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  Helen Hamilton Gardener, now age forty and at the height of her literary fame, delivered at least four keynote addresses. Some women recalled her giving six or eight, more than any other American woman. The New York Sun reported that next to Susan B. Anthony, Gardener created “the profoundest sensation.”2

  “In one of the halls where Helen Gardener and Miss Anthony were to speak there was such a tremendous crowd,” according to one eyewitness, “that they finally had to station two policemen to keep order.”3 Jennie June, the pen name of Jane Cunningham Croly—one of the most renowned female journalists of the nineteenth century, observed in her popular column that “there was one woman who, whenever she addressed an audience, was listened to with an intensity of interest accorded to no other speaker and attracted such crowds that the largest halls could not suffice for their accommodation.” Everyone at the fair “wanted to hear this one woman; to secure her as a speaker, no matter how widely the central idea might differ from their own.”4 This woman, of course, was Helen Hamilton Gardener.

  Not only did Gardener’s speeches electrify, so, too, did her outfits. For generations, opponents of women’s rights had characterized adherents as being short-haired women and long-haired men. The specter of the mannish spinster shaped audiences’ expectations of what feminist reformers might look like, and Gardener delighted in few things as much as upending expectations. Reporting on the surprising presence of many attractive and fashionable women at the World’s Congress, the Minneapolis Star Tribune featured Gardener as the first case in point. The paper even printed a “pen picture” of her to prove how stylish she was. “We’ve all more or less read her startling theories,” the author declared, but what about her as a person? Was she serious? One look and the author could tell, yes indeed she was. “Imagine a slender, dainty figure, dressed in quiet yet elegant manner, refined features, large dark eyes and such a clear bird-like voice,” described the correspondent. “Again picture this dainty, well-bred creature discussing the unmentionable social vices before a mixed audience as calmly as if delivering a literary critique. One might question her discretion but not her honesty or valor.”5

  Even though she had resented reviews of her freethought lectures that focused on her looks, Gardener also understood that female reformers could—whether they liked it or not—amplify their messages by looking attractive. She later criticized Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s decision to include a frumpy picture as the frontispiece to her memoir. The photo, Gardener charged, “does not do her credit. It has a look that people, who do not know her, would say, ‘Women who do things look like that. I should be afraid of her and I could not love her, however much I might admire her ability.’ “6 For her part, Gardener always strove to cushion the shock of her unconventional ideas by wrapping them in an attractive package.

  AFTER SIX YEARS of writing fiction nearly exclusively, the magnificent occasion of the World’s Columbian Exposition brought Gardener back to the podium and the polemical essay. To satisfy popular demand, she reprised her 1888 lecture “Sex in Brain” and delivered three new talks. The most significant was “Woman as an Annex,” the speech she gave on Thursday, May 18, the day sponsored by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

  Since Gardener had last spoken to the suffragists back in 1888 at the International Council of Women, she had fallen even further out of step with the movement’s leaders. Together with Stanton, Gardener objected to the 1890 merger of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), Stanton and Anthony’s group, with the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell. For Stanton and Gardener, the merger represented the ascendency of a more conservative faction of women’s rights advocates—women who opposed Stanton’s Woman’s Bible; women who shied away from discussing divorce and sex; and, perhaps most irksome, women who promoted temperance via the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), by far the largest women’s organization of the nineteenth century.

  As an outspoken agnostic, Gardener rejected the creep of Christianity into American public life (the era witnessed a surge in legislation proposing Sunday closing laws, Bibles in schools, and declarations that America was a Christian nation) and now into the women’s rights movement.7 And she opposed temperance as an infringement on individual liberty. Rather than outlaw vice, she suggested that “we . . . train young people to be strong and self-directing and self-respecting citizens,” set the age of consent for drinking (and for the other “social evil,” prostitution) at twenty-one, and let people make their own choices.8 She also resented the stereotype often promulgated by temperance advocates that women were naturally more moral than men. She believed that female temperance advocates resorted to “a hatchet and a prayer” because they lacked a voice within the law.9

  Back in October 1889, Gardener had spent the day with Stanton at her vacation home in Hempstead, Long Island, brainstorming what to do about the inevitable merger.10 Matilda Joslyn Gage, another freethinker and longtime suffrage leader, had suggested the formation of a new national liberal society that would combine the interests of the feminists with those of the freethinkers, in opposition to the proposed NAWSA merger, which she feared would bolster the church. Gardener and Stanton “talked the matter over, pros and cons” and agreed that a new organization would be best. Still in the midst of drafting The Woman’s Bible, however, Stanton clarified that Gage would have to organize this group herself. Though she would reluctantly accept a more-or-less honorary position as the unified NAWSA’s first president, Stanton declared herself beyond organizations. Henceforth, she would be a “free lance to do and say what I choose and shock people as much as I please.”11

  Gage’s group failed to get off the ground, so Gardener, like Stanton, remained a “free lance” in relation to women’s rights organizations, writing about feminist issues but not actively involved in women’s rights groups. In March 1890, for example, Gardener published an essay in The Arena advocating divorce reform. Divorce, she argued, was not a religious matter but a matter of general welfare with particular urgency for women. While a man might suffer in a bad marriage, a man in a bad marriage “still owns his own body.” “For these and other reasons,” Gardener asserted, “an unhappy marriage can never mean to a man what it must always mean to a woman.”12

  With her emphasis on secularism, divorce, and sex, Gardener’s writing represented precisely the sort of arguments not welcomed in the reunified NAWSA. In her 1890 NAWSA presidential address, Stanton proposed a set of resolutions, and the very first one advocated a wife’s right to seek divorce. “Liberal divorce laws are for wives what Canada was for the slaves,” Stanton proclaimed, “a door of escape from bondage.” And it was absurd for the government to consider changing divorce laws “until woman has a voice” in government.13 After Stanton stepped down as president of NAWSA in 1892, the group’s annual meetings featured no more keynotes about divorce.

  Despite never having attended a NAWSA meeting, Gardener was allotted a keynote spot—right after Susan B. Anthony, the group’s patron saint—on NAWSA’s day at the 1893 world’s fair. At 10 a.m. on Thursday, May 18, “Aunt Susan” delivered the opening address to roaring applause. Next, Gardener took to the podium to deliver “Woman as an Annex.”

  “If it were not often tragic and always humiliating,” Gardener began, “it would be exceedingly amusing to observe the results of a method of thought and a civilization which has proceeded always upon the idea that man is the race and that woman is merely an annex to him and because of his desires, needs and dictum.” While Genesis encoded female subservience, nature itself imparted no such message. “Bigotry or sex bias and pride does not carry this theory below the human animal,” Gardener asserted. “Among scientists and evolutionists, and, indeed, even among the various religious explanations of the source and cause of things, the male and female of all species of animals, birds and insects come into life and tread its paths together and as equals.”14 For decades, women had advanced
many arguments against patriarchy, but Gardener was among the first to argue that it was not natural.

  Gardener also delivered two speeches on heredity, which developed ideas from earlier essays. Evolutionary theory was revolutionizing scientific thinking about heredity, and reviewers praised Gardener simply for talking about a concept as yet so poorly understood. For the rest of her life, biographical sketches described her as “an expert in heredity.” But Gardener was not really interested in the precise mechanisms of trait transmission. Rather, she invoked the intellectual prestige of hereditary science to warn women that the sexually transmitted diseases they contracted from their husbands could be passed on to their children.

  Gardener was especially concerned about syphilis because it could result in children with seizure disorders, unsightly “syphilis teeth,” and even blindness, to say nothing of the horrors the disease visited upon unsuspecting wives.15 Ridding the world of the sexual double standard, of rape, and of prostitution, Gardener believed, would have far greater intergenerational consequences than just about any other reform. To those who protested that women must remain ignorant of vice, Gardener countered that before a woman became a mother, she should be brave enough “personally to demand and to obtain absolute personal liberty of action, equality of status and entire control of her great and race endowing function of maternity.”16

  Gardener’s speeches at the world’s fair proved so popular that she decided to quickly release them in book form. Just weeks after she left Chicago, newspapers reported that Facts and Fictions of Life, containing her world’s fair addresses plus a few greatest hits, would be on sale in July. An advertisement for the book declared “a thinker has been let loose upon us.”17

  After her blockbuster performance at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Gardener returned home to New York to prepare for the publication of what she considered her best book, An Unofficial Patriot. Over the next several months, she became more involved in the Woman’s Press Club of New York, an organization led by her friend Jane Cunningham Croly; attended a women’s rights meeting at the home of her friend Mary Phillips; and headlined a conference in Atlanta.18 But back in New York, Gardener’s public life as a celebrated author and reformer collided with her reality as a woman with limited income tethered to a feckless man.

  CHARLES SMART’S PROSPECTS at the Equitable Life Assurance Society had continued to dim since his plaintive letter requesting a loan back in 1891. Even more stressful than their financial woes, Gardener caught Smart in a lie that changed the direction of their relationship and of her career.

  At some point in 1894, Smart told Gardener that he had to go out of town for company business. Seeing as he generated so little business, she suspected that this was a lie. She confronted him, and they had the “first real and lasting quarrel we ever had.” Smart cried, accused Gardener of being unfair, and suffered “heart failure.” The couple summoned a doctor who warned that any further excitement would surely kill Smart. So Gardener “nursed him out of it—as usual.” She never mentioned his mysterious trip again, but in her heart she knew he had betrayed her. From that point on, Gardener withdrew from him “as a wife, from any and all possible relations.” She was “in a sense his mother from 1894 until his death,” as she later confided to her friend Mary Phillips, “but never his wife.”

  For the next several years, she told Phillips, her life became “simply a round of work and outside interest.” But after Smart’s deception, Gardener was no longer able to produce “really fine, imaginative work. . . . No one ever knew why—except him,” she recalled. “I lost confidence and that crippled my faculties.”19 Even as Gardener attacked the laws and social customs that kept women dependent on men, she was not entirely immune to these customs herself. She had evaded traditional marriage, by choice or by circumstance, and she supported herself and Smart with her earnings, but at some level, she still depended on Smart’s affection and fidelity for her self-confidence and for her public persona. Moreover, all evidence suggests that in spite of everything they went through together, she loved him deeply. She had not insisted that Smart marry her, but she had insisted that he love her the most. She was devastated by his betrayal. An Unofficial Patriot would be her last book.

  IN JUNE 1894, Gardener took a chance on a new opportunity—to move to Boston so that she could coedit The Arena, a magazine in which she regularly published. While New York remained her favorite place to live, the financial precariousness of the writer’s life weighed on her. Plus, she had been writing constantly since 1888—six books in as many years—and welcomed a respite. Boston was a major metropolis but with a slower pace of life than New York and a guaranteed paycheck.

  For years, Smart had claimed that he could not stay at the Equitable office all day because he missed Gardener and felt “so lonely I can’t work.”20 To combat this problem in Boston, Gardener arranged a job for him as the business manager of The Arena at a salary of $75 per week.21 Once settled, Gardener recalled that she “handled” the problem of Smart’s lackadaisical work ethic by “going to the office myself and doing double work to keep him at it—and he did then work hard and faithfully.”22

  In Boston, the couple settled into a handsome apartment at 185 Huntington Avenue, near Copley Place.23 The Arena offices were located in the Pierce Building downtown, and the couple mingled on the fringes of Boston Brahmin society, with Gardener occasionally giving talks to Boston women’s clubs.24 But mostly, they worked at The Arena. Founded by B. O. Flower in 1890, The Arena rapidly established itself as one of the nation’s premier reform publications. As Flower recalled, his aim was “to give all-around discussions, by the ablest and most authoritative writers, on vital questions relating to the social, economic, political, ethical, psychological, philosophical, educational, literary, dramatic, and artistic life of our age, giving special emphasis to the liberal or progressive ideals or the newer or more unconventional thought of the day.”25 With fewer than 30,000 subscribers, though, The Arena’s broad reformist goals were somewhat hampered.

  But Arena readers sprang into action for what would become Gardener’s signature reform. While the masthead still listed B. O. Flower as editor, Gardener took the reform publication in a new direction. Under her leadership, The Arena became devoted to the single issue of raising the age of sexual consent for girls, a problem she had frankly dramatized in her first two novels.

  Gardener announced this new campaign in a special January 1895 edition titled “The Shame of America.” Anti-vice crusader Aaron Powell, of New York, wrote the contextual essay, which explained that until very recently the age of consent in most states had been ten or twelve, following the precedent of English common law. But in 1885, British journalist William T. Stead went undercover in London’s brothels and learned, among other things, that men regularly paid upward of 13 pounds to deflower child virgins. Outraged, Stead published an exposé entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette. As public concern mounted, the British parliament raised the age of consent to sixteen. American reformers, led by Powell’s group and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), took up the effort. By 1894, twenty states had raised the age of consent to fourteen, an improvement but far short of the reformers’ goal of eighteen. Eight states refused to raise the age above twelve, and only in Kansas and Wyoming—where women had at least partial suffrage—was it raised all the way to eighteen.

  Reformers were also motivated by the desire to curb prostitution, often cited as the inevitable next step for “fallen women,” and to reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The so-called purity movement fought proposals to regulate prostitution, believing that government sanction of “the social evil” would only hurt women and children. They demanded instead that men abide by the same standard of sexual morals as women. Other contributors to the “Shame of America” issue of The Arena included the pioneering female physician Emily Blackwell and Frances Willard, president of the WCTU, who pronounced “strong d
rink and the degradation of woman” to be the “Siamese twins of vice.”26

  Gardener’s mission was to highlight not only the grievous sexual crimes against girls but also the links between women voting and women being able to control what happened to their bodies, much as she had done in her essays about divorce reform and heredity. When asked to explain why she so adamantly advocated raising the age of consent to eighteen, Gardener replied that she might as well be asked why one should be opposed to the “practice of cutting the throats of his neighbor’s children whenever that neighbor happened to not be at home to protect them.” Simply put, “There is no argument. There is no basis for a difference of opinion.” Maintaining that the problem stemmed, in part, from women’s lack of voice in government, she declared that “no legislature on earth, if its discussions were open to women, if women were present at its sessions, would ever have passed such acts.”27 Further emphasizing the links between sexual and political autonomy, Gardener praised, in a later issue of The Arena, an Illinois proposal to disenfranchise and bar from public office men convicted of having sex with girls under fourteen.28

  Developing skills she would later use to advocate for the vote, Gardener compiled a map of the United States indicating the age of consent in each state as well as a blacklist of states that had failed to raise the age of consent. She also pointed out that some states had technically increased the age only to add amendments stating that the crime exclusively pertained to cases where girls could prove they had previously been virgins. In a letter to Gardener, William Stead emphasized the absurdity of such clauses, noting that he had never met “a dissolute man who was not prepared to declare on oath . . . that he had not been first.”29