This is a continuation of my analysis of the allegorical and historical themes found in the Wizard of Oz. Read Part 1 here:
American Wonderland
In the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), author L. Frank Baum wrote that he wanted to create a “modernized fairy tale”.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) dominated children’s literature at the time and Baum’s fairy tale aimed to replace or update English whimsy (and outdated folklore) with American optimism, pragmatism, and technology.
Although Carroll called his work “nonsense”, Alice (which was written for the daughter of a friend) is considered by many to be an allegory for a young English girl searching for identity in the Victorian era, with the Red Queen as a stand in for Queen Victoria herself.
Similarly, Baum claimed Oz was just fantasy for children, despite the consistent allegorical framework at play. Through this Wonderland lens we can view Dorothy as a young girl navigating America at the turn of the 20th century.
Not In Kansas
In 1894, there was a vote in Kansas on a proposal to amend the state constitution in order to grant women the right to vote in that state.
Susan B. Anthony and the newly formed National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) poured their resources into the Kansas Equal Suffrage Campaign. They hoped the Populist Party, whose main voice was a woman, would guarantee victory for a state suffrage amendment.
Oz historian Littlefield suggested Dorothy was an allegorical stand-in for the fiery Kansas Populist leader Mary E. Lease who believed the political system was corrupt and controlled by Wall Street, railroad monopolies, and bankers. While that political reading holds, it’s crucial to remember that Lease was also a suffragist.
But the male Populist party leadership feared that formally endorsing the controversial issue of women’s suffrage would cost them male votes. They chose political expediency over their alliance. The amendment failed disastrously. The Populists not only lost the chance to vote, but they also lost a crucial election which led to nearly two decades of Republican control of the US.
Anthony was furious and felt utterly betrayed by Lease and the Populists. She wrote that she would “never again” trust a third party to carry the suffrage banner. In the press, the suffragists were deemed effective at organizing middle-class women in towns but largely failed to connect with the Kansas majority: farm women.
Gray Girl
At the start The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale is an orphan raised in total poverty by her sad Aunt Em and Uncle Henry in Kansas. Their house is a simple four-walled room. There are no trees or other houses for as far as the eye could see and the sun had baked the plowed lands turning everything into a gray mass, including them.
This bleak, gray Kansas was a reality for thousands of farmers like Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, who were facing drought and foreclosure. The monoculture agriculture and widespread removal of deep-rooted native grasses for crop cultivation disrupted the soil structure and left it prone to wind erosion. The valley of the Great Plains was already a notoriously perfect breeding ground for tornados.
Scholar Sally Roesch Wagner and Baum’s niece, Matilda Jewell Gage, both suggested that Frank may have named Dorothy after Baum’s late infant niece, as a gift to his wife Maud.
Dorothy Louise Gage died in infancy in November of 1898 while Frank was dreaming up Oz. Frank’s wife Maud, who had only sons and was close with the baby, was already grief-stricken by the loss of her mother earlier that year. Maud saw Dorothy as carrying on the spirit of her mother.
Witch Way
Maud Baum’s mother was Matilda Joslyn Gage, a prominent suffragist and radical feminist who was ahead of her time. Gage believed in matriarchal history, indigenous rights, and ultimately saw organized religion as a tool of female oppression.
Gage, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, were known as the triumvirate who founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869.
Before her death, she published Woman, Church, and State (1893), a radical and largely forgotten masterwork, where she devotes entire sections to the systematic persecution of women as witches.
While Stanton shared Gage’s intellectual critiques of religion and patriarchy, Susan B. Anthony was a political strategist above all and felt Gage’s views were ultimately too radical for the movement.
Gage became a ghost in the official history of woman suffrage, a deliberate act of erasure by Anthony’s camp to keep the movement “respectable” and politically viable.
Gage left the NWSA and founded her own group, the Woman’s National Liberal Union, in 1890. She opposed the NWSA merger with long-time rival suffrage group The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the general growing alignment of the suffrage movement with Christian temperance movements and (eventually) White supremacist groups.
The Cyclone
Before the Civil War, leaders of the abolitionist and women’s rights movements were often the same people, forming a strong alliance under the banner of universal human rights. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and brilliant abolitionist, was a firm supporter of women’s suffrage.
Susan B. Anthony was likewise a dedicated abolitionist. They all worked together in the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), founded in 1866, fighting for suffrage for all, regardless of race or sex.
Anthony became the public face of the cause and was relentlessly mocked in the press. Early political cartoons depicted her as a masculine figure, a scolding spinster wearing “male” accessories for stepping outside her “proper sphere”.
In February 1869, the 15th Amendment, championed primarily by Ulysses S. Grant and the burgeoning Republican Party, was passed by Congress and ratified the following year. It declared that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The amendment also fractured the women’s suffrage movement because women (both white and Black) were excluded from its protections.
The NWSA, Based in New York (The East) and led by Anthony, Stanton, and Gage; considered radical, they sought to achieve women’s suffrage through a federal constitutional amendment.
The AWSA, founded in the Ohio (The West) but headquartered in Boston, was more conservative led by Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell and pursued a state-by-state strategy to win the vote for women.
By the late 1880s, progress on both the state and federal levels had slowed to a crawl. Leaders on both the NWSA and the NAWSA sides recognized that a united front was essential to make any significant new gains.
In 1890, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected as the first president of the newly formed organization, with Susan B. Anthony serving as vice president.
Many believed they could build national pressure by first securing victories in individual states. Western states like Wyoming (1869) and Colorado (1893) became early successes that encouraged this method. But the South continued to pose a challenge.
Blue Witch
Upon landing in Oz, Dorothy is greeted by the Munchkins and the Good Witch of the North. If we see Oz as the political landscape of the suffrage movement, then the Good Witch of the North could be inspired by it’s elder stateswoman: Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She is the wise, guiding figure who sets the hero on her path back home. North is also the cardinal direction for wisdom.
The Woman’s Bible (1895), Stanton’s most radical and infamous work, is a two-part annotated critique of the Bible’s treatment of women. She drew parallels between the oppression of enslaved people and the subjugation of women, arguing that both groups were denied basic rights and freedoms.
When Stanton published The Woman’s Bible (with Gage’s ideological support), Anthony publicly distanced the NAWSA from it. She called it a “volcanic upheaval” that would alienate potential supporters.
Dead Witch
We never see the Wicked Witch of the East. Dorothy receives her silver shoes (not ruby like the film). Littlefield saw these shoes as the silver standard, but there is also an alchemical reference that ties silver to the moon and femininity. The cardinal direction East is also associated with sunrise and new beginnings.
The Witch of the North admits the shoes contain some sort of charm but she doesn’t know what. She has this to say about the deceased:
“She has held all the Munchkins in bondage for many years,
making them slave for her night and day.”
The Witch of the East can be seen as the embodiment of the ideology that had trapped women for generations: the doctrine of “separate spheres” championed by figures like Catharine Beecher.
Her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) which is said to have laid the groundwork for the Civil War. Both sisters believed women’s influence should be exercised indirectly, through moral leadership rather than direct politics.
Catharine Beecher believed women should influence society through the home, not the ballot. The same year Stanton, Anthony, and Gage founded the NWSA, Beecher published the advice manual The American Woman’s Home (1869).
Although Stanton respected Beecher’s intellect, she condemned her worldview as damaging to the cause of true liberation.
Stanton directly critiqued the notion of “woman’s sphere” as a cage that limited women’s potential and confined them to a life of dependency on men.
When Dorothy’s house lands on this witch, it symbolizes a new, radical generation literally crushing the old ideal of domestic confinement. It’s also deeply ironic.
Catherine Beecher died in 1878 in New York.
The Witch of the North tells Dorothy to go to the Emerald City (Washington DC) to see the Great Oz to get back to Kansas. However, she also seems aware that the Wizard might not be all he appears to be, suggesting he’s a “good wizard” but not necessarily an omnipotent one. The Emerald City was also inspired by Baum’s visit to The White City at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
Yellow Witch
The west is associated with sunset and death. Dorothy is warned that the Wicked Witch of the West has enslaved the Winkies and will enslave her too if she sticks around.
In January 1895, the NAWSA, now led by Susan B. Anthony, decided to hold its annual convention in Atlanta. This was a strategic move to build support for women’s suffrage in the South.
Frederick Douglass traveled to Atlanta to attend the convention, expecting to be welcomed as a distinguished guest and ally. However, upon his arrival, Anthony privately met with him and requested that he not attend the sessions or sit on the platform with the other leaders.
By the 1880s, Susan B. Anthony shifted the women’s suffrage movement toward a more pragmatic and conservative strategy. To gain mainstream support, she allied with powerful groups like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Ohio.
Frances Willard, president of the WCTU, was one of the most influential women of the 19th century. Willard argued that giving women the vote would allow them to protect their homes from alcohol, poverty, and moral decay.
Willard is also synonymous with bicycle riding, which had become a craze in the 1890s thanks in part by her. Willard saw the bicycle as empowering women through mobility.
A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (1895) was one of Willard’s final contributions at the age of 53. Her passing marked the end of an era in moral reform feminism, just before the temperance movement would pivot toward national prohibition.
When Wizard of Oz was adapted into a feature film by MGM in 1939, it reimagined Oz as a dream state and the Wicked Witch was given a real world bicycle-riding counterpart known as Almira Gulch.
The Fountain Girl statue at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (which depicted a young girl offering water from a fountain) was a key symbol of the temperance movement, closely associated with Willard and her efforts to morally elevate public life through reform, purity, and control of bodily pleasures.
Again, in this context, the witches death by water is not just symbolic, its deeply ironic.
The NAWSA’s new approach also courted Southern white women by accommodating racism and framing the vote as a tool for “home protection” rather than a demand for full equality. This alienated early suffragists like Gage and Stanton, who saw the strategy as a betrayal of the movement’s original principles.
Carrie Chapman Catt, who became one of Susan B. Anthony’s most trusted protégées. helped coordinate these national conventions, managed communications between state groups, and built political alliances.
She also softened the movement’s public image: rather than being cast as outsiders, suffragists were presented as loyal Americans who could improve the nation. She argued that enfranchising white women would “offset” the Black male vote in states where Black men had not yet been fully disenfranchised.
From the 1890s until 1920, NAWSA explicitly argued that enfranchising women would actually strengthen white supremacy in the South, as the votes of white women would guarantee continued white political dominance.
In the 1910s, as part of her “Winning Plan,” NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt and other suffrage leaders intentionally courted racist white southern politicians. NAWSA continued with what has been dubbed the “southern strategy” into the new century.
Witch of the South
Unlike the film, in the original tale, Dorothy’s story doesn’t end with the defeat of the Witch of the West. The wizard takes off in his balloon but Dorothy is accidently left behind. She’s told to seek help from Glinda, The Good Witch of the South, a figure that was blended with the Witch of the North in the film.
The South carries its own symbolic charge. In Biblical lore, the “Queen of the South” (often interpreted as the Queen of Sheba) appears in the Gospel of Matthew, a sovereign who seeks wisdom and affirms divine authority. In esoteric traditions, the South is aligned with warmth, intuition, and feminine wisdom.
Columbia
She could be partly inspired by Columbia, the spirit behind manifest destiny and the feminine embodiment of America. She represented the ideals of the republic (youth, progress, and democracy) and was often depicted leading the nation westward, guiding citizens, or standing alongside Uncle Sam.
Columbia dates back to the earliest European depictions of “Amérique” the allegorical queen of The Americas. As they broke with Britain, Amérique became the daughter defying her mother Britannia; sometimes noble and liberty-loving, sometimes crude and dangerous.
The old symbol, the Indian Queen with her feathered headdress, was how Europeans saw America; as a wild, native land. After the Revolutionary War, the female symbol for America changed from the “Indian Queen” to a new figure named Columbia.
The new symbol, Columbia, was made to look like a goddess from ancient Greece or Rome. She wore classical robes to represent liberty and civilization. This change was deliberate, as the United States wanted a symbol that looked more European to create a national identity separate from Native Americans and enslaved people.
But there was an ongoing battle about how she was depicted; sometimes in a white gown, sometimes with a crown, shield, and/or spear. Sometimes she protected immigrants, other times she protected an idea.
Columbia and Lady Liberty (the ancient Roman goddess Libertas, who personified freedom) were sometimes interchangeable, both evoking female guardianship of American ideals, though Columbia leaned more toward nationalism and Lady Liberty toward the principle of freedom.
The Red Witch
A strong, albeit problematic contender for the real-life Witch of the South is the American feminist that arguably started it all; Victoria Woodhull. She was a magnetist, mystic, stockbroker, publisher, and in 1872 became the first woman to run for president (with a Black man as her running mate). She was also the first person to publish the English translation of The Communist Manifesto in the United States.
Victoria and her sister Tennessee Claflin were two of the most notorious and influential women of the late 19th century. Born into poverty in Ohio, they rose to national fame in New York City in the early 1870s as spiritualists and magnetic healers, performing séances and claiming to channel otherworldly guidance.
In February of 1870, just as the 15th Amendment is being ratified, the sisters opened Woodhull, Claflin & Co., the first woman-run stock brokerage firm on Wall Street. The sisters were extremely radical in challenging the social and political order of their time, particularly around women’s rights, sexual freedom, and hypocrisy in public life.
In May of 1870, Victoria and Tennessee launched Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, a newspaper that became a platform for radical ideas.
In March 1870, they published the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, introducing many Americans to socialist ideas decades before such language became mainstream in politics.
Woodhull joined the Marxist International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) and later led a march in sympathy with the failed Paris Commune of 1871.
In November 1871, Victoria, Tennessee, and other women, attempted to vote in New York. This was not merely a protest but a calculated legal challenge based on a strategy known as the “New Departure.”
Instead of fighting for a new amendment, Woodhull’s unique strategy was to argue that the 15th Amendment was irrelevant. Her entire legal argument rested on the idea that the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868), which defined citizenship and guaranteed its “privileges,” had already implicitly granted women the vote.
Woodhull famously articulated this argument before the House Judiciary Committee in January 1871, becoming the first woman to speak before a congressional committee. However, this legal interpretation was ultimately rejected.
War of The Witches
At first, Anthony and some other suffragists were intrigued by Victoria. However, that relationship quickly soured. Anthony believed deeply in discipline, respectability, and long-term political strategy, while Woodhull and Claflin embraced sensationalism, free love, and public scandal.
To Woodhull “free love” (the right of women to marry, divorce, and bear children without government or church interference) was about giving women true mobility. Her views were a century ahead of the 1960s counterculture, and they terrified polite society.
The breaking point for Anthony came at the May 1872 NWSA convention. Woodhull tried to merge the NWSA with her new Equal Rights Party to run for president, even nominating Frederick Douglass as her running mate.
Fearing Woodhull was hijacking the NWSA for her own purposes, Susan B. Anthony famously took to the stage, denounced Woodhull, and officially adjourned the NWSA meeting before Woodhull could take control. Anthony would later refer to Victoria as “that terrible creature.”
Woodhull’s boldest and most explosive act came in November of 1872, just days before the election, with the Beecher-Tilton scandal.
Victoria publicly exposed the affair between the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Catharine Beecher aka The Wicked Witch of the East) and married woman Elizabeth Tilton.
Beecher was one of the most respected ministers in the country and publicly condemned “free love.” By revealing his hypocrisy, the sisters ignited a national media storm. On Election Day in 1872, Victoria was arrested and jailed under obscenity laws for publishing the story, though she was later acquitted.
The scandal dragged on for years, through trials, sermons, and tabloid wars, a morality play staged in the press. The battle drained her finances and she and her sister eventually fled the US altogether. Beecher was also eventually acquitted in civil court, yet his reputation never fully recovered.
Anthony was also arrested that year for attempting to vote, presumably not for Woodhull. Though many suffragists, including Anthony distanced themselves from the sisters at the time, their legacy helped lay the groundwork for later feminist movements that addressed not just the vote but the full spectrum of women’s rights.
No Place Like Home
It’s interesting to note that in the end, Dorothy is happy to return home again. The problems on the farm seem to have been resolved and the gray plains now have a red hue, as if her view of home was now rose-tinted.
Ultimately, this allegorical reading is just an interpretation. The parallels to the Populist or suffrage movements could be a deliberate, coded allegory or simply the subconscious influence of a politically charged era on a creative mind. As L. Frank Baum stated in the introduction, Oz was meant to be simply a modern American fantasy for children. Baum was a serial entrepreneur and businessman (albeit sometimes a poor one) but far from a champion of the working-class. By most accounts he was likely Republican.
From this perspective, Oz was not intended as a complex political allegory but as an imaginative escape, a world of optimism and pragmatism designed to entertain a young audience. It was the kind of story a father, who had only sons and was deeply devoted to his wife, could tell his own children.
That doesn’t stop Oz fans like me from speculating. In the next essay in this series I’ll be exploring the allegorical interpretations of the many Beasts of Oz as well as the symbols found on the Wicked Witch of the West that link her to the railroads. We’ll also learn about the connection between the Yellow Brick Road, the Chinese railroad workers, and the British Opium Wars.
—Mallon