Helen Hamilton Gardener

• Helen Gardener
• Born: January 21, 1853
• Died: July 26, 1925

Suffragist, writer and United States Civil Service Commissioner, was born in Winchester, Virginia, the youngest of six children and third daughter of the Rev. Alfred Griffith Chenoweth, a Methodist minister, and Katherine A. (Peel) Chenoweth. Her father’s ancestors had emigrated from Wales, settling in Maryland in the 1720s; Alfred Chenoweth had been raised as an Episcopalian but had become a 1850s. Katherine Chenowith remained a strict Calvinist throughout her life. Helen Hamilton Gardener was christened Alice Chenoweth. Shortly after her birth the family moved to Washington, D.C., but within two years resettled in Green-castle, Indiana, where her father worked as a circuit minister.

Alice Chenoweth was educated at the local district schools and by private tutors. After her father’s death in 1864, the family moved to Cincinnati, where she attended the Cincinnati Normal School. She was graduated in June 1873 and for the next two years taught school, until her marriage in 1875 to Charles Seldon Smart, a Virginian eighteen years her senior and the State school Commissioner of Ohio. The couple settled in Columbus, but moved to New York City in 1880, where Charles Smart worked in the insurance business. Alice Smart resumed her studies, attending Columbia University in a non-degree biology program while teaching sociology at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and sciences, an adult education school.

In addition, she wrote short literary pieces for newspapers, publishing under several male pseudonyms. In 1885 her first major book appeared Men, Women and Gods, and Other Lectures, under the name Helen Hamilton Gardener, which she eventually legally adopted. This work had grown out of a series of lectures she had given in January 1884 at the suggestion of the agnostic and free thinker Robert G. Ingersoll whose friendship she made and whose thinking profoundly influenced her. One major theme she addressed was the tendency of Christian theology to place women in a subordinate role in society. Her private studies had led to a strong interest in the women’s rights movement, and to a staunch feminist outlook.

In 1887 Gardener undertook research into the relationship between brain size and intellectual capacity so that she could refute an article published by a former United States Surgeon General, Dr. William A. Hammond, in Popular Science Monthly, that claimed women could not be given equality because their brains were markedly inferior. Her findings, which indicated that no such relationship had ever been determined, were presented in a paper entitled “Sex in Brain” before the International Council of Women in Washington, D.C., in 1888. In the late 1880s and 1890s she took to the lecture circuit in behalf of women’s rights, and in 1893 she was asked to deliver three papers before the Congress of Representative Women, which took place in connection with Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition. Her work was so well received that Elizabeth Caddy Stanton asked her to assist in writing the Woman’s Bible, which was published in 1895.

Gardener also took an active interest in the problem of prostitution, and she worked against its legalization. In 1890 she published a lurid novel, Is This Your Son, My Lord?, on the subject. The book was a financial success, and in 1892 she wrote another work of fiction, this time on married women’s lack of legal protection and rights, Pray You, Sir, Whose Daughter? Additionally, she wrote articles on social issues, especially those affecting women, for Harper’s Bazaar, Popular Science Monthly, and Free Thought Magazine. On the latter journal she served as an editorial writer from 1896 to 1903, and she was a writer for, and briefly, in 1897, co-editor of Arena, a reform magazine in Boston owned by Benjamin Flowers.

Charles Smart died in 1901, and Gardener married Selden Allen Day, a retired Army officer, on April 9, 1902. For the next few years the Days lived abroad, staying for a year in Japan; they eventually settled in Washington, D.C., on their return in 1907. Helen Gardener resumed her suffrage activities and made use of her husband’s widespread political and social contacts with government officials to lobby for a federal woman suffrage amendment. In addition, she organized parades, petition campaigns, and literature mailings. In 1913 she reorganized the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association’s Congressional Committee, after the majority of its members had joined the militant Congressional Union headed by Alice Paul. In 1917 she became vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and its chief lobbyist with the Wilson administration; in 1919 she was chosen vice chair of its Congressional committee.

Helen Gardner had a close working relationship with President Woodrow Wilson and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Champ Clark, who was her neighbor. On April 20, 1920, Wilson appointed her to the United States Civil Service Commission; she was the first woman to occupy such a high federal post. She held the position for five years, specifically working to make Civil Service careers more available to women.

Seldon Day died in 1919. Helen Gardener died in Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington at the age of seventy-two of chronic myocarditis. After her brain was removed, and donated to research at Cornell University, her body was cremated and the ashes interred in Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.

The Helen Gardener Papers are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Her writing include An Unofficial Patriot (1894), a fictionalized biography of her father; Facts and Fictions of Life (1893); A Thoughtless Yes (1890); and Pushed by Unseen Hands (1892). Biographical information can be found in Helen Hamilton Gardener (Alice Chenoweth Day), 1853-1925 (1925?), a privately printed memorial booklet. The best modern sketch is in Notable American Women (1971). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1931); and F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967). Material on her suffrage activities can be found in E. C. Stanton et al, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 4 and 5 (1902,1922); and M. W. Park, Front Door Lobby (1960). For her work in the Civil Service see the United States Civil Service Commission, 42nd Annual Report (1922). An interesting postscript on her death is to be found in James W. Papez, “The Brain of Helen H. Gardener,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology (October-December 1927). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, July 27, 1925.