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In her latest book \u201cFree Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener<\/a>,\u201d historian Kimberly A. Hamlin tells the story of an influential and fascinating woman who you likely have never even heard of. Helen Hamilton Gardener dedicated her life to championing women\u2019s rights and pushing back against the sexual double standard. She went toe-to-toe with some of the most prominent scientists and politicians of her day. She published 7 books and many more essays. By the time of her death in 1925, Gardener was the highest-ranking woman in federal government and a symbol of female citizenship.<\/p>\n Hamlin examines Gardener\u2019s accomplishments and legacy, but she also uncovers a great secret: up until she was 23, Gardener went by Alice Chenoweth. Already a successful educator, \u201cAlice Chenoweth\u201d was featured prominently in Ohio newspapers which carried the details of her affair with a married man. A \u201cfallen woman,\u201d she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, and spent the rest of her life fighting the sexual double standard.<\/p>\n BackStory recently spoke with Hamlin about her research on Gardener, the themes of legacy and personal identity, and the considerable amount that this once-forgotten figure has to say about our present day.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n BackStory:<\/b> How did you first come across Helen Hamilton Gardener, and what was about her that interested you?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Hamlin:<\/b> I first met, in quotes, Helen Hamilton Gardener, in the basement of the Perry-Casta\u00f1eda Library at the University of Texas at Austin when I was working on my dissertation. My dissertation explored how 19th century feminists used science to advance claims for women\u2019s equality.<\/span><\/p>\n So I was sitting in the basement thumbing through pages of old editions of Popular Science Monthly, the popular magazine from the 1870s and 1880s. I don\u2019t know if UT still has these bound copies, but it was kind of fun to leaf through them in a non-digitized way. I could just really see the whole scope of conversation.<\/span><\/p>\n As I was perusing these old volumes, one woman named Helen Hamilton Gardener really stood out to me. She wrote to Popular Science Monthly to challenge the findings of this guy named Dr. William Hammond, who was a pioneering neurologist. He had been the surgeon general for the Union during the Civil War, and then he went on to help found the American Neurological Association and serve as one of its early presidents<\/span><\/p>\n So here\u2019s this top-dog scientist, and here\u2019s Helen Hamilton Gardener, some woman who has never gone to college and no one has ever heard of. And she\u2019s challenging his research in the pages of Popular Science Monthly. So I thought, \u201cOh my gosh, who is this bold and fearless woman?\u201d And also, she was totally right.<\/span><\/p>\n Hammond had advanced all these claims about the inferiority of women\u2019s brains. He claimed that he had found 19 distinct ways in which women\u2019s brains were quote \/ unquote \u201cNaturally inferior to men\u2019s.\u201d Gardener and other women\u2019s rights activists had been reading his research and thinking, \u201cThis makes no rational sense.\u201d What are his studies like? This does not ring true.<\/span><\/p>\n Hammond\u2019s research was mostly anecdotal, what his other male scientists friends had said about women that they encountered. Gardener conducted her own research, and she consulted with other leading neurologists in New York City, where she lived. She really championed what we would consider a more modern approach to science to disapprove Hammond\u2019s claims that women were naturally intellectually inferior.<\/span><\/p>\n This was a huge issue in the 1870s and 1880s, because arguments like Hammond\u2019s were generally used to keep women from higher education. This was when women were first trying to attend college in larger numbers, and people like Hammond were arguing that they should not be able to go to college, much less have professions. <\/span>So the implications of Hammond\u2019s arguments, as Gardener and others realized, were huge. That\u2019s why she thought it was so important to discredit them.<\/span><\/p>\n Photo taken at the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade held in Washington, D.C., March 3, 1913. George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n BackStory:<\/b> How did this discovery become full biography on Gardener?<\/span><\/p>\n Hamlin:<\/b> I wrote about Gardener in my dissertation, and then in my first book I wrote about her interest in brain science and her later contributions. She donated her brain to science when she died in 1925 to prove the intellectual equality of women.<\/span><\/p>\n But something about her just stuck with me. She was so interesting. And I felt like through her, you could really see the whole of the 19th century women\u2019s rights movement. She\u2019s like the Forrest Gump of the women\u2019s rights movement. She\u2019s at all the things, she\u2019s friends with all the people.<\/span><\/p>\n I came to see that you could really tell this much larger story. Everywhere I looked for her, I found her. Early on in my research I said, \u201cGosh, I wonder if she was involved in the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington DC, the huge women\u2019s march that suffragist Alice Paul<\/a> planned to coincide with the first inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I went to the archives and, lo and behold, who was Alice Paul\u2019s right-hand woman in their makeshift office in DC every day? Helen Hamilton Gardener. Who was the press secretary for the campaign? Helen Hamilton Gardener. Who got every permission that they needed to march down Pennsylvania Avenue? Helen Hamilton Gardener. She plays a pivotal role in this marquee women\u2019s suffrage event.<\/span><\/p>\n And that\u2019s just one example of places where I thought, \u201cI wonder if she\u2019s there?\u201d And then not only is she there, she\u2019s totally responsible for many of the key elements of that event.<\/span><\/p>\n Frontispiece from the book Pray, Sir Whose Daughter? by Helen Hamilton Gardener (New York: R. F. Fenno, 1898)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n BackStory:<\/b> How did you go about recreating Gardener, especially given that she went through a major identity change? Was there a chance that you just weren\u2019t going to uncover the person she was before she became Gardener?<\/span><\/p>\n Hamlin:<\/b> In Gardener\u2019s will, she decrees that her executors burn her correspondence or destroy it in some other way. I think that\u2019s because she had had a scandalous early life and a big affair. She didn\u2019t leave behind a set of traditional papers. Mostly it was kind of a hunting and pecking exercise to trace her comings and goings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Because of this affair and the resulting sex scandal she had in her early twenties, she changed her name. I loved this project because I did a lot of traditional historical research, and then a lot of sleuthing, which was the really fun part.<\/span><\/p>\n One thing that made this book possible is the digitization of small local newspapers. I found a lot of details about Gardener\u2019s early life, including the affair that she had in Ohio, through the digitization of small local Ohio newspapers. It would have been impossible to go to every county in Ohio and physically look through old newspapers, but because they had been digitized, I could find her.<\/span><\/p>\n Another source that was really helpful in finding her in these early years, was this Freethought periodical called Truth Seeker, which has been posted online and digitized and you can search it. In Truth Seeker, Gardener wrote a lot of entries and essays for Truth Seeker, but they also loved her, so they frequently profiled her comings and goings. That was another important avenue to trace her early years.<\/span><\/p>\n BackStory:<\/b> It is fascinating how her affair was litigated in public in these newspapers.<\/span><\/p>\n Hamlin:<\/b> Exactly. She\u2019s this 23-year-old woman with hardly any family to support her. She has nothing really to fall back on. Yet she has this strength in herself to say, \u201cYou know what, no. I\u2019m not going to just sneak away in shame over this. I\u2019m going to question, why are women held to such a different standard in terms of sex? Why is a woman\u2019s virginity considered her most valuable asset?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n She moves to New York City, changes her name and reinvents. And I just love that about her.<\/span><\/p>\n BackStory:<\/b> That brings up another point, in how clearly you are able to link Gardener\u2019s personal experiences with the causes that she fought for. This is especially interesting considering her lack of awareness about racial issues, especially as they concern women\u2019s freedom and equality.<\/span><\/p>\n Hamlin:<\/b> I think that\u2019s exactly right. A pro and a con of Gardner\u2019s activism, is that it was very much rooted in her personal experience.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s admirable to think that you can turn your personal struggles into political movements and social change. That\u2019s what she did in terms of the sexual double-standard and her work to raise the age of sexual consent.<\/span><\/p>\n But then a con of drawing so closely on her personal experience, is thinking about herself as a stand-in for all women. This really blinded her to the experiences of African-American women and limited her ability to challenge the racist ideologies of her day.<\/span><\/p>\n Gardener was such an iconoclast. She had no fear calling out the church for its misogyny, or writing controversial articles about sex. But even she could not see her way through racism.<\/span><\/p>\n I think that\u2019s in large part due to her upbringing and her experiences during the Civil War. I have this sense that because Gardener\u2019s family had sacrificed so much during the Civil War, and to end slavery, that she felt this somehow absolved her from having to do anything more.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It is an unfortunate part of her legacy, but one that I think we really need to grapple with in terms of our larger understanding about voting rights and the history of women\u2019s rights.<\/span><\/p>\n BackStory:<\/b> I want to ask about this idea of legacy and historical memory, and how that ties in with the individual. Gardener was obviously very aware of her legacy. In your book, you also explain how the Suffragists held their specific coalition and movement to stand for women\u2019s suffrage overall.<\/span><\/p>\n Helen Hamilton Gardener, Carrie Chapman Catt and Maud Wood Park (from left to right) on the balcony of Suffrage House, the Washington headquarters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hamlin:<\/b> I have a lot of thoughts on that, and I\u2019ve published some shorter pieces about it. Most recently, in a Washington Post op-ed called \u201cThe Problem With Women\u2019s History Month in 2020<\/a>,\u201d I argue that the suffragists were in many ways the nation\u2019s first historians of women.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Cover](\"https:\/\/backstoryradio.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/12\/2020\/05\/FreeThinker_9781324004974.jpg\")
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