doctrine of total depravity or of special providence, or the power of any being by prayer to move the universe, or any having right to do so if he could. Consequently I was led into association with the Universalists, more as a disbeliever in the doctrine of eternal punishment than any fixed faith."
In 1828 Frances married Universalist James Gage, an abolitionist lawyer and iron founder in the village of McConnelsville, 30 miles to the north. He was a friend of the New York State Universalist evangelist Stephen R. Smith. Through 35 years of married life, James supported Frances's commitment to help others. They raised eight children, all of whom thrived. She lived in McConnelsville for a quarter of a century, raising her children, educating herself, and gradually gathering influence among her peers.
Professional writing brought Gage regional fame. Writing in The Ohio Cultivator and other regional journals as "Aunt Fanny," 1845-62, she offered a warm, domestic persona who offered advice and support to isolated housewives in Ohio. She published Poems in 1867.
She extended her circle of acquaintance beyond Ohio by writing letters to women of like mind, including Englishwoman Harriet Martineau, whose 1837 book, Society in America, included a chapter, "The Political Nonexistence of Women." Another correspondent, Amelia Bloomer, engaged her to write for the New York State temperance newspaper, The Lily, 1841-54. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose 1848 Seneca Falls Convention launched the women's rights movement in America, was also on the staff.
In 1851 at Akron, Ohio, chairing the state's second women's rights convention, Gage, overriding audience protests, allowed the ex-slave, Sojourner Truth, to speak. Years later Gage recorded her recollection of Truth's speech, "Ain't I a Woman?" This version, superceding that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, has become the standard text and account of the event.
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