Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A story of transgression in the face of religious ideology, a sexist scientific establishment, and political resistance to securing women’s right to vote.
When Ohio newspapers published the story of Alice Chenoweth’s affair with a married man, she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, and devoted her life to championing women’s rights and decrying the sexual double standard. She published seven books and countless essays, hobnobbed with the most interesting thinkers of her era, and was celebrated for her audacious ideas and keen wit. Opposed to piety, temperance, and conventional thinking, Gardener eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where her tireless work proved, according to her colleague Maud Wood Park, "the most potent factor" in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Free Thinker is the first biography of Helen Hamilton Gardener, who died as the highest-ranking woman in federal government and a national symbol of female citizenship. Hamlin exposes the racism that underpinned the women’s suffrage movement and the contradictions of Gardener’s politics. Her life sheds new light on why it was not until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Nineteenth Amendment became a reality for all women.
Celebrated in her own time but lost to history in ours, Gardener was hailed as the "Harriet Beecher Stowe of Fallen Women." Free Thinker is the story of a woman whose struggles, both personal and political, resound in today’s fight for gender and sexual equity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hamlin (From Eve to Evolution), a professor of American studies at Miami University of Ohio, delivers an eye-opening biography of women's rights activist Helen Hamilton Gardener (1853 1925). Born Mary Alice Chenoweth, Gardener became the youngest school principal in Ohio at the age of 21. When a newspaper exposed her affair with the married school commissioner, Charles Smart, she left Ohio, became a prot g of noted "freethinker" Robert Ingersoll, and delivered her first lecture as Helen Hamilton Gardener in New York City in 1884 ("Hamilton" and "Gardener" were Smart's grandmothers' maiden names). In speeches and writings, Gardener refuted claims that women had different brain structures than men, challenged traditional views on sexuality, and led a nationwide campaign to raise the age of sexual consent to 18 (most states had it at 12 or 14). After Smart's death in 1901 (the couple lived together in New York, but never married), Gardener settled in Washington, D.C., where she helped to organize the 1913 women's suffrage parade and forged close relationships with members of Woodrow Wilson's White House. Following passage of the 19th Amendment in 1919, she joined the Civil Service Commission as "the highest-ranking and highest-paid woman in federal government." Though the book's middle section occasionally flags, Hamlin provides a captivating behind-the-scenes view of the suffrage movement on the cusp of its final victory, and her eloquent account sparkles with Gardener's sharp personality. Feminists and fans of women's history will be exhilarated.
