Gardener’s brain essays attracted international attention. Even scientists took note of her research and intellectual creativity. The Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Investigator republished her findings “with pleasure,” boasting that this “talented young woman has bearded the lion in his den . . . the investigations set on foot by Miss Gardener open up an entirely new field, in which we hope she will continue her work.”14
At the same time, Men, Women, and Gods continued to sell so well that it had recently appeared in a new edition. Yet the unrelenting stress of life as a reforming lecturer and writer with no steady paycheck drained Gardener. Since settling in New York, Smart’s income and health proved even more unstable than Gardener’s, exacerbating the couple’s struggles. What’s more, her brother Alfred Chenoweth died in November 1887, leaving Gardener with just one remaining sibling—Kate, with whom she was not in contact—to link her to the long chain of ancestral Chenoweths. In late 1887, Gardener, now thirty-four years old, suffered a health breakdown. This one lasted several months. The physical and emotional strain of becoming and performing Helen Hamilton Gardener had overwhelmed her.
In December, the conclusion of her first full year in New York, The Truth Seeker reported that Gardener was “too ill to respond to invitations to lecture, or to conduct correspondence.” The paper proclaimed that “her heart is in the cause of liberty, but her body is too feeble to bear her to the front.” When she recovered, the editors promised, “her voice will again be heard throughout the land.”15 And indeed it would. Not six months later, Gardener would deliver the speech that defined her career.
GARDENER SPENT the winter of 1887 as “an invalid confined to her room in New York,” according to one colleague.16 But in early 1888, an enticing invitation from her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she had come to know on the freethought lecture circuit, hastened her return to the podium.
Born in 1815, Stanton was nearly the same age that Gardener’s mother would have been. Gardener revered her as a role model and lovingly referred to her as “Mother Superior.”17 Stanton had been active in reform work since before Gardener was born—famously co-organizing the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and drafting the meeting’s Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which demanded, among other reforms, women’s right to vote. Long considered the century’s most prominent feminist thinker, Stanton’s fearless writings about the misogyny undergirding marriage, religion, and social customs shared much in common with Gardener’s. But by the late 1880s, Stanton’s outspoken critiques of the Bible met with increasing resistance within the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), the group she cofounded and led with Susan B. Anthony.18 Stanton was looking for new allies, and she found an enthusiastic one in Gardener.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the freethinking friend who introduced Gardener to the women’s rights movement.
Together with Anthony, Stanton was planning a historic international gathering of leading women from western Europe and North America—the biggest ever held in the United States—to take place during the spring of 1888 in Washington, D.C. For what they called the International Council of Women (ICW), Stanton and Anthony aimed to bring together “all women of light and learning . . . all associations of women in trades, professions and reforms, as well as . . . those advocating political rights.”19 Ultimately, women representing fifty organizations and eight countries converged in Washington on March 25 for the elaborate eight-day event. President Grover Cleveland welcomed the group, and a number of senators held receptions in their honor. Many attendees stayed on an extra day to address legislators in Congress, emphasizing that suffrage was the ultimate goal of the proceedings and of the women’s rights movement.20
The ICW was organized under the auspices of the NWSA, one of two national suffrage groups competing for priority in the nineteenth century. In organizing the ICW, Stanton and Anthony hoped to shore up their preeminence by celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, a decision that obscured the movement’s earlier roots in abolition and the accomplishments of their rival group, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). As savvy organizers, Stanton and Anthony believed that for their cause to prevail, they also had to shape their own legacies, even to the point of compiling the movement’s history themselves.
Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage had just completed step one of this mission by writing the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, which detailed the accomplishments of the NWSA and marginalized the AWSA (which worked for the vote on a state-by-state basis and was headquartered in Boston). Stanton and Anthony saw the ICW as the next phase of their legacy project. According to historian Lisa Tetrault, the ICW “worked to bring the women’s movement in line behind the story Stanton and Anthony had given ten exhausting years to constructing” in the History of Woman Suffrage.21 The two aging leaders hoped that a shared origins narrative would move female reformers, who by then disagreed on many issues and strategies, toward the singular goal of securing a federal suffrage amendment.
Stanton had an additional motive. She also wanted to use the ICW to entice women to join her Woman’s Bible Revising Committee, a project to compile and provide commentary on all sections of the Bible that mention women.22 Stanton had long voiced anticlerical and anti-orthodox sentiments, and after finishing the suffrage histories, she turned her full attention to The Woman’s Bible. Believing this to be her most significant contribution to women’s rights, Stanton had begun inviting women to her Bible project as early as 1882, but she was having a hard time securing Revising Committee members. Most of the women she approached over the years turned her down, their rejection letters producing, in her words, “a most varied and amusing bundle of manuscripts.”23
The Woman’s Bible was very similar in scope to Gardener’s Men, Women, and Gods, and Gardener was one of a small handful of eager Revising Committee members. When Stanton first approached her in the summer of 1886, Gardener gladly accepted, declaring, “I consider this a most important proposal.” If the two busy women could “ever stay on the same side of the Atlantic long enough,” Gardener promised, “we will join hands and do the work.”24 Gardener agreed to chair the historical committee, and she provided regular updates about the project to interested readers of The Truth Seeker.25 But she understood that her true job was to “bring the wit” to The Woman’s Bible.26
Stanton’s hopes of securing a large cadre of Revising Committee members at the ICW never came to fruition. What the gathering revealed instead was that the vast majority of female reformers remained deeply religious even though they held divergent beliefs about denominations and doctrines. Foreshadowing the book’s later reception among suffragists, The Woman’s Bible generated only controversy at the ICW.27
GARDENER, HOWEVER, TRIUMPHED. Her appearance at the ICW opened up a new chapter in her public life and introduced her to a wide network of international women. When brainstorming her ideal roster of speakers, Stanton had first proposed that Gardener speak during the session devoted to religion, but after reading Gardener’s 1887 essays in Popular Science Monthly, Stanton suggested instead that Gardener deliver “one speech on our heads, as to their size and contents.” Stanton told the other organizers that Gardener “was logical and at the same time amusing” and a “very pleasing little woman.”28
Even though she had never attended a women’s rights meeting before, Gardener was allotted a Saturday evening keynote spot at which to deliver her new lecture, “Sex in Brain.” Stanton introduced Gardener, explaining that “the last stronghold of the enemy is scientific.” And one would have been hard-pressed to overestimate the power of science in shaping public opinion about what women should and should not be able to do. “Men have decided that we must not enter the colleges and study very hard; must not have the responsibility of government laid on our heads,” Stanton thundered, “because our brains weigh much less than the brains of men.” But after fourteen m
onths of investigation, Gardener, Stanton promised, would “show to us that it is impossible to prove any of the positions that Dr. Hammond has maintained.”29
After a hearty round of applause, Gardener rose to the podium and looked out over hundreds of the world’s foremost women. Emphasizing the serious purpose and historic nature of the ICW, the grand stage was festooned with flags from each U.S. state and several foreign countries, along with evergreens and flowers.30 Every aspect of the ICW was designed to present women as capable citizens, up to the tasks of voting and crafting public policy. According to Stanton, “the order and dignity of the proceedings proved the women worthy [of] the occasion.”31
Adorned in her favorite black velvet dress with a scarf of red Canton crepe across her chest, Gardener beseeched the women to add science to their agenda.32 Women’s opportunities, she explained, were “very greatly influenced” by those “two conservative molders of public opinion—clergymen and physicians.” In those heady days of rapid scientific discovery and technological invention, few educated men still quoted the Genesis creation story to justify their treatment of women. Now they turned to science. After biblical literalism had gone “out of fashion,” Gardener contended, “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.”
Scientists like Hammond, she charged, let their religious and cultural biases taint their research and mar their conclusions, noting that “a man’s religious leanings inevitably color and modify all of his opinions, and govern his entire mental outlook.” Scientific experiments would not be free from sexism without checks in place to counter the ingrained prejudices of scientists themselves. As it stood, women “had hailed science as their friend and ally” only to be met with “pseudo-science” that “adopted theories, invented statistics, and published personal prejudices as demonstrated fact.”
Beyond simply debunking Hammond’s brain research, Gardener sought to impress upon her audience that science was both a vital fulcrum in debates about women’s rights and a potential ally for feminists. “Educators, theorists, and politicians readily accept the data and statistics of prominent physicians, and, in good faith, make them a basis of action,” declared Gardener, while women, the “victims of their misinformation,” remained helpless. Few were confident enough to question scientific findings; fewer still had the anatomical and anthropological information required “to risk a fight on a field . . . held by those who based all of their arguments upon scientific facts, collected by microscopes and scales and reduced to unanswerable statistics.”33
Women needed to participate in science, Gardener proclaimed. After so many scientists and news outlets uncritically accepted Hammond’s findings, Gardener had been shocked to discover that there was in fact no scientific consensus on the existence or significance of sex differences in brains. “This being the case,” Gardener implored, “it will be just as well for women themselves to take a hand in the future investigations and statements.”34 And Gardener had a very specific form of participation in mind. The brain of “no remarkable woman” had ever been studied. Scientists made sweeping claims about the differences between male and female brains, but their studies compared the brains of great male leaders and intellects against anonymous “female tramps, hospital subjects and unfortunates.”35
Surrounded by the most prominent women in the United States, Canada, and western Europe, Gardener sought a few specimens. “I sincerely hope that the brains of some of our able women may be preserved and examined by honest brain students, so that we may hereafter have our Cuviers and Websters and Cromwells,” she concluded. “And I think I know where some of them can be found without a search warrant—when Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, and some others I have the honor to know, are done with theirs.”36
Stanton was galvanized by Gardener’s address. The next day she declared: “The paper read last night by Helen Gardener was an unanswerable argument to the twaddle of the scientists on woman’s brain. The facts she gave us were so encouraging that I started life again this morning, with renewed confidence that my brain might hold out a few years longer.”37 In her autobiography, Stanton singled out just one speech from the eight-day ICW, describing “Sex in Brain” as “one of the best speeches” of the week.38
Gardener’s brain research cemented her friendship with Stanton and prompted the two freethinkers to swear an oath to each other. The previous summer, Gardener wrote Stanton to urge her to donate her brain to science so that researchers could, for the first time, study the brain of a “great woman.” She explained that she had instructed Smart to donate her brain too, but Gardener feared that because of her small stature and poor health her brain might not measure up as well as Stanton’s presumably larger and heartier specimen. Gardener further enjoined Stanton to make sure that her children would honor her wishes and signed her letter “Heathen Helen.” Stanton submitted her signed brain bequest form to Cornell University’s Burt Wilder Brain Collection. And on the back of Gardener’s letter, she instructed her children: “You must save my brain for Heathen Helen’s statistics.”39
Gardener even published a humorous poem imagining their brains living on together at Cornell, a creation she especially cherished because it “shocked the elect.”40 Gardener mused that “Corked in a decanter on a shelf so high, their brains at Cornell, their souls ‘on the fly.’ Elizabeth Cady and Helen so small, Hold converse with scientists, all ‘round the wall.” The pair shared the space with an assortment of interesting male brains—doctors, lawyers, an admiral, and a poet—but Gardener’s brain told Stanton’s, “None can more deeply delight me than you.”41
At “Heathen Helen’s” request, Stanton pledged her brain to Cornell University’s Burt Wilder Brain Collection.
After 1888, speaking invitations poured in from women’s and reform groups eager to hear from Gardener. Degree or no degree, Gardener retained her enthusiasm for science and continued to encourage women to enlist science as an ally. A few years after the ICM, she spoke at an event called the Science Sermons Society and declared that “had it not been for the birth of the scientific method of thought I would not stand here—no woman would be represented here tonight.” Without science, women would be “where superstition and authority placed [them]—under the feet of man!” And it was the “strictly scientific method of thought alone,” Gardener promised, that would free woman from “the bondage which barbarity bound upon her.”42 Decades later when she entered suffrage work, Gardener told a younger colleague that “in and through and with all of my scientific work, at all times, I have applied it to the feminist movement and especially to suffrage in America.”43
But the experience of debating Hammond had also revealed to Gardener the limits of statistics, science, and reason. As it turned out, she learned with dismay, many people did not really care about statistics, science, or reason. After the publication of “Sex in Brain,” Gardener’s essay writing slowed. As she continued to struggle with her own health, romantic drama, and finances, she increasingly turned to fiction. In fiction, Gardener could reveal truths about her own life, and the lives of women more broadly, that otherwise went unspoken.
8
The Fictions of Fiction
The fictions of fiction have contributed to disarm us . . . We wait for the orthodox denouement. It does not come. We pray . . . we sit down and wait but no rich relation dies and leaves us a legacy, nor does the prince appear and wed us.
—HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1890
BEFORE THE VOGUE of the memoir, writers often turned to fiction to voice the shameful truths about their own lives and the things that no decent person was supposed to openly acknowledge. Between 1888 and 1894, Helen Hamilton Gardener published three novels and at least nineteen short stories. With a fake husband and a complicated, scandalous past, Gardener had much with which she needed to come to terms. Not all of her novels and short stories were autobiographical, but sh
e often spoke of her fiction in autobiographical terms, sometimes even revealing to friends the names of the real-life people represented by characters in her stories.1
Gardener described her turn to fiction in two distinct ways. She told friends that for years her New York literary contacts had encouraged her to try her hand at storytelling. Then one night she awoke with the “theme and the diction” of a story coming to her, so she stayed up the rest of the night and wrote it all down. In the morning, she mailed the story to Donn Piatt, the editor of Belford’s Monthly Magazine, with a letter instructing him to return it if the story were not up to his standards. Piatt recalled that in a “musical rustle of feminine drapery,” she brought the story to him in person and that he was struck by her “girlish face and figure” and her “dark, luminous eyes . . . shadowed with pain, as if touched with the reminiscence of suffering, common to lifelong invalids.” Regardless of how he received the story, that evening Piatt sent Gardener a reply, saying simply “Tip Top” and enclosing a check for $100.2
Other times, Gardener recounted more intellectual reasons for writing fiction. It was only in fiction, she explained, that one could both tell the truth and compel readers to understand the truth. “It is an interesting mental condition,” she began the preface to her first novel, “which enables people to know things and not know them at the same time; to be perfectly familiar with the facts, and yet fail to grasp their significance until it is put before them in dramatic form.”3
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