Baum, Oz and radical feminism.

I must concede that as a young lad, reading Baum's "The Marvelous Land of Oz," the whole transgendered "Tip reverts back to Princess Ozma" story line freaked me the hell out. Subsequently, I came to understand just how progressively clever Baum really was, as explained here.

What 'Oz' Owes To Early Radical Feminism, by Michelle Dean (The Nation)

 ... Given that these are all early-century books, the progressiveness of it might seem remarkable, but then Frank Baum was unusually well-connected to one of the more radical figures in early American feminism. He’d married a woman named Maud Gage, whose mother, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a feminist who worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But Matilda Gage was more than a simple suffragette or birth control activist; she was a philosopher and a theosophist as well as a historian. She believed in reincarnation, and developed an entire theory that “man” had suppressed traces of an earlier history of matriarchy, particularly among First Nations people: