THE WORK OF a civil service commissioner was demanding and required Gardener to show up at the office, located on the sixth floor of 1724 F Street and overlooking the White House and Lincoln Memorial, six days a week.41 Each day, the three commissioners gathered to discuss various appointments, firings, and disputes and come to consensus about how to proceed. They also communicated regularly with the White House—Gardener was appointed the special White House liaison—regarding high-level posts, rule changes, and statute interpretations. Gardener also met regularly with job seekers in her office and represented the Civil Service Commission at various events in D.C. and along the eastern seaboard.
She loved her job and the perks that accompanied it. Describing the work as “fascinating,” she found it a “natural follow-up of my past work.” She invited Kester to come see her in action at her stately new office, advising, “If they tell you ‘she is in a board meeting’ you just say loftily ‘she asked me to send in my card’ . . . strike an imposing tone and wait! I’ll come.”42 Bursting with pride, Gardener relayed that she had her own secretary along with a Cadillac and driver at her disposal during the workday. Indeed, one of the reasons that Gardener, now sixty-seven, took the job was because she desperately needed the money. With her comfortable salary of $6,500 per year (nearly $85,000 today), she paid off her and Day’s debts, purchased her own car, put her favorite niece Helen Gardener Crane through college, and bought expensive gifts—silk scarves, evening gowns, gloves—for her female friends.43 For the first time in her life, she “felt safe financially.”44
Gardener loved her work as U.S. Civil Service commissioner, barely missing a day during her five-year tenure.
To keep her household running smoothly, she and Helen Gardener Crane welcomed in cousin Mrs. Kate Wyatt, who presided over the cooking; a male friend of Mrs. Wyatt’s; Day’s nephew Sam Day, who drove Gardener around town in her new Dodge; and her secretary, Rena B. Smith (who went on to become prominent in the civil service herself). Most nights Gardener came home late from work and went to bed, but she did make time for her favorite pastimes—women’s clubs and theater. A lifelong theater buff, Gardener invested in the nation’s first all-women theater production company and regularly attended plays in Washington (her favorite was Lincoln, by John Drinkwater, which she saw at the National Theater at least three times).45 She actively participated in events hosted by the Women’s City Club of D.C., the League of American Pen Women, and the LWV (she was the first charter member of the D.C. chapter).46 She also spent a few weeks each year in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia and in New York visiting with old friends, including the Ingersoll family.
These were the happiest years of Gardener’s life. Thanks to her historic appointment, she returned to the podium as a sought-after lecturer and traveled up and down the East Coast speaking about the importance of women in government.47 Her earlier letters frequently reference toil, heartache, and how she used humor to stave off the “mad house.”48 After starting her new job, the tone of her letters becomes giddy with excitement and pride. Her position also had a salutary effect on her health; after years of intermittent illness and frequent breakdowns, Gardener barely missed a day of work as commissioner.49 When she went to the White House one day during President Harding’s administration, his secretary said: “I went to the mat for you yesterday, Mrs. Gardener. A man undertook to tell me that you are nearly seventy; but I said that if you are a day older than I am—I’m 54—I’d eat my hat.” To which Gardener replied, “Then prepare for a diet of felt!”50
With her comfortable paycheck and own home, Gardener finally felt free. This was the last photo taken of her, 1924.
While she claimed that her top priority was finding the best person for each job, the issues Gardener championed as commissioner were equal pay for equal work and the right of women to work after marriage. She gave many speeches on pay equity and considered it a victory that the Classification Act of 1923 contained the following provision: “In determining the rate of compensation which an employee shall receive, the principle of equal compensation for equal work irrespective of sex shall be followed.”51 She also supported the creation of a Civil Service Advisory Council composed of half men and half women.52 Over the course of her lifetime, women had increasingly entered business, teaching, and government work, but nineteenth-century prohibitions against married women working remained in effect. Such regulations were often justified by the need to give jobs to returning soldiers or by the argument that it was unfair for one family to draw two paychecks. Gardener did not buy these flimsy excuses and began her campaign with the Postal Service, the nation’s largest employer.
“Will you tell me how it came to be the business of Post Master General Payne to regulate the home life and conduct of the wives of his clerks,” Gardener demanded regarding a policy put in place back in 1902. What if a wife were a lousy cook, could hire a good cook for $15 per month, and could earn $100 per month herself as a “first class stenographer or book keeper.” Who was the Post Master to arbitrarily limit her monthly family income by $85 while at the same time bestowing “indigestion and a constant fear of poverty” among two people who would otherwise be content? To the claim that the government could not employ two members of the same household, Gardener countered that enforcing such a provision would cause “a good deal of hardship to a number of officials whose fathers and sons chance to have an aptitude (or a pull) in the same kind of work.” Gardener rejected the “colossal assumption of the masculine mind” that enabled men to “dictate to women how they shall occupy their time and ability the moment they marry; or how much a family may or may not earn.” This, she concluded, represented the “bigotry and ignorance of a past age.” Gardener’s appeals on behalf of married women working garnered tremendous press coverage—one paper celebrated her efforts as a “square deal for the fair sex”—but she would not live to see the full adoption of this far-reaching reform.53
In her daily work as commissioner, Gardener excelled. On her six-month anniversary, her two fellow commissioners wrote to President Wilson to applaud him for the wisdom of her appointment, which they described as a “ten strike.”54 And on her third anniversary, the 400 employees at civil service headquarters surprised her with flowers and thoughtful tributes.55 Throughout her tenure, newspapers across the country profiled her as one of the top women in government and claimed that her appointment heralded women’s full participation in the nation’s affairs.56 Gardener gloried in the attention and in the satisfaction of finally becoming the prominent person she had always longed to be—a woman able to shape policy, be quoted in newspapers, and earn a paycheck.
BUT, AS ALWAYS, she kept one eye on the next chapter—which she suspected would be the grave. She revised her will, updated the exhibit at the Smithsonian to include a portrait of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and worked with those who would memorialize Wilson in an ill-fated attempt to ensure that suffrage was included as one of the president’s top achievements. She urged Tumulty to highlight in his memoir President Wilson’s many efforts to help women to attain the vote, even in the face of the “picketing lunatics.”57 Tumulty did not mention suffrage.58 Next, she encouraged Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s official biographer, to “make plain” that Wilson was “the only President who ever turned his hand over to help women in their long struggle for emancipation—the only bloodless revolution ever fought.”59 With a few notable exceptions, history has not made plain the full spectrum of Wilson’s efforts regarding suffrage.60
If presidential historians would not remember suffrage, Gardener hoped at least that younger women would. In what would be her last public speech, at the NAWSA “Looking Backward” luncheon in April 1925, Gardener delivered a poignant plea to remember the brave women who had led the bloodless revolution. With an uncharacteristically raspy voice, the only indication of her declining physical condition, Gardener began her speech, movingly titled “Our Heroic Dead.” First she announced that merely calling the roll of the movement
’s deceased leaders would take more than her allotted time. But she was tempted to do so because so many of the pioneers’ names were unfamiliar to “the workers of today.” Most of their struggles already seemed distant. Gardener reminded her audience that the earliest women’s rights leaders faced the “hardest of all tests to bear”—opposition from fathers, husbands, and sons. After having braved public scorn and overwhelming obstacles, these intrepid women faced “constant opposition at their own firesides,” a challenge that would have defeated most women, including those gathered at the luncheon. Even though the pioneers “knew that the Promised Land was not for them,” they nevertheless “bore the cross for you and for me.”
Gardener pondered how suffrage would be remembered and what it would take for women’s rights leaders to assume their rightful place among America’s exalted statesmen in the nation’s collective memory. In the early twentieth century, civic leaders had rushed to honor Civil War veterans, Union and Confederate, in a host of statues, parks, and monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial, which had been dedicated in 1922. And much of Washington’s existing landscape paid tribute to the Revolutionary heroes. Gardener contended that Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone were “the George Washington, the Thomas Jefferson, the Alexander Hamiltons of the woman’s revolution.” It did not occur to her to include the names of the pioneering African American women she had encountered, such as Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells. Where were the public shrines to these women? Who would pay homage to them?
Adelaide Johnson’s gallery of eminent women never materialized, and she destroyed many of her sculptures before dying in poverty. During the ratification drive, the National Woman’s Party commissioned Johnson to create a new bust depicting Anthony, Stanton, and Mott for inclusion in the Capitol building. After tireless lobbying, this statue, known as the Portrait Monument, was displayed in the Capitol rotunda for just one day before being dispatched one floor below to the area known as “the crypt” of the Capitol. In 1996, women raised the money to finally move it upstairs.61 For decades, the limited Smithsonian exhibit that Gardener had orchestrated remained the principal public tribute to the suffrage movement.
From the “Looking Backward” luncheon ballroom, it was just a short trip to Arlington National Cemetery—“the great city of the dead heroes of many wars,” in Gardener’s description, where soldiers received “the Nation’s homage year after year for what they did to free their fellowmen.” Where were the brave soldiers of the women’s rights movement commemorated? Gardener observed that “Our Arlington is scattered over America in graves little recognized.” Even though the names of suffrage leaders had already become unfamiliar, they were women whose “deeds were mighty, whose courage, patience, and loyal achievement deserve the cross of honor, the distinguished service medal of achievement, and the hero’s wreath from us all who should worship at their shrine and keep their memory green.” Gardener concluded this, her final speech, by imploring her audience to “not forget and let us not allow our children and our children’s children to forget, while we continue to give our cheers for our living heroes, to also mingle our tears for our heroic dead.”62
Having lived through the Civil War, its reconciliation, and its commemoration, Gardener understood that how the nation remembered something was generally even more important than the thing itself. She had attended parades for aging soldiers, participated in reunions of the Blue and Gray, and watched as Congress debated how to properly memorialize Lincoln. She wanted a spot for women in these national civic memories and maybe even a place for herself.
LESS THAN ONE MONTH LATER, on May 11, Gardener went to the Civil Service Commission for what would be her last day on the job. She was hospitalized for much of the summer. Friends believed she would make a comeback, as she had done so many times before. Gardener, too, thought she might go back to work. But by July, she was busily trying to confirm her replacement on the commission.63 On July 25, she bid a few friends and her niece Helen Gardener Crane goodnight, closed her eyes, and died in her sleep.
Fulfilling Gardener’s wishes, a simple, nonreligious service was held at her home on July 28. Rudolph Forster, President Wilson’s former secretary, served as one of the honorary pallbearers, and the offices of the U.S. Civil Service Commission closed in her honor. Carrie Chapman Catt, Maud Wood Park, and her colleagues on the Civil Service Commission gave moving tributes to Gardener’s strength of character and lifetime of achievement on behalf of women’s rights. A few weeks before, Catt related, Gardener had told her that she was not afraid to die. “I have lived my life as well as I could day by day,” Gardener said. “Whenever I am called, I am ready, and I have always been ready.” Catt singled out “courage” as her friend’s defining characteristic and claimed that Gardener was “one of the most all-round courageous human beings I have ever known.” Had she lived in an earlier era, Catt imagined Gardener as a queen fearlessly leading her troops into battle. As it was, she lived at the turn of the twentieth century, “so she gave herself to what was . . . the most controversial of subjects . . . the emancipation of women.” To the younger suffragists and career women in attendance, Catt emphasized that their opportunities resulted in part from Gardener’s work, especially her brain research: “You who are younger never encountered [arguments like Hammond’s]; you found the doors open and now it is a forgotten episode, yet it was Helen Gardener who blazed that trail.”64
The night after Gardener’s funeral, Catt wrote her close friend Mary Gray Peck expressing her loneliness and grief. “Maud and I loved Helen very much, and were proud that neither of us broke down in tears,” Catt related. Gardener’s grave may have been nearby, but “Washington will never be the same again. She was one of the world’s wonders.”65
Gardener updated her last will and testament on May 26, when she must have sensed that the end was near, leaving detailed instructions regarding the dispersal of her estate, which by then totaled over $17,000.66 She wanted most of her savings, stocks, and prized possessions to be divided among the two nurses who had cared for her and Day, Rena Smith, Maud Wood Park, and her favorite nieces and great-nieces. When she made a cash gift to a male friend, she specified that the money was to be used for the education of his daughter. She also bequeathed her prized Japanese lacquer, the American flag Day hoisted over Puerto Rico, and other notable items collected during her world travels to the Smithsonian. Years later, more than 2,000 of her lantern slides and photographs wound their way there, too.67 She also gave an unintentional gift to Helen Gardener Crane, her favorite niece and her will’s executor. Crane ended up marrying Barnum L. Colton, the assistant trust officer at the District National Bank, where most of Gardener’s assets were held. Throughout her final years, Gardener kept two separate bank accounts: one for Helen H. Gardener and one for Alice C. Day. She even signed her will in both names, lest there be any lingering confusion.
To Carrie Chapman Catt, who Gardener noted was well-off financially, she left her fifty-volume Chronicles of America, the series published in 1918 by Yale University Press. With volume titles such as “The Fathers of New England,” “The Fathers of the Constitution,” and “The Masters of Capital,” these were the grand masculine narratives of American history that Gardener tried to disrupt through her life’s work, the Smithsonian exhibit, and her final speech.
Unfortunately for historians, Gardener’s will also contained one very lamentable instruction. After clarifying that her nieces and Rena Smith should oversee the closing up of her Lamont Street home, she commanded them “to burn, unopened, my letters, personal papers, etc. . . . These are in drawers and boxes in the storeroom and in trunks and in the locked closet.” As Gardener explained, “No one would understand many of the letters and papers. . . . Do not leave them to the eyes of strangers.”68 After having spent decades creating “Helen Hamilton Gardener,” she wanted to control her narrative into posterity.
THE MOST UNUSUAL ELEMENT of Gardener’s will was her s
tipulation that her brain be removed and transported to Cornell University, in fulfilment of her decades-old promise to provide a specimen of “a woman who thinks.” Gardener explained in her will that Burt Wilder, then the director of Cornell’s brain collection, had invited her back in 1897 to donate her brain as a representative of women “who have used their brains for the public welfare.” After having spent her life “using such brains as I possess in trying to better the conditions of humanity and especially of women,” she was happy to grant his request.69 Because Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s children had refused to fulfill their mother’s brain bequest, Gardener went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that hers would not be thwarted. She reached out to Cornell’s president in 1923 to confirm plans, designated in her will the doctor who would remove her brain (and provided a handsome $1,000 payment for the service), and consulted two different attorneys to make sure that her will was inviolate.70 Her unusual bequest received intense national press coverage, including multiple front-page stories in the New York Times.71
By happenstance, Burt Wilder, the brain collection’s founder and namesake, had died just a few months before Gardener. Newspapers reported that the two brains would be studied in tandem so that scientists might, for the first time, compare the brains of men and women who had grown up under similar circumstances. Unbelievably, the two brains weighed exactly the same, 1,150 grams, just shy of the mark of greatness set by William Hammond back in the 1880s. Though brain weight had long since been discredited as a marker of intelligence, the finding seemed significant. Dr. James Papez, the director of Cornell’s Wilder Brain Collection, examined Gardener’s brain in exhaustive detail and published his findings in a fifty-page report. After comparing every fissure, lobe, and curve of Gardener’s brain against forty other specimens, male and female, Papez concluded that her brain exhibited sex differences “to a lesser degree” than did other female brains.72
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