Free Thinker Page 8
After the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of women began tentatively entering American public life by joining one of the countless new women’s clubs—from civic garden clubs to neighborhood groups to temperance organizations—that flourished from coast to coast. White and black women alike joined women’s clubs, though the organizations were generally segregated. Unlike Gardener, however, these women generally engaged in activism because they believed that it was a Christian woman’s duty to extend her sphere of influence beyond the home so that she might better protect her home. Such women generally spoke to women in public and male officials in private.
Gardener’s inaugural lecture promised quite a different take on women’s relationship to Christianity and public life.
PROTESTERS FLANKED the entrance to Chickering Hall on the night of Gardener’s debut. Men and women representing the Salvation Army stood sentinel at the door and offered to buy back, at a profit, any tickets purchased for Gardener’s talk. Her manager, Edward Bloom, tried to reason with the protesters by downplaying the content of her speech, a tactic to which Gardener vehemently objected. “Mrs. Gardener,” he instructed, “I wish you would do the lecturing and let me do the lying.”8
Shortly after 8 p.m., Gardener and Ingersoll took the stage together. The petite Gardener and the towering Ingersoll made a strange pair, with Ingersoll more than double Gardener’s weight and over a foot taller. After enjoying several minutes of warm applause, Ingersoll quieted the crowd and, uncharacteristically, focused the attention on his stage mate. “Nothing gives me more pleasure, nothing gives greater promise for the future,” proclaimed the Great Agnostic, “than the fact that woman is achieving intellectual and physical liberty.” All men and especially women should heed this new voice, advised Ingersoll. “No human being can answer her arguments.”9
Dressed in “plain black, with lace frilling on her throat and wrists,” Gardener gathered her long brown hair “in a coil on the top of her shapely head, and in front were the customary bangs which believers and unbelievers among womankind seem to have in common.” Despite her fashionable dress and bangs, Gardener looked much younger than her thirty years. One newspaper reported definitively that she was twenty-three.10 The audience in Chickering Hall may well have doubted Ingersoll’s grandiose claims about what this tiny young woman had to say.
After a brief, expectant applause, Gardener placed her printed lecture, “Men, Women, and Gods,” on a small black music stand in the middle of the vast stage, empty save for Ingersoll, who looked on from the comfort of a plush armchair. “It is thought strange and particularly shocking by some persons for a woman to question the absolute correctness of the Bible,” she ventured. “She is supposed to be able to go through this world with her eyes shut, and her mouth open wide enough to swallow Jonah and the Garden of Eden without making a wry face. It is usually recounted as one of her most beautiful traits of character that she has faith sufficient to float the Ark without inspecting its animals.” But Gardener was not like these other women. “I claim that I have a right to offer my objections to the Bible,” she announced.
Robert Ingersoll, the “Great Agnostic,” Gardener’s close friend and champion.
At first, her voice waivered and she “comported herself like a young lady on commencement day,” one newspaper reported, but by the second half of her two-hour address, Gardener, with a “clear and pleasant voice,” hit her stride as a speaker worthy of Ingersoll’s endorsement.11 Her years of capturing and retaining her students’ attention in the classroom translated well to the stage. The Chicago Tribune reported that Gardener delivered her address “like a little man.”12
Although she did not mention her affair in Sandusky or her observations about her mother’s and sisters’ lives, these experiences informed her analysis of women’s place in the world. Beginning with Eve eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, Gardener declared “every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a Christian country has been ‘authorized by the Bible’ and riveted and perpetrated by the pulpit.” For example, the Bible taught that “a father may sell his daughter for a slave, that he may sacrifice her purity to a mob, and that he may murder her, and still be a good father and a holy man.” Though Gardener hesitated to “soil my lips [or] your ears” with the details about what the Bible taught regarding women, she summarized several biblical stories to make her point that the Bible authorized and naturalized women’s degradation.
In spite of these foundational edicts about female inferiority, women sat, week after week, in church pews, supporting the church with their money, their time, and their unpaid labor. The relationship between women and Christianity, then, was two-pronged: the Bible mandated women’s second-class status while the church required her vigilant efforts to maintain it. By the 1880s, the notion that Christianity uplifted women and that women upheld the churches had become both sacrosanct and common knowledge. Nonsense, said Gardener. “Of all human beings a woman should spurn the Bible first.” Women “above all others, should try to destroy its influence; and I mean to do what I can in that direction.”13
Laws and social customs, based on the purported authority of the Bible, enforced female subservience to men in myriad ways. Husbands demanded purity upon marriage and fidelity after marriage; most wives could expect neither. Husbands could sue wives for divorce for any infraction; wives could not seek divorce for even the most grievous crimes, and if they dared to leave, mothers in the majority of states would lose custody of their children. Few women questioned the Bible or its lessons reiterated in law. Those who did were typically dismissed as insane, unfeminine, or sexually wanton. It was bad enough when men like Ingersoll attacked the Bible, one reviewer wrote scathingly, “but when a woman opens her mouth against the inspiration of The Book, it not only disgusts but terrifies one.”14
Within days, reports of Gardener’s remarkable speech spread from coast to coast. A headline in the Detroit Free Press declared “Christianity Crushed” by “Bullets from Bob Ingersoll’s Mature Rosebud.”15 Newspapers proclaimed the existence of “A Petticoated Infidel,” “A Fair Infidel,” and “The Female Scoffer.” Ultimately, the name “Ingersoll in Soprano,” bestowed by the New York Sun, stuck.16 Proud to be linked to Ingersoll in such a personal way, Gardener embraced this new moniker and the thousands of potential listeners it afforded.
INGERSOLL’S FAME as a speaker brought increased public attention to the causes he championed. The freethought movement reached the height of popularity in the United States in the late 1870s and 1880s. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, freethinkers established the National Liberal League to advocate for a truly secular nation—including the repeal of Sunday closing laws and Comstock Laws, the removal of the Bible from public schools, and universal suffrage.17 This group, together with many state and local affiliates, sponsored numerous conventions, meetings, and publications each year, ensuring audiences and invitations for Gardener.
Freethought particularly appealed to Gardener because it addressed the root causes of women’s oppression. She could not pinpoint one or two reforms that would have eased her mother’s probate and guardianship struggles, nor could one law have prevented the public shaming she suffered in Sandusky. Such changes could only come from revolutionizing how Americans thought about the essential differences between men and women. She saw her unorthodox lectures as a step in that direction.
If Gardener’s words shocked, that only added to the draw of her lecture tour. In the months to come, she went on to deliver “Men, Women, and Gods” in marquee venues throughout New York State, stopping in Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, and on to Chicago.18 Ingersoll was so impressed with Gardener that he continued as her mentor, encouraging her in subtle and overt ways as her career developed.
The novelty of Gardener’s lecture tour made national news, but most reviews focused on her looks, sometimes to the complete exclusion of her remarks. The Chicago Tribune, for example, provided extensive coverage of her hair b
efore concluding, “It is unnecessary to give a synopsis of her lecture.”19
The persistence of such superficial reviews prompted Gardener to pen a spoof entitled “Lecture by the New Male Star,” written “in the present style of reporting on women’s lectures.” Published in The Truth Seeker, the leading freethought publication and the only one with a national reach, the essay described in detail how a young male star looked and how he spoke, but included hardly anything about what he said.20 “He is a small man, with large luminous brown eyes, and fair complexion,” Gardener satirized. “He wore his hair cut short and parted on the left side, about an eighth of an inch from the middle.” He styled his linen collar “close about a shapely throat” and from underneath his trousers “peeped the daintiest of feet, encased in patent leather shoes.” The review concluded ceremoniously, “his necktie buckled in the back.”21 At the outset of her career, Gardener had found that humor was an effective way to combat sexism, a tactic she would employ time and again.
THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 1884, freethought papers advertised Gardener as one of the movement’s leading speakers and promised that she would headline the upcoming annual conference of the National Liberal League, held in conjunction with the New York State Freethinkers Association, at Cassadaga Lake, in New York, that September.22
Despite a grueling fourteen-hour train trip, Gardener expertly delivered “Men, Women, and Gods” at the Cassadaga meeting, convincing reviewers that she “deserves the success she has found in the lecture field.”23 During the business portion of the convention, the National Liberal League members changed the group’s name to the American Secular Union (ASU) and elected Robert Ingersoll their president and Gardener to a prominent committee. Nine months from the day of her debut, Gardener had become among the most influential and well-known women in the burgeoning freethought movement.24
Even though freethinkers promoted universal suffrage, critiqued patriarchal marriage, and welcomed female voices and even female officeholders, the movement was nevertheless led by men who generally shared their era’s views of women. Emboldened by Ingersoll’s endorsement, Gardener felt secure enough in her status to take on the movement’s male leaders. Just a few weeks after the close of the September 1884 convention at Cassadaga Lake, Gardener wrote a critical review of freethought leader Samuel P. Putnam’s new book, Waifs and Wanderings. She grumbled that Putnam’s otherwise promising book “dealt with woman too much upon the conventional theory that she is a convenient target at which to shoot sharp little sayings about peevishness, extravagance, and all the other frailties commonly enjoyed by vulgar humanity but usually denominated feminine.”25
Putnam, a long-standing ASU official, popular speaker, and regular contributor to The Truth Seeker, did not take kindly to being criticized in the very paper that he helped to edit, especially not by a young woman whom he and the other male leaders had graciously welcomed into their ranks. He wrote Gardener a private letter asking her to expound on her thoughts about women’s mental traits, though he hoped his inquiry would not “drown her in tears.” Gardener published her reply in The Truth Seeker, clarifying that no tears had been shed by her on this or any other matter because “tears are not much in my line.”
Above all, Gardener took issue with Putnam’s mansplaining, noting that his letter was “delivered with that large confidence and breezy good nature characteristic of your sex.” She also rejected his assertion that men were inherently governed by reason. It was men, she countered, who were governed by superstition. Even the so-called liberal ones encouraged their wives and daughters to go to church, Gardener pointed out. Fathers denied their daughters the right to study science, politics, and business and then complained that women were unreasonable. Men “never think of training their boys to a future of idle dependence and emotional trust and faith that the Lord (or some other male bird) will feed and clothe them.” Yet, girls were “taught this hourly.”
It was precisely because of such absurd teachings that Gardener “publicly took the field.” Countless people spoke against the Bible for other good reasons, she declared, but “I do it for women.” Men were beginning to acknowledge that the Bible may not have been the best reference on subjects like geology, but most still maintained that it was right in its estimation of women. According to Gardener, nine-tenths of liberal men argued, in theory, for the equality of women but “in act and in ordinary life . . . their daughters are trained just as other girls are, to go to Sunday-school and church, and never know their own disgrace in so doing.”26
BUT BEING INGERSOLL’S FAVORITE had its costs. Ingersoll’s mentorship, in particular, had begun to rankle some of her colleagues. While women often spoke at small freethought meetings, none had taken the rostrum at a venue comparable to Chickering Hall, much less been championed by the Great Agnostic himself. By the spring of 1885, whispers of sour grapes made their way into the freethought press. After all, there were many women “whose writings are superior to Miss Helen H. Gardener’s,” Elmina Slenker asserted. Why had Ingersoll chosen to promote Gardener above all others?27 Over the next few years, similar critiques appeared in The Truth Seeker. E. A. Stevens complained that Gardener’s “particular claim for distinction consists of having been introduced by Colonel Ingersoll as a Lecturer.”28 Another observed that Gardener’s debut had “roiled the good disposition” of a “few of the old dames who had starred the country for seventy-five years.”29
Gardener penned a public letter in her defense against Elmina Slenker’s criticism, conceding that there were women who were superior writers and that she never claimed to be the best.30 Lucy Colman, of Syracuse, a grand dame of the movement, chided Gardener’s detractors, scolding “cannot one be glad for another that she may have had that advantage, even though she may be alone in the honor?”31
But neither Gardener nor her defenders answered the underlying question surely on everyone’s mind: was she sleeping with Ingersoll? Probably not. Christian moralizers regularly tried to discredit freethinkers as debauched sexual deviants. In response, Ingersoll carefully crafted a persona as the nation’s consummate husband and father—and, by all accounts, he was.
Many freethinkers, including Ingersoll, critiqued traditional marriage as stifling for women. Some even went so far as to call marriage “legalized prostitution” because, with few other avenues to support themselves, women essentially sold themselves to husbands in exchange for housing, food, and other necessities. But most stopped short of advocating free love—a fringe movement that promoted various iterations of an individual’s right to natural sexual expression.32 Nevertheless, the two “free” causes—free love and freethought—were linked by some common adherents and by their shared opposition to the Comstock Laws, under which both were regularly prosecuted. As passionately as he lobbied for secularism, Ingersoll decried free love and he most certainly did not want to be associated with free lovers.33
For her part, Gardener praised Ingersoll’s devotion to his family throughout her life.34 She even dedicated her first book to Mrs. Eva Ingersoll, “the brave, happy wife of America’s greatest orator and woman’s truest friend.”35 And she continued to spend time with the family at their Dobb’s Ferry, New York, estate decades after Ingersoll’s death.36 Gardener publicly denounced free love in 1886, even as she was still engaging in it with Smart. She wrote: “We must all admit that love, to be love at all, must be ‘free’ to choose its object. But . . . I do not believe in any form of polygamy which has yet been tried . . . I believe in but one marital love in one life; but I am aware that some very good people differ from me wholly on this point. As to the promiscuity usually called ‘free love,’ it seems an utter abomination to me.”37 Privately, Gardener had felt the constraints of the “but one marital love” edict, but proclaiming a person’s right to more than one marital love, much less a woman’s right to passion, was out of bounds, even for “Heathen Helen.”
DESPITE GARDENER’S successful 1884 lecture tour and meteoric rise within freethought
circles, she returned to Missouri and made St. Louis her home base following the September meeting at Cassadaga Lake. One letter revealed that she went to Missouri to recover from her “present illness.”38 Since her time in Sandusky, she had regularly experienced periods of ill health. Most likely, she suffered from the nineteenth-century epidemic of neurasthenia, what today would loosely be understood as depression, perhaps triggered by the strain of living an increasingly public lie.
Her trip back to Missouri may also have been to help her lone surviving brother Alfred through a difficult time. Though they had been estranged since Alfred had her written out of their mother’s will, Alfred’s wife and children were in dire straits by 1884. Alfred’s eye troubles made it impossible for him to carry on his work as a physician. So, in 1881, his family moved 21 miles from Olney to Troy, Missouri, where Alfred opened up a pharmacy. By 1884, he was blind and could no longer run the pharmacy.39 His wife Ella bore their sixth and seventh children in Troy, one in 1882 and one in 1885, but neither child survived infancy. Gardener may have returned to Missouri to help run the pharmacy and care for the older children.
From the fall of 1884 until the spring of 1886, Gardener listed St. Louis as her home, though she traveled as far away as Philadelphia and New York to lecture. Charles Smart moved to St. Louis with her and tried, unsuccessfully, to drum up business for the Equitable Life Assurance Society.40 During this time, Gardener forged a close connection with Alfred’s oldest daughter Minnie, then fourteen, who would one day name her own daughter Helen Gardener as a tribute to her favorite aunt.