■ Historian · Teacher · Founder of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation
She spent her life finding the women history forgot.
Sally Roesch Wagner, 1942 – 2025
She brought Matilda Joslyn Gage back into the story of women's rights, showed that the suffragists learned freedom from Haudenosaunee women, bought and restored Gage's house, and taught for fifty years. She left behind a hard drive of 61,473 files. Her family is opening it, beginning with her own essays and speeches.
Her work, by way of the archive
4 minutesSix threads of one life
About this archiveThe prairie and the lake
Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota. The prairie never left her: six volumes of pioneer women’s own stories, published as Daughters of Dakota.
Read her on this1973The muskrat and Matilda
She drove to Aberdeen to interview the granddaughter of a suffragist for a class anecdote, and came away with the papers of Matilda Joslyn Gage. Everything that followed began that day.
Read her on this1978 – 2025Fifty years in the classroom
One of the first doctorates in women’s studies in the country. She founded one of its first programs and was still teaching at Syracuse University the semester she died.
Read her on thisSisters in Spirit
Her argument, now widely taught, that Stanton and Gage learned what free women looked like from their Haudenosaunee neighbors.
Wounded Knee and Oz
She testified before the Senate for the survivors’ descendants, traced L. Frank Baum’s editorials calling for extermination, and brought his descendants to South Dakota to apologize.
Read her on this2002 – 2025The Gage House
She bought Gage’s house in Fayetteville, New York, raised the money to restore it, and opened it as a center for dialogue on the causes Gage fought for.
Read her on thisWhere to begin reading
All 27 piecesArticle · 2017
Reproductive Choice
How widely available 19th-century birth control was driven underground by the Comstock laws, and how Matilda Joslyn Gage, Stanton and their Freethought allies fought for women's right to decide when to bear children.
Essay · 1986
Where Were the Black Women in the Suffrage Movement? Finding the Right Question
By asking where feminists were in the nineteenth-century Black rights movement, Sally finds Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Martin Delany and the Negro convention movement leading the way, and concludes that Black women were in front of the woman's rights movement.
Article · 1996
A Woman Runs for President, 100 Years Ago
A profile of Belva Lockwood's 1884 and 1888 presidential campaigns on the Equal Rights Party ticket, and of her work for suffrage, racial justice, equal pay and international arbitration.
Essay · 1990
Sitting Bull: In Memory
Written on the hundredth anniversary of his death, this essay draws on accounts by Fanny Kelly, Catherine Weldon and white neighbours to argue that Sitting Bull was a man of peace killed to silence his opposition to the sale of Lakota land.
Essay · 2007
Introduction: Forgotten Famous South Dakota Women
Schoolchildren can name only a handful of South Dakota women; this introduction debunks the Annie Tallent 'first woman in the Black Hills' myth and lists accomplished women missing from the textbooks.
What is here, and what is coming
This first release holds 27 of her essays, speeches and lectures, about 35,000 words, each read in full before it was posted. The drive holds far more: her unfinished books, her research files, and the records of the Gage Foundation. They are being prepared with care, and nothing private will be published.