Fact-Checking Feminism

Wagner talks about the First Wave feminists' achievement, women's suffrage, and Native women's leadership and inspiration. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, the primary writers of the early women's rights movement, who, along with Susan B. Anthony, formed the leadership of the National Woman Suffrage Association, lived in New York, on the homelands of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora). While they referenced the Declaration of Independence in their published materials, it was the Indigenous women who modeled equality for these early feminists. Feminism's debt to these women is rarely acknowledged.