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GARDENER, Helen Hamilton (Chenoweth)

Born Alice Chenoweth, 21 January 1853, Winchester, Virginia; died 26 July 1925, Washington, D.C.

Daughter of Alfred G. and Katherine Peel Chenoweth; married Charles S. Smart, 1875; Selden A. Day, 1902

The initial impetus to Helen Hamilton Gardener's public career as an author, freethinker, suffragist, and political lobbyist came from her father, whose abolitionist activities and rejection of formal Episcopalian thought instilled in Gardener a strong commitment to independent scientific inquiry, sociological analysis, and concomitant activism. Gardener acknowledged this debt to her father in her last novel, An Unofficial Patriot (1894), a slightly fictionalized biography focusing on her father's conversion to the Methodist church and on his Civil War activities.

After an extensive education at various private schools in the Washington, D.C., area and two years of school teaching, Gardener moved with her husband to New York City, where she studied biology at Columbia University and lectured in sociology at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In 1884, prompted by her friendship with the prominent agnostic and skeptic, Robert G. Ingersoll, Gardener gave a series of lectures devoted to the principles of free thought and a discussion of the relationship between heredity and environment.

Her first book-length publication, Men, Women, and Gods (1885), contains many of these lectures. It was published under the name Helen Hamilton Gardener, a name that she subsequently adopted in both her personal and professional life. It is not known whether she rejected her given name and her married name to further her assertion of individual independence, to shield her family from the uproar which accompanied many of her publications, or to underscore a growing dissatisfaction with her marriage.

From 1885 to 1890, Gardener published numerous essays and short stories in a wide variety of periodicals. Many of these pieces were collected in Pushed by Unseen Hands (1890) and A Thoughtless Yes (1890). In the former, Gardener describes the scope of her subject matter as "unanalyzed varieties of mental, moral, social, industrial, or other aberrations of what is by courtesy called civilized society." Here, as in all of her writings, Gardener insists that her readers formulate independent conclusions, conclusions invariably counterposed to their previous passivity.

Gardener continued this work in two essay collections, Pulpit, Pew, and Cradle (1892) and Facts and Fictions of Life (1893). Exploring such diverse topics as insurance fraud, penal reform, labor disputes, hypocrisy in religion and philanthropy, the subservient position of women, and tenement living conditions, these two books make Gardener one of the earliest of the American muckrakers. The most significant and widely discussed of these essays was "Sex in Brain," the result of a 14-month biological study conducted to refute the contention of Dr. W. A. Hammond, surgeon general of the U.S., that the brains of men and women are structurally different. Gardener originally presented the conclusions reached through this research to the International Council of Women in Washington, D.C., in 1888.

During the 1890s, when she served as contributor, associate editor, and, briefly, coeditor of B. F. Flower's reform-oriented magazine, The Arena, she was chiefly responsible for the journal's progressive stance on a wide variety of feminist issues.

Gardener's two novels, Is This Your Son, My Lord? (1891) and Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? (1892), explicitly confront and condemn the sexual double standard. The first of these attacks the hypocritical upbringing of young American men, especially with respect to the emphasis on external respectability rather than moral convictions and independent thought. Gardener's condemnation of institutionalized Christianity as abettor of this false social system figures heavily in her argument.

The companion novel, Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter?, focuses on the lives of three young women. Here Gardener writes a strident but effectively argued denunciation of an attempt by the New York state legislature to lower the age-of-consent law; she also condemns the low wages paid to working women, and attacks the inferior position of women in the marital relationship. The novel is especially significant for its memorable portrait of a "new-woman" heroine, Gertrude Foster.

Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton's prediction that Gardener's writings would do for the women's rights movement what Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the abolitionist cause was not fulfilled, the two novels were frequently reprinted and were the subject of widespread controversy.

Gardener traveled extensively in Europe and Asia during the first six years of her marriage to Selden Day. Although she no longer wrote for publication, after her return to Washington in 1907 she became active in the agitation for woman suffrage and drafted many platform papers in conjunction with her work with Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. In 1920, President Wilson nominated Gardener to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. She was the first woman to hold such a high federal position.

Throughout her long and varied career, Gardener's commitment to feminism was a prominent aspect of her self-proclaimed separation from conventional thought and action. Possibly Gardener's most significant contribution lay in her attack on the standards of propriety and respectability imposed upon the woman writer. In her essay, "The Immoral Influence of Women in Literature" (Arena, February 1890), for example, Gardener cites the need for an uncensored and distinctly female literary voice. She claims such a voice depends upon the gains of the women's rights movement, gains which she celebrated repeatedly and saw as part of an ongoing struggle, inseparable from wider social advancement and reform.