On a winding, tree-lined road in Fayetteville, there is an old house. Four massive columns hide the small porch. Its white siding is weathered, and one of the black shutters is missing.

Few in the Syracuse area know that history was made in the house. Inside, the 19th century’s most powerful women sat around a table and organized a movement that changed the very fabric of the United States.

The home was once the residence of Matilda Joslyn Gage, an abolitionist, a Native rights activist and a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. It was within its walls that she, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton planned civil disobedience and wrote some of the most influential works of their time, including the Declaration of the Rights of Women.

Gage’s home is now a museum run by the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, which is, according to its website, “dedicated to educating current and future generations about Gage’s work and its power to drive contemporary social change.”

“The foundation was set up because we want to create dialogue on the social justice issues that Matilda cared about,” said Office Manager Melissa Almeyda. “We just want people talking about those things. The foundation is not to glorify Matilda. It's really to get people talking about the issue she cared about.”

The Gage Foundation is creating a new program to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the museum and the 20th anniversary of the foundation--The Matilda Effect. The term, named after Gage, was coined by scientific historian Margaret W. Rossiter in reference to women whose contributions to history have been largely unrecognized or attributed to someone else.

The term was named after Gage because she, herself, is a largely unknown historical figure. Gage was considered more radical than her feminist peers, and she was an outspoken critic of the Christian Church. When the suffrage movement allied with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Gage left. Her separation from the movement left her contributions unrecognized.

Almeyda said the foundation is asking the public to nominate women whose work in civil rights and social justice has been forgotten. The nominations will then be compiled in a virtual database, which visitors will be able to access on iPads in the museum.

“It’s going to be community driven because we want the community to be a part of our museum and to help shape it,” Almeyda said. “We want to make sure there's a place people can go to find more people to inspire them.”

The state of New York was a hotbed of activism in the 19th and 20th centuries, meaning there will be no shortage of local women to nominate. Elissa Dragoni, a history teacher at the Albany Academy and a doctoral student at Syracuse University certainly has a woman in mind--Josephine Clara Goldmark.

Dragoni explained that Goldmark, a native New Yorker and an advocate for labor reform, was hired by Louis Brandeis, a lawyer and future supreme court justice, to investigate labor conditions.

“Josephine Goldmark spent months and months investigating this for Brandeis,” Dragoni said. Goldmark’s findings were compiled into a brief and presented to the U.S. Supreme Court during the Muller v. Oregon case, which resulted in a state mandate which set the maximum number of work hours for women lower than the maximum for men. The brief, for which Goldmark did hundreds of hours of research and compiled into a document over 100 pages, was named the Brandeis Brief.

“Brandeis has his name attached to this brief because it was his idea, but Josephine Goldmark did all the work for him,” Dragoni said. “It’s a great example of a woman doing all of this work and getting none of the credit.”

The Matilda Effect goes beyond borders. In a brief from Sally Roesch Wagner, founder of the Gage Foundation and a professor at Syracuse University, she explained that five European universities created a joint Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender History called MATILDA, inspired by Gage’s work and the Matilda Effect. Graduate students have the opportunity to study in England, Switzerland, France, Bulgaria, and Hungary, where they will learn about women’s history from medieval times to today. The foundation promotes this program because it allows students to study women like Matilda Joslyn Gage and help the foundation carry on her memory.