Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Since her family believed her to be married to Smart, it is unlikely that Alice asked them for money. The couple most likely lived together in Detroit on Smart’s salary, though he must also have sent funds home to Ohio for at least as long as he continued to visit. Alice may have earned additional money as a tutor or writer.15 As an unmarried woman, she had more freedoms and more legal rights than a married woman. She had no legal obligation to obey a husband, and if she earned any money, she could keep it.

  Alice later assailed the idea that a man who had seduced a woman under false pretenses could subsequently “make an honest woman of her” through marriage. “Why sustain the fiction,” she demanded, “that a woman can be elevated by making her the permanent victim of one who has already abused her confidence and now holds himself—because of his own perfidy—as in a position to confer honor on his victim?” Alice described such thinking as “vicious” and concluded, “What fiction of fiction (and alas of law) could be more degrading to womanhood—and hence to humanity—than the thought here presented?”16 Rather than be “saved” by Smart through marriage, Alice endeavored to save herself.

  She began to narrow in on intellectual and financial freedom as her life goals. The church had taught woman, she would soon write, that “her mind is to be of slight use to her; that her hands may not learn the cunning of a trade nor her brain the bearings of a profession; that mentally she is nothing; and that physically she is worse than nothing only in so far as she may minister to one appetite.”17 In spite of, or perhaps because of, the tremendous loss and humiliation she had endured for her affair, Alice rejected such teachings outright. What women needed were the rights to think for themselves and support themselves. Free from husband and children, Alice began to chart an independent life, even as she lived with Smart.

  But Alice’s romantic situation remained precarious, no matter how she may have rationalized it to herself. If people in Detroit learned that she was not really Smart’s wife, the couple’s prospects would have been ruined in Michigan, too. If Smart returned to his wife, Alice would have been without a home once again. And if word of her unorthodox relationship with Smart resurfaced, who would marry or hire her, a woman with a tarnished reputation who had doubled down on her extramarital affair rather than repent? Moreover, what toll did this fake marriage, a lie first uttered as an act of self-preservation by a woman with no safety net and few options, exact on Alice’s inner life?

  THE BIG LIE ASIDE, Alice and Charles Smart appear to have led a full life in Detroit. Smart approached his post at Equitable Life with zeal, taking out regular advertisements in the Detroit Free Press and in the Detroit City Directory. He offered new customers deep discounts on insurance policies and was praised in the local paper for always giving “detailed information when asked in relation to the business at his office” in Detroit’s bustling downtown.18 As a “gentleman of recognized ability in the science of life insurance,” he was promoted to General Inspector of Agencies for Equitable Life in November 1881. And in 1882, Equitable Life Assurance reported that it had issued more insurance policies than had “ever before been written in a single year by any company in America or abroad.”19

  In the late 1870s and 1880s, Detroit was a good place to explore new ideas and reinvent oneself. Not yet the Motor City, it was nevertheless a city on the move. Electric lights and telephones came to the city in the late 1870s, thrilling citizens with the new opportunities made possible by recent advancements in science and technology.

  After the 1873 depression and massive labor strikes of 1877, business and commerce rebounded. By 1880, Detroit’s population surpassed 116,000 and the city boasted a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. The opera house regularly hosted national speakers and world-class musical events. One history of Detroit refers to the 1880s as “the elegant eighties” because the city’s streets were “wide and beautiful,” supporting “many mansions with fine stables of superior horses.” The people of Detroit “love entertainment and parties,” and the city was “fat and content and purring to itself, a sleek cat drowsing in the sun.”20

  For the next phase of her education, Alice could have picked few places better than the new and expanded Detroit Public Library. Opened in 1877, by 1886 this stunning five-story library had doubled its holdings to 70,000 books. Within its elegant walls, she could read history, philosophy, science, and literature in sunny rooms overlooking the construction of a modern city.

  She could even see the Detroit Public Library from the posh Griswold Hotel, where, by 1882, the not-exactly-married Smarts boarded. Located just one block from both the library and Smart’s office on West Congress Street, the Griswold Hotel provided an ideal temporary home for two people in the process of reinvention. The hotel boasted a refrigerated buffet with several beers on tap and 160 guest rooms.21 Off of the main lobby, several smaller lounges and cafes provided guests ample room for privacy and anonymity—including, for example, the opportunity to live with your lover and avoid scrutiny.

  ALICE’S REINVENTION during these years in Detroit was also propelled by changes within the Chenoweth family. While she appears to have remained in contact with her mother and brother Alfred throughout the 1870s, perhaps even living with them between late 1876 and 1880, Alice’s remaining family ties would soon be strained.

  In 1874, when Alice was working in Sandusky, her mother Ann drafted her will and listed Alice as the executor and sole beneficiary of her estate, which by then included 39 acres of land in St. Charles County, Missouri. Her brother Bernard and sister Julia had died, and Alice’s three surviving siblings were married and settled. Only Alice, the youngest, remained single with an uncertain future. Her mother must have intended to provide for her most vulnerable daughter, perhaps feeling guilty for having legally severed ties with her in 1867.

  Then, in February of 1881, Ann contracted pneumonia and died at Alfred’s house. As a physician, Alfred cared for his mother during her final illness but resented the toll it took on him. That his youngest sister Alice stood to inherit their mother’s estate must not have seemed fair, emotionally or financially, to Alfred.

  Shortly after Ann’s will was approved by the probate court, Alfred got himself appointed administrator of the estate, despite the fact that the will clearly named Alice as executor. Then, in July, Alfred and his sister Kate sued Ann’s estate, listing Alice as codefendant. According to court documents, Mrs. Alice Smart of Detroit was summoned to appear before the Lincoln County Probate Court. But Alice did not contest her siblings’ suit or show up for the hearings.22 Perhaps she did not want to invite legal scrutiny of her marital status. Nevertheless, Alfred’s treachery stung.

  The court invalidated Ann’s will and ruled that her estate had to be evenly divided among the living Chenoweth children, with additional shares going to the descendants of the deceased siblings. Part of Alfred’s claim rested on the fact that Ann had lived with him, and he charged her estate for her room, board, and medical care. Ultimately, each sibling received $237 and their pick of Ann’s belongings. Of the dozens of items listed in the three-page estate inventory—from books and family Bibles to linens and silverware—Alice claimed just one thing: a pair of gold spectacles, valued at $2.

  A few years later, in her first public lectures, Alice spoke of a devout Sunday School superintendent she knew, a man much like Alfred, who “refused his mother her dying wish.” The following Sunday, this man atoned for his “unhuman act by singing with the usual unction, ‘how gentle God’s commands,’ and reading with devout fervor, ‘the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.’ ” Yet, this devout man’s mother, who “had the same shepherd, had wanted for much.” His mother “even wanted for a stone to mark her grave, because the money she had left for that purpose her holy son thought best to use, vicariously, upon himself.” Reflecting on this man’s acts, Alice concluded: “He is willing to take his heavenly home through the blood of Christ, and his earthly one out of the pockets of a dead mother.”23

  After Alfr
ed and Kate prevailed in probate court, Alice went from being the sole beneficiary of her mother’s will to being written out of it almost entirely. Her pious siblings had singled out Alice’s inheritance as unfair, but she may have felt that they also singled out her—a young woman who always related more to her brothers than to her sisters, who inherited their father’s iconoclasm and brother Bernard’s agnosticism, and who had insisted on striking out on her own. Among the Chenoweth’s immediate and more far-flung relatives stood women shaped by traditional Southern standards of feminine comportment. Alice’s ambition and independence marked her as decidedly different.

  WHILE THE FREETHOUGHT MOVEMENT had long appealed to Alice intellectually, she was also drawn to it by what she considered the hypocrisies of Christianity and, more to the point, the hypocrisies of the Christians in her own family. In part because she lacked a husband and a family to tell her not to, Alice read widely during her exile and determined that the barriers and degradations experienced by women could all be traced to the Bible and the churches that promulgated its messages. As a child, she had appreciated her brother’s contraband copy of Paine’s The Age of Reason. At normal school, she thrived in an environment that prized “real thinking,” not rote learning. In Detroit, she had the opportunity to follow her intellectual passions wherever they logically led her, most likely in the voluminous stacks of the public library.

  Alice’s quest for knowledge coincided with the publication of a surge of books contextualizing and critiquing the Bible and providing revolutionary ways to think about the origins and development of human civilization and patriarchy. In place of biblical origin stories, the new anthropological and evolutionary accounts of human history appealed to Alice. The essays she would soon write contain detailed references to these landmark publications—John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women”; W. E. H. Lecky’s History of European Morals; Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology; and Henry T. Buckle’s History of Civilization.

  After the death of her mother, Alice began writing down her reading notes and her ideas about sex differences and gender roles, looking for answers to her predicament and by extension the challenges facing all women. In an early victory for her considerable personal charm, she shared one of these drafts with Robert Ingersoll, perhaps when he lectured at the Detroit Opera House on November 8, 1882.24 Throughout her life, Alice would gain entry into elite circles by writing charming letters of introduction, often referencing—vaguely or by name—mutual friends. This is surely the tactic she employed to meet Ingersoll, a man famous for welcoming all callers. Once introduced, her vivacious personality and witty intellect cemented the connection.

  Ingersoll liked what he read, and he urged Alice to keep at it.25 The encouragement of the Great Agnostic provided Alice with much needed confidence and affirmation. Perhaps her years in purgatory would serve a larger purpose. Maybe all the suffering she had endured—the frequent moves, the loss of parents and siblings, and the public shaming resulting from her affair with Smart—had served a larger purpose, too. Perhaps she could join her father and her brother Bernard as a person who made brave sacrifices for a greater cause.

  By the early 1880s, Alice had determined that her cause would be women’s rights. She would fight for women, like her mother, who had subscribed to magazines such as The Ladies’ Repository and learned from an early age that it was women’s lot in life to clean and tidy the world of men.26 She would speak for women like herself, who had been told they could be teachers, but only if they earned half as much as men, lived a circumscribed life, remained pleasant no matter what befell them, and retired upon marriage. She would voice the fears of young women taught to look pretty to attract a suitor, but not so pretty as to incite a man’s lust, lest their own reputations be ruined. And she would preach to women who had been taught that the sins of the world rested on their shoulders—sins in which they had no say and for which they were cursed with pain in childbirth and perpetual servitude to men—that these sins were not their fault.

  Each of Alice’s advancements—her independent moves to Cincinnati and Sandusky and the unchartered path she negotiated with Smart—required new ways of relating to authority, the development of new skills, and mastering modes of life for which she had few, if any, female examples. This next move would be her boldest yet. If Ingersoll could attract crowds of 10,000 by subjecting biblical teachings to reason, why couldn’t she? But first Alice Chenoweth needed a platform, a new home, and a new name.

  PART TWO

  Helen Hamilton Gardener

  1884–1901

  “Ingersoll in Soprano”: Gardener, age thirty-two, as she appeared in her first book Men, Women, and Gods (1885).

  5

  Ingersoll in Soprano

  There are a great many women to-day who think that orthodoxy is as great nonsense as I do, but who are afraid to say so. They whisper it to each other. They are afraid of the slander of the Church. I want to help make it so that they will dare to speak.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1884

  ON A COLD, CLEAR EVENING in January 1884, the portentous first Sunday of the year, 800 people, mostly men, paid 75 cents to hear a young woman deliver a lecture in New York City’s famed Chickering Hall, at Fifth Avenue and 18th Street, the very spot from which Alexander Graham Bell had placed the first interstate telephone call.1 This particular night, the audience had not paid to witness a technological marvel but rather an intellectual one. It was rare indeed to pay good money to hear a woman speak, much less a woman no one had ever heard of before. Until just a few days earlier, this young woman had been known as Alice Chenoweth, a woman who had published no articles, championed no causes, and been involved in no reform efforts. That night in Chickering Hall, Alice Chenoweth became Helen Hamilton Gardener.

  By the fall of 1883, Alice and Charles Smart had moved to New York City, where they continued to live a public lie together as husband and wife. Equitable Life Assurance transferred Smart from the Detroit office to the company’s flagship headquarters at 120 Broadway, the nation’s first modern office building.2 The couple attempted an equally modern life together as a reformist woman whose career was buttressed by a doting husband.

  Alice later claimed that when she began extolling her radical ideas, she changed her name so as to not call attention to her Chenoweth heritage. But what she really did not want to draw attention to were the published reports of her sex scandal back in Ohio. Since “Mrs. Charles S. Smart” was already another woman’s legal name, Alice came up with a brand new one that nevertheless signaled her fidelity to her lover. While she never gave a reason for her particular choice of names, genealogical research reveals that Hamilton and Gardener were the maiden names of Smart’s two grandmothers (the former claimed to have descended from Alexander Hamilton).3 Her last names were historical; her chosen first name was aspirational. In Greek, Helen means “bright one” or “shining light.” Helen Hamilton Gardener would shine light on the injustices against women.

  Upon arriving in New York, Gardener contacted Robert Ingersoll, who maintained a law office in the city, to let him know she had been working, as promised, on her freethought essays. He assured her that she “had written something valuable” and “at once declared it must be read in public.” Gardener remained forever grateful to Ingersoll because he “placed my foot upon the first rung of the ladder as a writer and speaker.” She had “come of a Southern line of ancestry whose women had never done any public thing,” and she “trembled and feared from without lest I be wrong—lest my ability to do was purely imaginary.” Ingersoll’s encouragement was like a “Rock of Gibraltar” to Gardener at a time when she “boiled and seethed within with the need for self-expression and self-development.” Ingersoll instructed Gardener to find her “own soul and then to stand erect and not to doubt and fear.”4 It was a directive she would ably follow for the next forty years.

  But Ingersoll did more than offer crucial moral support to Gardener. He used his “commanding posit
ion” to open doors for her and even traveled from his home in Washington, D.C., to Manhattan to introduce her inaugural lecture, guaranteeing crowds and publicity few first-time speakers could attract. Though Ingersoll encouraged the careers of many artists, he had never before—and never would again—take on a protégé. For the rest of his life, he lovingly referred to Gardener as “Heathen Helen” and treated her like a daughter.5

  Just a few days before Gardener’s debut, small advertisements in the New York papers promoted her lecture, promising that it would be “most interesting and characteristic of an educated and liberal-minded woman” and that Ingersoll himself would be there to “preside during the lecture.” Tickets for her talk went on sale at Chickering Hall and Brentanos Bookstore at 9 a.m. Friday morning.6

  Designed to house a music store, warehouse, and 1,450-seat concert hall, the four-story Chickering Hall, in the vibrant Union Square entertainment district, was considered an architectural masterpiece of brick, trimmed with gray marble and brownstone. It had recently hosted lectures by the poet Oscar Wilde and the famous naturalist Thomas Huxley, as well as numerous concerts utilizing its state-of-the-art $15,000 organ.7 Attending lectures was a popular nineteenth-century leisure activity, and audiences expected talks to last two hours or more. But the vast majority of speakers were male.