Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Gardener was particularly concerned about poverty’s impact on women. Around this time, she wrote a short story featuring a young woman who could not find a job and attempted to kill herself rather than turn to prostitution, the only path to survival open to her. The narrator declared that “her story was that of thousands of helpless girls who face the unknown dangers of a great city with the confidence of youth, and that ill training and ignorance of the world which is supposed to be a part of the charm of young womanhood.”21

  She published another story depicting a reform meeting, not unlike those she attended each Friday at the Liberal Club. In the story, a man named Roland Barker stops by the meeting to address a crowd of workingmen on “The Realities of Life” before venturing on to an elegant dinner party. He confidently declares that “poverty and toil are not, after all, the worst that can befall a man, and that the most acute misery dwells in palaces and is robed in purple.”22 Barker intimates that he is miserable in his marriage but stuck in it due to retrograde marriage laws, a far worse fate, he suggests, than to be poor but happily married.

  Barker’s speech is interrupted by a shy, haggard woman standing at the back of the crowded room. She raises her hand to counter that Barker “does not know what real suffering is. He cannot. No rich man can.” Barker had argued that money without love does not bring happiness, but the woman contends that “the keenest agony that mortals ever bore” is the combination of love plus poverty. The woman asserts that when you love a husband or a child, yet do not have the money to properly care for them when they are ill, knowing that effective treatments exist just beyond your reach, that is the hardest of all life’s struggles.23

  Barker is deeply shaken by what the woman says and immediately understands it to be true. He later visits the woman in her ramshackle home and finds that she is caring, round the clock, for an invalid, mentally ill, and occasionally violent husband. Rather than watch him further degenerate without the possibility of an affordable cure, the woman poisons her husband and then herself. Barker and his doctor friend find the couple and conclude that the cause of death was “natural,” a result of “the brutality and selfishness of man.”24

  In her depiction of the outspoken woman at the mostly male liberal meeting, Gardener was presenting a version of herself. In the few years since she had joined the freethought movement, Gardener had borne witness to no limit of bloviating by rich men on various topics at the Liberal Club, at reform meetings, and at the Ingersolls’ Sunday gatherings. Gardener infiltrated these circles through her charm, wit, and elegant self-presentation, but underneath her one or two nice dresses, she remained an outsider with few resources.

  Gardener trenchantly observed the connection between wealth and radicalism—it was easy to be a radical if you were rich, easier still if you also happened to be a white man. Commenting on the people who had hosted her 1886 lecture in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, she described H. Clay Luse as a man who enjoyed not only a “free brain” but also “the happy combination of independent social and financial standing, which enables [him] to do justice to his brains without fear of doing injustice to his appetite.”25 This was a freedom that Helen Gardener would never know. Gardener’s intellect would soon become legendary, but she would never enjoy the safety net conferred by a family fortune, a dependable career, or a wealthy husband.

  Gardener in 1890, on the cusp of becoming a self-supporting writer and reformer in Manhattan.

  GARDENER ALSO EXPERIENCED the economic struggles wrought by the rapid expansion of post–Civil War capitalism in her very own apartment, where Charles Smart returned each day to vent about his struggles at the Equitable Life Assurance Society.

  The world headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, erected in 1870 at 120 Broadway, was one of Manhattan’s architectural marvels. The building was the precursor to the modern skyscraper and the first to boast an elevator. Within a few years of its inception, Equitable had become the second largest insurance company in America. Its formidable founder, Henry Hyde, believed that the company needed a headquarters that visually represented its dominance. Hyde selected the design of Arthur Gilman and Edward Kendall among a field of top competitors. According to an architectural historian, the design was chosen “for its superior logic as well as its artistic bravura.” As a place of work, the Equitable Building did not merely “accommodate corporate activity, it celebrated corporate enterprise.”26

  The actual benefits that the Equitable Building bestowed to workers and customers, however, were dubious and in some cases downright dangerous. Company letterhead boasted that the safety deposit vaults in the Equitable Building were the “most secure in the world.” But internal memos tell a more nuanced story. A New York manager wrote to President Hyde in 1883 to report changes he had made to the reading room adjacent to the safe deposit area because the upholstered furniture was “of very little use excepting for chronic loungers.” Each day several men spent hours sleeping in the lounge’s comfortable chairs. As a result, the furniture was “alive with lice and a few bedbugs.” These men also availed themselves of the adjacent basin, where rather than simply wash their hands, some stripped down and took baths. In response, the manager replaced the upholstered furniture with wood and removed the wash basin.27 Just before Smart arrived in 1883, the building also witnessed its first fatality after a man was crushed to death under a descending elevator car.28

  Located nearly 6 miles from his apartment in the Upper West Side, it was to this flagship building that Smart ventured each day in the hopes of turning a profit. But Smart, born in the 1830s and trained as a one-room schoolteacher, struggled to adapt to the fast-paced, modern mode of business. While he had once proved adept at selling himself within Ohio political circles, self-promotion for the sake of corporate profit was a different skill altogether.

  Smart must have expressed reservations to Gardener about the ethics of the insurance industry because in July 1887, she published an article entitled “Lawsuit or Legacy” in Popular Science Monthly lambasting the insurance industry for scamming families out of money after their insured loved ones died. She objected to company policies that refused to pay claims on the grounds that the deceased had lived an “immoral” life. “Nowhere else in the history of large business organizations,” charged Gardener, “has the debtor regulated his obligation by the morals of his creditor.” By way of example, she clarified that if A owed B $50 and B was a murderer that did not mean that A did not have to pay the debt.29

  Elsewhere, Gardener critiqued the gender bias of the insurance business, the very industry that pioneered the science of actuarial tables and pinpointed the monetary value of each human life according to age, race, and sex.30 Insurance “estimates of longevity, desirability of risk, etc.,” she claimed, were all “based upon male standards.” Furthermore, insurance executives often used actuarial tables in contradictory ways to either deny women coverage or charge them more. Gardener told of a woman who was informed that she would have to pay significantly more for insurance than her brother, since women—as a result of childbirth—were “subject to more dangers of death than men.” Later, her elderly mother went to the same insurance agent to invest in an annuity only to be told that she was entitled to much less than a man because women tended to live longer.31

  While by all accounts successful in the Detroit office, Smart struggled to maintain his standing within the Equitable company after moving to Manhattan, occupying various positions, such as salesman, manager, and investigator. He was often too ill to go to work, and when he did go to the office, he always came home for lunch, all the way from 120 Broadway to 165 West 82nd Street. Gardener recalled that when it came to his job, Smart was so “leisurely (possibly lazy might be used by most) that I often wondered (and feared) that they did not dismiss him entirely for a well man who would reach the office promptly and remain all day.” Even President Hyde did not come home for lunch, Gardener exclaimed.32 Gardener’s reputation as a writer and speaker soared through
out the 1880s, but her public acclaim and book sales did not translate into a salary that could comfortably support the couple.

  Gardener’s greatest disappointment in New York, however, was not financial or romantic. It was intellectual. After years of critiquing the Bible for its treatment of women, she had come to believe that science offered a rational antidote to biblically sanctioned misogyny. According to Gardener, women who were “fortunate to live in the same age as Charles Darwin” had “better stick to nature . . . [because] nature may be exacting, but she is not partial.”33 In her 1886 keynote lecture at the American Secular Union Congress, Gardener even proposed that “the education of women in the sciences is vastly more important to-day than the education of men” because science had the power to elevate women.34 But she would soon be dismayed to find that nineteenth-century science, like religion, was a system run by men for men. That, too, would have to change.

  7

  Sex in Brain

  When religious influence and dogma began to lose their terrors, legal enactments were slowly modified in woman’s favor and hell went out of fashion. Then, Conservatism, Ignorance, and Egotism, in dismay and terror, took counsel together and called in medical science, still in its infancy, to aid in staying the march of progress.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1888

  NOT LONG AFTER her arrival in Manhattan, Helen Hamilton Gardener tried to register for science classes at Columbia University, not far from her apartment on 82nd Street. But in the 1880s, women could enroll only in the special Collegiate Course for Women, not in the University’s science classes.1 For the rest of her life, she proudly claimed to have done postgraduate work in biology at Columbia, but in reality she would have had to sit silently in the back of the class as an auditor.

  In the long tradition of Thomas Paine, nineteenth-century freethinkers viewed science as the apotheosis of rational thought. Gardener, a voracious reader and autodidact, joined them in enthusiastically championing science. Atheists and agnostics had long dismissed biblical literalism, and the new science of evolution promised to substantiate their critiques with evidence. At the same time, the broad-based acceptance of evolutionary theory helped bring the freethought movement comfortably into the mainstream. Freethought conventions and publications regularly celebrated Charles Darwin—especially upon his death in 1882—and discussed the latest scientific and technological developments. Religion could not explain modern marvels like electricity, photography, or the telephone. Science could. Freethinkers believed that such advancements heralded the eventual triumph of a secular worldview.

  For Gardener and other female freethinkers, evolutionary theory offered the additional benefit of debunking the Adam and Eve creation story. For generations, the lessons drawn from this myth circumscribed women’s opportunities, justified their ill treatment, and diminished their self-confidence.2 Eve was created from Adam’s rib to be his helpmate; thus, it was preordained that women should be subservient to men. Eve introduced sin into the world by eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; thus, women were not to be trusted and sin was their fault. For her transgression, God cursed Eve and all women after her to suffer painful childbirth and be “ruled over” by their husbands. But as Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed in the freethought periodical Lucifer the Light-Bearer, “What would be the tragedy in the Garden of Eden to a generation of scientific women? . . . Scientific women [would] relegate the allegory to the same class of literature as Aesop’s fables.”3

  Despite feminists’ expectations that evolutionary theory would revolutionize thinking about the supposedly preordained differences between men and women, scientists did not welcome women into their ranks or have encouraging things to say about their capabilities. To the contrary, science was enlisted to explain why women were “naturally” unfit to enter college, the professions, and public life. The contrast between what science offered women in theory and how it was deployed by some male scientists inspired Gardener to probe the nature of science itself. Just a few years after she had challenged the (mostly) all-male preserve of the church for its foundational misogyny, she went on to the second most powerful all-male preserve—science—and confronted the masculine bias at its core.

  IN SEEKING ADMITTANCE to Columbia University, Gardener entered the most heated women’s rights debate of the late nineteenth century: should women go to college? After the Civil War, more and more women had begun enrolling in colleges because there were no longer enough men to fill the seats or enough men to marry. But educators and medical experts feared the consequences of this unprecedented social experiment. In particular, they worried that higher education would “unsex” women.

  The debate over whether or not women should go to college was shaped by the best-selling book Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), written by Harvard professor and physician Edward Clarke. According to Clarke, the physical strain of menstruation was so taxing that it should preclude higher education. Women who dared to go to college while menstruating risked becoming infertile. Pioneering doctor Mary Putnam Jacobi debunked Clarke’s thesis with what was then the largest and most comprehensive study of menstruation, but Clarke simply shifted tactics and began arguing that women should not go to college because of the structure of their brains.4 Women’s brains, he asserted in his next book The Building of a Brain (1874), were fundamentally different from men’s and thus not suited for higher education or careers.

  To substantiate his arguments about sex differences in brains, Clarke turned to the work of William A. Hammond, the former surgeon general of the U.S. Army and past president of the American Neurological Association.5 Hammond claimed to have treated scores of young women who had had their nervous systems “woefully disturbed” in the effort to master subjects that “could not possibly be of use to them,” such as “algebra, geometry, and spherical trigonometry.”6 Hammond came to believe that teaching women the same subjects as men—especially science and math—overtaxed their delicate systems and led to mental breakdown.

  After years of study, Hammond claimed that there were nearly twenty physiological differences distinguishing the brains of men from those of women. Male brains, he declared in Popular Science Monthly, weighed more, had higher specific gravity, and had better developed frontal regions. These distinctions supposedly revealed why men excelled in intellectual and professional pursuits and women did not.7 As a result of their differential brain structure, women, according to Hammond, should stick with subjects relevant to their job as mothers—such as music, painting, and literature.8

  Gardener was an avid reader of Popular Science Monthly, and she puzzled over Hammond’s article, “Brain-Forcing in Childhood,” published in the April 1887 edition. She had repeatedly asserted that science had propelled women’s gains thus far, and here science (like the Bible) was being used to naturalize women’s permanent inferiority. Something did not jibe. Hammond cataloged sex differences in brains as if these were well-known, established facts. But Gardener believed that Hammond worked from the unquestioned assumption that women were naturally inferior to men and based his research on substantiating this premise, rather than interrogating the premise itself. In other words, Hammond had his own Garden of Eden story. What was new in this retelling was the claim that female inferiority could be measured by scales and microscopes. Fine, Gardener demanded, let’s measure.

  Undaunted by Hammond’s superior status in the scientific community, Gardener decided she would set the record straight. As a woman, she lacked a degree, a laboratory, and the ability to study brain specimens herself. So she wrote down a list of twenty questions—Do the brains of infants differ by sex? If so, were these differences observable by sight? If yes, did these differences increase with age? Was there “unanimity of opinion” among scientists about these questions?—and sent them to the leading neurologists and brain anatomists in New York City.9

  She then queried the man she had heard was the nation’s premier neurologist, Edward C. Spitzka, the former
president of the New York Neurological Association and the man who would soon found the American Anthropometric Society, to collect and examine the brains of accomplished individuals. Having “previously discovered that even brain anatomists are subject to the spell of good clothes,” Gardener put on her “best gown” and went to meet the esteemed doctor. Though Spitzka did not support women’s rights, he was committed to modern scientific methods. His office was filled with all sorts of specimens, microscopes, and journals to which most people lacked access. According to Gardener, Spitzka, unlike Hammond, was “too thoroughly scientific to allow his hereditary bias to color his statements of facts on this or any subject.” Spitzka confirmed that, contrary to Hammond’s assertions, it was impossible to differentiate brains by sex. Gardener and Spitzka became lifelong friends.10

  After having collected a wealth of data and immersed herself in the subject, Gardener rebutted Hammond’s findings with a letter to the editor in the June issue of Popular Science Monthly. Hammond’s theory about sex differences in brains, she charged, was based on “assumption and prejudice,” not “scientific facts and discoveries.”11

  Gardener challenged Hammond to a public test. She would provide twenty brains from Spitzka’s collection, and if Hammond could distinguish them by sex, she would concede. Hammond refused. He countered, smugly, that calculating averages, not examining individual brains, was the way “all such determinations are made by those who know what they are about.” He dismissed Gardener’s challenge as resulting from the “defective logical power” so “characteristic of most female minds.” Not only would a sample of male brains always weigh, on average, more than female brains, Hammond dared Gardener to find just one female brain that exceeded 53 ounces, a mark of greatness met by several eminent men.12 Gardener and Hammond sparred in the pages of Popular Science Monthly for the next several months. In October, the editors declared the debate over and granted Hammond the last word.13