Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  A company memo prepared for Hyde the next day showed that Smart had already taken out several cash advances and owed the Equitable $4,562.40. Smart had written just $11,000 in policies for the year 1891, and of those, he had collected on only $1,000.30 Smart continued to be listed in New York City directories with a business address at the Equitable’s Broadway headquarters until 1894, but given his lackluster performance, it is unlikely that he worked there very often. The modern insurance industry, especially the world-leading Equitable did not tolerate weakness and failure.

  To survive, then, Smart relied on Gardener’s earnings as a lecturer and writer, which strained their relationship and her health. By the close of 1891, she was writing at a faster clip than ever before. Back in New York, the couple took a night off to attend the first annual banquet of the new Vegetarian Society, where they enjoyed a “meatless feast” of boiled parsnips, potato pancakes, and cream of celery soup.31 But otherwise Gardener was consumed by her writing and the pressure to support herself and the ailing Smart. Later in life, she described to her friend Adelaide Johnson the “dreadful conditions” in which she wrote her second novel, “under tight contract and with Smart constantly under foot.”32

  In April 1892, her second short story collection, Pushed by Unseen Hands, was released. It contained nine short stories and an endorsement from Robert Ingersoll. This book called into question the many social and moral problems that were governed by the “unseen hands” of the past, including the passing on of traits to offspring, outdated laws, and unexamined customs. Gardener characterized the overriding theme of the stories as “heredity,” but modern readers might better understand the theme as “why people do what they do.” Gardener did not believe in a strict definition of biological heredity, but rather one that included social and environmental forces, an idea she would continue to develop.

  All the while, Gardener was scrambling to finish her second novel, Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter?, published just two months after Pushed by Unseen Hands. She desperately hoped that her second novel would sell even more than the first. But the literary quality of the novel reflects the stressful conditions in which Gardener finished it. Though she improved formally as a writer—for example, the narrator remains constant in the second novel—the plot lacks the verve of Is This Your Son, My Lord? Elizabeth Cady Stanton was right: Gardener was not a born novelist. Nevertheless, the book went into thirteen editions and sold more than 25,000 copies.33

  With Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter?, Gardener also found her signature reform: raising the age of sexual consent for girls, which in 1890 was twelve or younger in thirty-eight states. In Delaware, it was seven.34 Stanton wrote the preface and proclaimed that she had long waited for a novelist to do for women what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for the enslaved—a book that would “paint the awful facts of woman’s position in living colors that all must see and feel.” In so vividly describing the “dark shadows” lurking in “everyday life” and in “every household,” Stanton declared, Gardener had come close to realizing her dream.35

  Gardener, age thirty-nine, nearing the height of her literary fame.

  The novel revolves around a wealthy New York family, the Fosters, and their twenty-year-old daughter Gertrude, a college student. Smart but sheltered, Gertrude longs to learn about life as it really is—not as men explain it to women, whom they deem too delicate or too stupid to understand. Volunteering at a neighborhood settlement house, Gertrude befriends two working-class fourteen-year-old girls, Francis King and Ettie Berton, both of whose fathers work for the local party boss and serve in the state legislature at his behest. Much to her traditional father’s chagrin, Francis refuses to play the part of the wide-eyed naïf. Ettie, however, learned from a young age that the easiest way for women to get along in the world is to act how men want them to act—pleasing, self-effacing, and self-denying.

  Always ready with a smile and an affirmation of male wisdom, Ettie is seduced and impregnated by an older man during a visit to Coney Island. Gertrude’s father insists that she stop seeing Francis and Ettie lest she be found guilty by association of being a “fallen woman.” “The test of respectability of a woman,” he informs Gertrude matter-of-factly, “is whether a man of position will marry her or not. A man’s respectable if he’s out of jail.”36 Shunned by her father, the pregnant Ettie dies alone in the room she shares with Francis, paid for by Gertrude.

  Indignant, Gertrude protests that society was wrong to condemn Ettie as a “fallen woman,” when really she had only behaved precisely how she had been taught her whole short life. She soon learns from her suitor Selden Avery that the New York State Legislature had been meeting in secret session to lower the age of sexual consent from fourteen to twelve. Worse still, the bill had been introduced by Ettie’s own father. The glaring hypocrisy of the situation inspires Gertrude and Selden to action, and they succeed in stopping the bill’s passage. The novel concludes with Gertrude and Selden promising to marry in ten weeks so that they can move to Albany, the state capital, in advance of the next legislative session.

  Reviewers praised Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? as “a novel with a purpose.” Some even heralded Gardener as the “Harriet Beecher Stowe of Fallen Women.” B. O. Flower, editor of The Arena, declared it “the strongest work which has yet come from the pen of this gifted lady” and concluded that “if the white ribbon army should make it the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of their noble crusade, it would, I believe, accomplish more in one year than their present efforts will realize in a decade.”37 The freethought, birth control journal Lucifer the Light-Bearer praised the book for revealing “many unpalatable truths,” declaring the work an “unexcelled . . . ‘eye-opener’ for women.” The reviewer speculated that “if angels ever weep, it would be to see mothers who know that their seven- and ten-year-old daughters are being ravaged by men and yet claim that women have all the rights they need.38

  More orthodox readers objected to Gardener’s brazen choice of subject matter and suggested that she title her next book Do You Know Where Your Husband Is, Madam?39 Unfortunately for Gardener, she knew precisely where Smart was nearly all the time: loafing about the apartment. But around the time of Pray You Sir’s publication, Gardener discovered that Smart could serve narrative, if not functional, purposes.

  PRIOR TO 1892, Gardener had never referred to Smart as her husband in print. Friends considered them to be husband and wife, but The Truth Seeker always referred to her as Miss Gardener, and none of her book prefaces mentioned a husband.40 That is, not until the publication of Pray You, Sir.

  Surprisingly, given what she later confessed to Adelaide Johnson about how Smart hindered her writing process, Gardener dedicated Pray You, Sir to her husband. She did not name him, but she gushed that he “was ever at once her first, most severe, and most sympathetic critic, whose encouragement and interest in her work never flags; whose abiding belief in human rights, without sex limitation, and in equality of opportunity leaves scant room in his great soul to harbor patience with sex domination in a land which boasts of freedom for all.”

  In a flurry of reviews and profiles of Gardener, Smart began to appear as an affectionate, egalitarian, and modern husband. A widely reprinted profile entitled “Helen Hamilton Gardener is Smart” announced that Smart was Gardener’s real name and “she lives up to it.” The article also stated, incorrectly, that Col. Smart was “a gentleman known in New York legal circles.”41 Other profiles emphasized the romance of their marriage. A friend from Michigan wrote to the Saginaw Courier-Herald to testify that he had visited Gardener in her New York home and hosted her on summer holiday. Unfortunately for her “masculine admirers,” the man related, “she is married to a man she loves devotedly.”42

  Another profile raised a question no doubt on many readers’ minds: how could a woman write about the sexual experiences Gardener detailed “unless she has a personal experience of the things of which she writes”? But according to the reviewer, this was an absurd assumption. No one
would dare suggest such a thing of Shakespeare or Dickens or argue that the preacher “who depicts the torments of the damned must have had these torments.” To further deflect attacks against Gardener’s womanly character, the article reported that her “home life with her parents was markedly simple and happy and pure and as free as possible from the troubles and ills of the world”—an odd summation of a life that included the loss of three homes, two fortunes, two parents, three brothers, and one sister in the wake of the bloodbath of the Civil War. Moreover, the author declared, Gardener’s “marriage or domestic life is simply ideal.” Her husband, a “college-bred professional gentleman,” was “in entire harmony with all her work and all she desires to do, as she is with all he thinks and does. She has no more earnest admirer and at the same time no more careful critic.”43

  For a freethinking woman with an interest in sex reform, having a devoted husband provided respectability and social validation. In writing about extramarital sex, statutory rape, and seduction, Gardener violated many taboos. Nearly all reviews and profiles described her feminine charms, idyllic home life, and polished manners in part to make her novels acceptable: If an upstanding woman wrote them, the novels could not be judged as impure. The fictive Charles Smart chronicled in the press allowed Gardener to present herself as an upstanding, happily married woman who abided by the normal rules of society even as she wrote about the many trespasses against them. In addition, this version of Smart-the-husband provided a rare model of an egalitarian marriage for other nineteenth-century women who were on the lookout for alternatives to the patriarchal marriages they had grown up with.

  Having a husband who supported her career wholeheartedly also allowed Gardener to continue traveling the country—often alone—to do her work. She may have chafed against this reality, but at some level she knew that her career was bolstered by the public’s perception of Smart. Single women traveling alone were highly suspect, but if everyone knew that Charles Smart waited at home, happily cheering on his intrepid wife, who could fault Gardener for venturing out? Regardless of what he actually contributed as a partner, the public Charles Smart allowed her to go about the world by herself, voicing her iconoclastic ideas.

  By the end of 1892, travel was what Gardener needed the most. After the publication of four books in two years, she had become a literary sensation, a writer known far beyond the confines of the freethought movement, and a woman in need of a break. On December 24, The Truth Seeker reported that Gardener had left New York for the West, return date unknown.44

  FROM DECEMBER 1892 THROUGH JULY 1893, Gardener traveled the country researching her third novel, An Unofficial Patriot, which would be published in 1894. Outwardly, this was her most autobiographical novel, as she told everyone who read it, but it also involved a fair amount of fiction. In an inscribed gift copy, she wrote: “You may care to know before you read it that this ‘story’ is both historically and sociologically true and was fully verified in the records of the secret service department years ago. Only the names are changed.”45 The main character “‘Griffith Davenport’ was my beloved father,” she divulged to another friend. “For the public it was a ‘novel based on the secret history of the Civil War period,’ for those who know it is also the soul of my home.”46

  To recount her father’s heroism, Gardener headed west and south to see to what extent her memories could be verified. By February 1893, Gardener arrived in Locust Lodge, Kentucky, to visit General Thomas A. Harris, a Confederate veteran and politician. From there she traveled on to Louisville before going to Indianapolis to meet with May Wright Sewall, the organizer of the World’s Congress of Representative Women. The two conferred about the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition to be held in Chicago that May. Gardener explained to Sewall that she would have to play her arrival by ear because “I am West on a business trip—verifying material for my next literary work—I am compelled to govern my next movements by what I learn in each succeeding place.”47

  After meeting with Sewall and conducting some research in Indianapolis, Gardener took the train to Toledo, Ohio. In March, Clara Bewick Colby, her colleague on the Woman’s Bible Revising Committee and the publisher of the Stanton loyalist paper the Woman’s Tribune, hosted a reception in Gardener’s honor at her home in Nebraska. The two may have had something else in common besides loyalty to Stanton and abhorrence of orthodoxy. Colby’s husband was notoriously unfaithful (the couple divorced in 1906), and Gardener later told a mutual friend that “any doctor and every man know instantly upon looking at her that she has the worst form of the worst disease.”48

  An Unofficial Patriot is markedly different from Gardener’s other fiction in that it has nothing to do with women’s rights or sex reform. The novel profiles Rev. Griffith Davenport, his decision to manumit the enslaved people he inherited, his family’s move west, and their experiences during the Civil War. Thirty years after the end of hostilities, the novel highlights the moral complexities of the war—the heroism and righteousness of her father, the racism of their Indiana neighbors, and the havoc that the war caused her family. While it condemns slavery, the novel also describes the structural barriers in place to freeing individual slaves, as well as nostalgic—and racist—depictions of the “peculiar institution.” She gives no agency to the African American characters, none of whom are well developed. Instead, Gardener’s work reflects a shared culture of whiteness among North and South to which white readers responded positively.

  One critic hailed An Unofficial Patriot as “the most remarkable historical novel of the Civil War.”49 The Los Angeles Herald concurred with The Arena’s assessment that the novel was “history instead of fiction” and a “story which will live in permanent literature.”50 The Pittsburg Press observed that An Unofficial Patriot “forms part of the summer reading of the best readers of the country.”51 Apropos of nothing, this blurb also included the information that Gardener weighed less than 100 pounds and wore a size 5¼ glove. “There is nothing in it to offend the traditions of an honest man, North or South,” declared the Chicago Times.52 Allegedly, both Fitzhugh Lee, son of Robert E., and Robert Lincoln, son of Abraham, enjoyed it, testifying to the book’s appeal to white readers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.53

  “I am a Chenoweth of Virginia,” Gardener had proudly declared upon settling in New York in 1886. There is no evidence that she visited Virginia since leaving as an infant in 1854 or that she kept in touch with any Virginia relations until much later. But she longed to reconnect with this storied heritage, and writing about it offered her one way to do so. More than anything else, An Unofficial Patriot established Gardener’s reputation as a Southerner. In addition to her petite frame, youthful appearance, and loving husband, profiles now mentioned her Virginia birth and her long line of Chenoweth ancestors going back to Lord Baltimore.54 A Louisville paper praised her for elevating “the literary profile of the South.”55 For the first time, some reviews even described Gardener as speaking with the twinge of a Southern accent.

  Between 1888 and 1894, Gardener used fiction to make sense of her romantic past, enhance public sympathy for fallen and complicated women, and connect with a Southern way of life that she had not experienced firsthand. Throughout, she used the press generated by her novels to craft an appealing—if not altogether accurate—persona for herself.

  Several months before the publication of An Unofficial Patriot, Gardener fulfilled her promise to May Wright Sewall to participate in the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. This invitation provided Gardener with an opportunity to debut her revised self on the most prominent stage in the nation.

  9

  The Harriet Beecher Stowe of Fallen Women

  If it were not often tragic and always humiliating, it would be exceedingly amusing to observe the results of a method of thought and a civilization which has proceeded always upon the idea that man is the race and that woman is merely an annex to him and because of his desires, needs, and dictum.


  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1893

  IN MAY OF 1893, Helen Hamilton Gardener joined hundreds of leading women in Chicago for the week-long World’s Congress of Representative Women, held at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the second world’s fair to be held in the United States. The Columbian Exposition highlighted American innovation and industrial prowess and commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus landing in North America. In a grueling and deadly test of endurance, over 40,000 skilled workers hastily constructed an all-white city of temporary buildings to welcome over 27 million visitors—more than one-third of the entire U.S. population—who arrived by rail and by stage every day for six months.1 Not only were the buildings all white, so, too, were the fair’s organizers, speakers, and exhibitors. To protest the exclusion of African Americans from this international celebration of American progress, black leaders Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass published and distributed thousands of copies of a pamphlet entitled “The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exhibition.”

  Along with exhibits showcasing the advancements of more than eighty countries and thirty-eight states, the exposition hosted many smaller events, including a different thematic congress each week. The World’s Congress of Representative Women was held just a few weeks after the fair opened, and many remarked that it was by far the most organized and informative of all the congresses, thanks to the leadership of May Wright Sewall, who had recruited Gardener to her Science and Philosophy Committee. The women’s congress showcased white women’s achievements in the arts, industry, the professions, and the home. The Woman’s Building, which hosted exhibitions by and about women, was even designed by a female architect—twenty-four-year-old Sophia Hayden, the first woman to graduate from the architecture program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.