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  Helen Hamilton Gardener, 1913, just as she found her calling as the suffragists’ “Diplomatic Corps” in Washington, D.C.

  FREE THINKER

  SEX, SUFFRAGE, AND THE

  EXTRAORDINARY LIFE

  of

  HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER

  KIMBERLY A. HAMLIN

  To Ruby and Elias

  Contents

  Preface

  PART I: MARY ALICE CHENOWETH, 1853–1883

  1.A Chenoweth of Virginia

  2.The Best and Cheapest Teachers

  3.A Very Bad Beecher Case

  4.Purgatory and Rebirth

  PART II: HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1884–1901

  5.Ingersoll in Soprano

  6.The Cultured Poor

  7.Sex in Brain

  8.The Fictions of Fiction

  9.The Harriet Beecher Stowe of Fallen Women

  10.Wee Wifee

  PART III: TWO CALLING CARDS, 1901–1925

  11.Around the World with the Sun

  12.Mrs. Day Comes to Washington

  13.Old Fogies

  14.NAWSA’s “Diplomatic Corps”

  15.Twenty-Two Favors

  16.Our Heroic Dead

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Preface

  ON JUNE 4, 1919, the U.S. Senate followed the House in passing the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. After three generations of activism, this amendment removed “sex” as a legal basis for denying citizens the right to vote. One triumphant woman rushed to attend the signing ceremony. And why not? She had planned it—down to purchasing the fancy gold pen the vice president and the Speaker of the House would use to endorse the amendment before sending it off to the states for ratification. She took her deserved place beside both men as they signed. Flash bulbs captured her standing proud, and her image graced the front pages of newspapers across the nation. Days later, she arranged for the Smithsonian Institution to display the first-ever exhibition on the long history of the suffrage movement. Within the year, she had become the highest-ranking and highest-paid woman in federal government: the personification of what it meant, finally, for women to be full citizens. Her name—at the time—was Helen Hamilton Gardener, and she was famous.

  She was also transgressive and bold and a very unlikely woman to become the public face of female citizenship. Though hardly anyone knew it—certainly not her suffrage colleagues—Gardener was a “fallen woman.” In her early twenties, when she was working as a school principal in Sandusky, Ohio, she had an affair with a prominent elected official who also happened to be a married father of two. As a result, she lost her hard-earned job and her reputation. Rather than accept her fate as a fallen woman and recede quietly into the shadows, she determined to figure out why chastity was considered a woman’s most valuable asset and why men were held to such different standards when it came to sex. Then she turned her findings into a lifetime of feminist reform.

  Born when most women dared not speak in public and when few had a voice in public or private decisions, Gardener pioneered an independent life for herself. After her affair, she moved to a new city and changed her name from Mary Alice Chenoweth to Helen Hamilton Gardener. She did not marry until she was almost fifty. And, significantly, she was neither a mother nor a spinster. Vivacious and charismatic, Gardener loved to entertain but hated to cook. Though she lacked a steady income until her late sixties, she prided herself on her stylish clothes and elegant tastes. She tolerated the two men she lived with as husbands, endured their many foibles, and reserved her strongest emotional attachments for her female friends, especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

  Gardener’s early sex scandal and ongoing romantic struggles opened her eyes to the links between women’s sexual, financial, and political autonomy. Her life’s goal was to secure all three. To convince her peers that women were “self-respecting, self-directing human units with brains and bodies sacredly their own,” she realized that she had to challenge the foundational stories about women inscribed in the Bible, science, fiction, and the law.1 So she rewrote those, too. She became one of the most sought-after speakers on the nineteenth-century lecture circuit, published seven books and countless essays, supported herself, hobnobbed with the most interesting thinkers of her era, visited twenty-two countries, and was celebrated for her audacious ideas and keen wit. News reports often commented on the contrast between her tiny stature—she was barely 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds—and her big ideas.

  After charting an independent and unconventional life throughout the United States and abroad, Gardener settled in Washington, D.C., and joined the suffrage movement. In the 1910s, many suffragists deftly lobbied in Washington, but only one lived next door to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and only one became a welcome daily presence at the White House. Gardener’s many successes in D.C. demonstrate that not only is the personal political, but so, too, is the political personal. Upon Gardener’s death in 1925, suffrage leader Maud Wood Park described her friend as “the most potent factor” in securing congressional passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.2 And Carrie Chapman Catt, the former president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, lauded Gardener as “one of the most courageous of our time.”3

  In her eulogy, Catt also referred to Gardener as a “great White soul,” revealing the extent to which Gardener’s story, and the larger story of the women’s suffrage movement, is about race and, more to the point, whiteness. Even though she took great pride in her Virginia family’s bold stance against slavery and intrepid service in the Union army, Gardener devoted the penultimate chapter of her life to securing the vote for white women, all the while knowing that black women in the South, along with other women of color, would not be enfranchised. For all her intellectual bravery and iconoclasm, she could not see her way through racism. Her life sheds new light on the racial—and racist—dynamics underscoring the women’s suffrage movement and why it was not until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Nineteenth Amendment became a reality for all women.

  Gardener’s dying wish was that the “George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamiltons” of the women’s rights movement would be studied by schoolchildren, commemorated in museums, and have their graves tended by citizens paying tribute to the women who devoted their lives to what she called the “greatest bloodless revolution.”4 In a curious twist, her brain remains on display at Cornell University, but hardly anyone has ever heard of Helen Hamilton Gardener or the countless other women who endured decades of scorn and unimaginable obstacles in their long campaign to attain the right to live as autonomous people.

  A quintessentially American story of self-making, Gardener’s life provides a window into another America—a nation that women helped to make and the nation that women imagined America might become. This book is an invitation, an entreaty, to look for more Helen Hamilton Gardeners—of all backgrounds, races, and ethnicities—to learn from the worlds they hoped to create; to revise our national stories to celebrate their experiences and contributions; and to become familiar with their complexities, failures, and triumphs so that we might better understand our own.

  PART ONE

  Mary Alice Chenoweth

  1853–1883

  1

  A Chenoweth of Virginia

  I have good reason to think well of my ancestors. They have made it easier for me to be fearless in telling the truth.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1895

  IN 1884, Helen Hamilton Gardener made her national debut by delivering a speech entitled “Men, Women, and Gods.” Poised behind a music stand at New York City’s Chickering Hall, she told a rapt aud
ience that the biblical creation story had been written by fallible men, not enacted by an omniscient creator, and that this bogus tale had resulted in the degradation of women for centuries. As a woman who entered public life by denouncing the Adam and Eve myth, Gardener understood the importance of origin stories. She had at least two herself: one for Mary “Alice” Chenoweth, her birth name, and one for Helen Hamilton Gardener, the name she chose for herself in 1884.

  Not much is known about the actual birth of Alice, as she preferred to be called, the youngest child of Rev. Alfred and Catherine (Peale) Chenoweth of Virginia. She always listed her birth as occurring on January 21, 1853, but Virginia did not yet require birth certificates, so none exists for Alice. Within a few months of baby Alice’s arrival, the Chenoweths departed Virginia for good, leaving few traces. Even though she lived in the state for only the first few months of her seventy-two years of life, Alice always prided herself on being a Chenoweth of Virginia.

  Alice did not receive much money or property from her Chenoweth ancestors, but she did inherit a strong family lore and the confidence that she was descended from people of significance. For centuries, the Chenoweths had been stalwart landowners, town settlers, and Westward expanders. In their native England and, later, in the New World, the Chenoweths bought and cleared land, built homes and established families, planted crops, and created communities across their holdings. Over hundreds of years, the Chenoweth characteristics of tenacity and property ownership became inscribed in their understanding of themselves and their place on this earth.

  The first Chenoweths to leave England for the American colonies were John and Mary, who arrived in 1715. Believing themselves descended from Lord Baltimore, John and Mary settled in Baltimore County to claim 7,200 acres of land near the Chesapeake Bay that Maryland colonial officials had taken over from the Susquehannock people. From there, John and Mary’s descendants went on to settle towns, villages, and farms from Maryland to Virginia to Ohio and Indiana, all the way to Kentucky and Missouri. Alice’s great-grandfather, a Revolutionary War veteran also named John, eventually settled in Berkeley County, Virginia (now West Virginia).1

  In between John Chenoweth’s homestead in West Virginia and the graves of Alice’s parents in Greencastle, Indiana, lie nearly a dozen towns, streets, and squares named Chenoweth. As founding families of many white communities, the Chenoweths tended to marry well, aligning themselves with other prominent landowners and civic leaders. Later generations became ministers and inventors, craftsmen and builders, doctors and statesmen.

  But Alice’s family stories contrasted starkly with the realities of her life as a white woman in mid-nineteenth-century America, a woman who would lose her name in marriage, who was not allowed by law to own property, to participate in politics, or to lead any communities herself. Her life’s trajectory testifies to the outrage she felt at the chasm between her birthright as a Chenoweth of Virginia and the legal and cultural constraints placed upon her as a woman.

  THE OUTLINES OF Alice Chenoweth’s life began to take shape four decades before she was born, with the birth of her beloved father in February of 1809. Alfred Griffith Chenoweth grew up surrounded by propertied white elites and the privileges accorded to landowning patriarchs in Virginia. His grandfather, John Sr., owned more land than nearly anyone else in Berkeley County, Virginia, and his father, John Jr., inherited much of it. John Sr. owned between five and eight slaves; John Jr. owned two, Jerry and Mariah.2 Alfred and his brothers grew up in a home with a library and tutors, in “an atmosphere of scholarly investigation and calm,” understanding that they were destined to succeed their father as county squires.

  Early on, Alfred learned that with land and slave ownership came exalted status within the community and within the Episcopal Church of his birth. Alice later recalled that the tethering of wealth, enslavement, and church membership in antebellum Virginia did not sit well with her father. “The easy-going, gentle Episcopalianism of [Alfred’s] home-training, with its morning and evening, perfunctory, family prayers, its ‘table grace’ and its Sunday service, where all the leading families of the county were to be seen, and where the Rector read with so much finish and the choir sang so divinely, the same old hymns, week after week, had so far been as much a part of his life,” Alice wrote, “and were accepted as mechanically,—as were the daily meals, the unpaid negro labor, and the fact this his father, the old ‘Squire,’ sat in the best pew, because he had built and endowed the finest church in the State.”3 Rather than the privilege of sitting in the finest pew, young Alfred craved a more authentic connection with his God and with his fellow man.

  By the late 1820s, Alfred began expressing serious doubts about his family’s religion and its tacit, sometimes explicit, endorsement of slavery. All around him he heard of upstart faiths, preached by men freed from tradition and even from churches; men who rode across the countryside on their horses, sharing the good news of Christ’s salvation with hundreds of people gathered in makeshift tents. These new “circuit riding” ministers and the personal, urgent beliefs they professed resonated with Alfred. Like thousands of other Americans, Alfred was born again in Christ during the Second Great Awakening.

  Between the 1820s and the 1850s, Christians such as Alice’s father sought to revitalize both society and themselves. Their motto was “Make thyself perfect as God in heaven is perfect.” Prompted by a millennialist conviction that the “cosmos was crumbling,” Americans inaugurated a host of reforms—from abolition to temperance to vegetarianism—and new religious movements to promote them.4 Unlike the Great Awakening of the 1740s, the goal of the Second Great Awakening was not to revive individual churches but to make American society itself sacred. Rapid industrialization and urbanization had given rise to numerous social problems—the entrenchment of slavery, intergenerational poverty, prostitution, crime, public drunkenness—that reformers hoped to eradicate through good works and active prayer.

  Abolition was by far the most popular movement of the era, with temperance a distant second. Women and men alike were caught up in the reformist zeal, and by the 1840s, some white women began to understand their own second-class status as linked to that of enslaved people. In 1838, Sarah Grimké, an abolitionist from a slave-owning family in South Carolina, published “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes,” in which she argued that women should be allowed to speak in public, as she had been chastised for doing, and that women were inherently equal to men. Religious denominations split over whether or not to oppose slavery, and abolitionists splintered over whether or not women should be allowed to speak in public.

  Objecting to slavery but ambivalent about the role of women, Alfred Chenoweth was drawn to Methodism. On his nineteenth birthday, in 1828, Alfred was baptized in Virginia’s Opequon Creek, disowned by his father, and welcomed as a circuit riding preacher by the Methodists. For the next six years, Alfred traveled all over Virginia and Pennsylvania telling the good news of Christ’s salvation. He composed his sermons while riding on his faithful horse Selim, singing hymns to himself along the way.5 By 1836, Alfred had reconciled with his father and been admitted as a minister and a deacon in the Methodist Church.6

  While crisscrossing the state of Virginia, Alfred rode along the Spotswood Trail (Route 33), a major East-West thoroughfare. He likely frequented the churches and homes near Peales Crossroads, at the corner of the Spotswood Trail and Route 276, a North-South artery, 5 miles from Harrisonburg, Virginia.7 For generations, and even today, Peales Crossroads has greeted travelers arriving from all four directions.

  Peales Crossroads came into existence in 1811 when Bernard Peale bought 101 acres near the Spotswood Trail and built a log cabin for his family, including his daughter Catherine Ann, who was born in 1812.8 Bernard Peale owned several slaves, and in 1816, he was tried and acquitted of whipping an enslaved woman named Rachel to death.9

  Two years later, Bernard Peale died. His daughter Catherine Ann was just six years old. To what extent the death of Rachel or the d
eath of her father affected Ann, as she was called, we will never know. Like nearly all women of her time, Ann left behind no diaries or letters (and most of the Rockingham County, Virginia, records were burned during the Civil War). Ann grew up on the homestead at Peales Crossroads, attending the Presbyterian Church across Spotswood Trail with her mother and siblings. Her eldest brother, Jonathan, took over the family lands, leaving Ann to help supervise the household, meals, and childcare.

  In 1838, at the relatively advanced age of twenty-six, Ann Peale married the circuit riding minister Alfred Griffith Chenoweth, whom she probably met as he rode through Peales Crossroads.10 Ann’s marriage to the near-penniless itinerant minister was surely not what the Peale family had hoped for their first-born daughter. A few years after Ann’s marriage, her brother Jonathan razed the original Peale log cabin and built a Greek Revival mansion in its place. Ann’s younger sister Amanda married George Keezell II, son of the founder of Keezletown and an esteemed Virginia patriarch, a much more suitable match for a daughter of Peales Crossroads.

  Ann and Alfred Chenoweth, on the other hand, owned no home and moved to a new town each year as the Methodist Church demanded. If Alfred had resented the connection between a parishioner’s wealth and that parishioner’s standing in the Episcopal Church, he certainly went to the opposite extreme in joining the ranks of itinerant Methodist preachers.

  Upon their marriage, Ann brought along her inherited slaves, and her father-in-law insisted that the young couple also take Jerry, the enslaved man who had helped to raise Alfred, and his family with them as well. Alfred had already realized that he opposed slavery, but he tried to draw a moral distinction between inheriting slaves and buying people outright. Together with the enslaved people they had inherited, Alfred and Ann continued his itinerant preacher lifestyle throughout the 1840s and into the 1850s. By 1853, they had seven children, each born in a different house in a different Virginia town.