Helen Hamilton Gardener, née Alice Chenoweth, (January 21, 1852 to July 26, 1925), made her mark on history, first as an author and Free Thought lecturer, and later as a key player in obtaining the vote for women.
EARLY LIFE & STRIFE
Born Alice Chenoweth in Winchester, Virginia, Gardener was the sixth child of an itinerant Methodist minister, whose family, in 1865, moved to Greencastle, Indiana, where they farmed. An avid learner, she was educated by tutors and grew up admiring her father, who had freed the slaves he inherited and then served as a scout in Virginia for the Union army.
As the youngest daughter, she saw firsthand the hard lives of her mother, sisters, and sisters-in-law working the farm and raising young children. She wanted more from life. So, at age nineteen, she moved to Cincinnati on her own and attended the Cincinnati Normal School there.
She then became a teacher in Sandusky, Ohio. Her educational innovations were so successful that after two years, the town appointed her head principal, making her, at twenty-one, the youngest principal in Ohio. In this position, she attracted the attention of the married Ohio Commissioner of Public Schools, Charles Smart, and they began an affair. When their relationship became publicly known, she resigned and, turned off by her family, moved to New York, where she assumed the name Helen Hamilton Gardener.
Charles Smart, however, continued to hold office. Even later, when he was finally voted out because of the lingering scandal, he was able to get a high-ranking position in an insurance company. Gardener later wrote. “A man is valued of men for many things, least of which is his chastity. A woman is valued of men for few things, chief of which is her chastity.”
Despite her recognition of the injustice, the taboo of being a “fallen” woman at the time was so strong that all her life, she claimed to have been married to Charles Smart. For those interested, Kimberly A. Hamlin, in her biography of Gardener, Free Thinker, provides detailed research on the history of this relationship.
GOALS & MOTIVATIONS
Gardener’s arrival in New York City in 1876 became a turning point in her life. The period between 1876 and 1914 is considered the Golden Age of Free Thought in the United States. This is the period when many women, such as Gardner and Ida Craddock, fought for sexual freedom and the right to challenge religious beliefs and strictures.
Gardener became friends with Robert Ingersoll, an acclaimed rationalist lecturer at the time and part of the Free Thought movement. He encouraged her to give lectures on the unequal positions of men and women. Her early lectures attributed the subjugation of women to the teachings in the Bible. These were published in a hardback edition by The Truth Seeker, under her new pen name Helen H. Gardener. Her stance drew acclaim but also outrage. But that didn’t stop her. She continued to rail against the subjugation of women.
In 1875, Dr. William Hammond had given a lecture asserting that men’s brains weighed more, had a higher specific gravity, and had better developed frontal regions than women’s, and therefore men were biologically superior. (You can read the NY Times report on the lecture here.) Upon hearing this claim for the neurological basis of female inferiority combined with that of Edward Clark in his bestselling book Sex in Education (1873) and The Building of a Brain (1874) in which he claimed women were too weak to attend college, Gardener decided to attack.
In 1888, at the convention of the International Council of Women, Gardener presented the paper “Sex in Brain.” In her lecture, Gardener challenged Hammond’s methodology, in which he had compared the brains of major male figures with those of indigent women. For the next several months, Gardener and Hammond sparred in the pages of Popular Science Monthly until the editors declared Gardener the winner. As a result, Gardener emerged as a leading public speaker for women’s rights.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
In the 1890s, Gardener began writing fiction based on the belief that touching people’s heartstrings through powerful fiction was a way of inducing societal change. For example, her novel, Is This Your Son, My Lord?, told the tragic story of two young men and how they mistreated and abused women with no consequences. In one case, the victim is only fourteen. Raising the age of consent was one of Gardner’s causes, which at the time was as low as seven in Delaware. The book sold over 25,000 copies in its first five months after publication and drew shocked responses from critics and readers alike.Gardener faced criticism from almost every direction: religious leaders, politicians—even other women who worried she was rocking the boat too much. The following excerpt from the introduction to the second edition captures Gardener’s stance and shows why she was called the Harriet Beecher Stowe of Fallen Women. (pp. iii to viii)
The discussion is very old. The question is where it was hundreds of years ago when the writers who touched upon religious or social questions were warned away by the sticklers for “art for art’s sake” and “fiction for pleasure only.” One point this school of critics always ignores. It is this. If they like the topic under discussion, if it presents their side, it is legitimate fiction and good art. If it presents the side they object to, it is neither the one nor the other. The stronger and more powerful the presentation, the more sure they are on this point. I will illustrate. All fiction—there is hardly an exception—in Christian countries is pervaded by subtle arguments in favor of Christianity. “She knelt long before the altar and arose strengthened and calmed,” etc. There is, too, directly and indirectly, in all of our fiction arguments, more or less open, in favor of certain forms of marriage, legal enactment, government control, etc. How the wife clung to an unworthy husband pervades fiction, and is good “art” and quite above reproach as fiction. We are taught in many a war story what true patriotism is and warned against the fatal results of treason, or failure in duty to a cause. Illustrations need not be multiplied. They are so familiar on so many subjects that to give a hint of one will furnish clues to hundreds of forms of argument in our fiction to which we are all so accustomed that we do not give them a conscious thought. The influence over our habits of thought is none the less powerful because we have not stopped to analyze the motives.
Let a new idea, or “an unpopular” train of thought be suggested more or less plainly in a novel, and at once the cry goes up, “This has no place in fiction.” Its opposite may have held place therein without a protest until it has grown fast in our mental life.
The discussion of religion was nothing new in fiction when the protest went up against Robert Elsmere. It was only that the point of view and method of handling the material used was new to most novel readers as an argument in fiction.
Sex relations have been the theme of song and story since the beginning of fictitious writing. Woman’s relations to man have been exploited therein from the time she entered the world until she was borne to the grave. Nothing has been too secret or too sacred to be used as argument or suggestion. Even the throes of maternity have not escaped portrayal. Her foibles have met with no veil of charity, and so courtesan life (open and secret) is as familiar to the readers of fiction as is life itself— that is to say, the courtesan life of the woman. How long she would live after the ” first false step,” how, and when, and where, and why that step was taken, down through all its stages until the father waves her from his own immaculate presence with “You are no longer child of mine, etc.” We all know the infinite variety of forms in which it has served to sharpen and supply the novelist’s pen. But beginning with the “first false step” of a boy, whether innocently taken or otherwise, and following him from the other point of view, — in man’s relation to woman, — is, it would seem, not fit for fiction and has no place therein according to one class of critics. There is nothing new in the criticism, and there is nothing new in the topic. The point of view only is unusual to these critics. There are those who think it might be well for this angle of vision to be more familiar to them.
This novel was not written as history, but there is not a material point in it which is not based on fact. Nor are they based upon isolated or particularly unusual facts, as would be well understood, were readers accustomed to comprehend what they read in newspapers and in legal, medical and historical works.
Here again comes in the effectiveness of fiction. One reads a legal or medical or philosophical essay wherein all the facts appear, but he is not stirred. His imagination is too weak or too little aroused to recognize the bearings of cold formal statement. Then, again, the readers of such treatises are, as a rule, already informed of the facts, while the great general public, which does not dream of them, never reads such essays or books…
Ten thousand essays on slavery would not stir the heart and conscience as did Mrs. Stowe’s one dramatic story. People had thought and said that they knew all about slavery— but she was abused and denounced for “having pictured horrors that did not exist,” as if it were possible to understand human slavery and do that!
The double system of morals which has legal and therefore social support — which makes of man a free and dominant human being and of woman a dependent function only and always — is not understood one whit better than was physical slavery in 1853…
Woman stands in that position to-day. She has no voice in her own government, nor in fixing the standards by which she is judged and controlled. She is a dependent morally, mentally, financially and physically.
It is all very well — and very silly — to say that women control society and make the moral standards that govern it. They do nothing of the kind. Financial dependents and political nonentities create no standards. They receive them ready made. The merest modicum of reason will supply the proof of this.
No subject class — no unrecognized, dependent class — ever yet made public opinion either for itself or for others. It always did, and it always must, simply reflect the sentiments and opinions of its rulers. It is true that many a “woman treats with scorn the “fallen “of her sex while receiving the companion in crime as a suitable son or husband. Who makes that sentiment? Who decides what woman is “fit to be a wife and mother” ? Who makes the laws that give divorce to a husband for the least fault of the wife, but places another standard upon the loyalty of the husband ?
Who talks about ” making an honest woman” of his companion in guilt? Who makes him “honest”? Who enacted the legal standards upon which all these social sentiments rest ? A man is valued of men for many things, least of which is his chastity. A woman is valued of men for few things, chief of which is her chastity. This double code can by no sane or reasonable person be claimed as woman made. Woman has had no voice whatever in its establishment…
The willingness to accept a degraded and subordinate status in the world, and the assertion that they like it, are the lowest depths of human degradation to which human beings can be reduced. A system which produces willing legal, moral, financial and social dependents and inferiors is one that cannot fail, as all history shows, to breed crime and vice, poverty and insanity, imbecility and moral obliquity enough to make of a beautiful world a mere den of discomfort, discord, and despair…
Shall not woman have her novelists also?
GETTING THE VOTE
As a supporter of women’s suffrage, Gardener joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association and, in 1913, was appointed a position on the Congressional Committee. This led to her being named chief liaison with the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1918. Worried about the deleterious effects of the accusatory protests by Alice Paul and her cohorts on the President’s actions, she cultivated a relationship with the Wilson 19th Amendment.
WRITINGS BY HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER
1885. Men, Women, and Gods.
1888. “Sex in Brain,” A paper delivered to the International Council of Women. Reprinted in Fact and Fiction.
1890: A Thoughtless Yes. New York: R.F. Fenno and Company.
1890 Pushed by Unseen Hands. New York: R.F. Fenno and Company.
1891. Is This Your Son, My Lord? A Novel. Boston: Arena Publishing Company.
1892. Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? Boston: Arena Publishing Company.
1892. Pulpit, Pew, and Cradle. New York: The Truth Seeker Company.
1893. Facts and Fictions of Life. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co.
1894. An Unofficial Patriot. Boston: Arena Publishing Company.
1895. “Philosophers Afloat,” The Arena, August, pp. 480–485.
1896. Have Children a Right to Legal Protection? Boston: Arena Publishing Company.
n.d. Plain Talk: A Pamphlet on the Population Question and the Moral Responsibility of Woman in Maternity. Chicago: G.E. Wilson.
c.1915. Woman Suffrage, Which Way? New York: National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co.
Collections
Works by Helen H. Gardener at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Helen H. Gardener at the Internet Archive
Works by Helen H. Gardener at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Papers in the Woman’s Rights Collection, 1913-1941. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
SPEECHES OF HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER
May 18, 1893. Woman as an Annex
April 26, 1913. Statement before the U.S. Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage
March 3, 1914. Statement before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee
Nov. 1913. Woman Suffrage. Which Way?
Dec. 3, 1913. Testimony at a Hearing before the Committee on Rules of the U.S. House of Representatives
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER
“Exploring Freethought Feminist Helen Hamilton Gardener.” Philadelphia Ethical Society. (video)
Free Thinker by Kimberly A. Hamlin, 2020. (biography)
“Positive Atheism’s Big List of Quotations: Helen H. Gardener (1853-1925),” www.positiveatheism.org/
Eulogy for Gardener given by Carrie Chapman Catt, July 28, 1925
“The Fallen Woman Who Won the Vote.” Excerpt from Kimberly Hamlin’s biography.
“The Forgotten Suffragettes.” by Kimberly Hamlin.
“The Woman Who Pushed the Smithsonian to Preserve the Victory for Suffrage.” Kimberly Hamlin.
“But the fiction of fictions which has done more real harm to the human race than any other, perhaps, is the one which dominates it — the idea that woman was created for the benefit and pleasure of man, while man exists for and because of himself.”
Helen H. Gardener Facts and Fictions 1893