BackStory with the American Historical past Guys

In her newest ebook “Free Thinker: Intercourse, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Lifetime of Helen Hamilton Gardener,” historian Kimberly A. Hamlin tells the story of an influential and interesting girl who you possible have by no means even heard of. Helen Hamilton Gardener devoted her life to championing girls’s rights and pushing again in opposition to the sexual double commonplace. She went toe-to-toe with a few of the most distinguished scientists and politicians of her day. She printed 7 books and lots of extra essays. By the point of her demise in 1925, Gardener was the highest-ranking girl in federal authorities and an emblem of feminine citizenship.

Hamlin examines Gardener’s accomplishments and legacy, however she additionally uncovers an important secret: up till she was 23, Gardener glided by Alice Chenoweth. Already a profitable educator, “Alice Chenoweth” was featured prominently in Ohio newspapers which carried the small print of her affair with a married man. A “fallen girl,” she modified her title to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, and spent the remainder of her life preventing the sexual double commonplace.

BackStory just lately spoke with Hamlin about her analysis on Gardener, the themes of legacy and private identification, and the appreciable quantity that this once-forgotten determine has to say about our current day.

 

BackStory: How did you first come throughout Helen Hamilton Gardener, and what was about her that you? 

Hamlin: I first met, in quotes, Helen Hamilton Gardener, within the basement of the Perry-Castañeda Library on the College of Texas at Austin once I was engaged on my dissertation. My dissertation explored how nineteenth century feminists used science to advance claims for girls’s equality.

So I used to be sitting within the basement thumbing by way of pages of previous editions of Fashionable Science Month-to-month, the favored journal from the 1870s and Eighties. I don’t know if UT nonetheless has these sure copies, but it surely was sort of enjoyable to leaf by way of them in a non-digitized means. I may simply actually see the entire scope of dialog.

As I used to be perusing these previous volumes, one girl named Helen Hamilton Gardener actually stood out to me. She wrote to Fashionable Science Month-to-month to problem the findings of this man named Dr. William Hammond, who was a pioneering neurologist. He had been the surgeon normal for the Union in the course of the Civil Conflict, after which he went on to assist discovered the American Neurological Affiliation and function certainly one of its early presidents

So right here’s this top-dog scientist, and right here’s Helen Hamilton Gardener, some girl who has by no means gone to school and nobody has ever heard of. And she or he’s difficult his analysis within the pages of Fashionable Science Month-to-month. So I assumed, “Oh my gosh, who is that this daring and fearless girl?” And in addition, she was completely proper.

Hammond had superior all these claims in regards to the inferiority of girls’s brains. He claimed that he had discovered 19 distinct methods during which girls’s brains had been quote / unquote “Naturally inferior to males’s.” Gardener and different girls’s rights activists had been studying his analysis and pondering, “This makes no rational sense.” What are his research like? This doesn’t ring true.

Hammond’s analysis was principally anecdotal, what his different male scientists associates had mentioned about girls that they encountered. Gardener performed her personal analysis, and he or she consulted with different main neurologists in New York Metropolis, the place she lived. She actually championed what we’d contemplate a extra fashionable method to science to disapprove Hammond’s claims that ladies had been naturally intellectually inferior.

This was an enormous difficulty within the 1870s and Eighties, as a result of arguments like Hammond’s had been typically used to maintain girls from greater schooling. This was when girls had been first attempting to attend school in bigger numbers, and folks like Hammond had been arguing that they shouldn’t be capable of go to school, a lot much less have professions. So the implications of Hammond’s arguments, as Gardener and others realized, had been large. That’s why she thought it was so vital to discredit them.

BackStory: How did this discovery change into full biography on Gardener?

Hamlin: I wrote about Gardener in my dissertation, after which in my first ebook I wrote about her curiosity in mind science and her later contributions. She donated her mind to science when she died in 1925 to show the mental equality of girls.

However one thing about her simply caught with me. She was so fascinating. And I felt like by way of her, you may actually see the entire of the nineteenth century girls’s rights motion. She’s just like the Forrest Gump of the ladies’s rights motion. She’s in any respect the issues, she’s associates with all of the individuals.

I got here to see that you may actually inform this a lot bigger story. In all places I regarded for her, I discovered her. Early on in my analysis I mentioned, “Gosh, I ponder if she was concerned within the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington DC, the large girls’s march that suffragist Alice Paul deliberate to coincide with the primary inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.” 

I went to the archives and, lo and behold, who was Alice Paul’s right-hand girl of their makeshift workplace in DC every single day? Helen Hamilton Gardener. Who was the press secretary for the marketing campaign? Helen Hamilton Gardener. Who bought each permission that they wanted to march down Pennsylvania Avenue? Helen Hamilton Gardener. She performs a pivotal function on this marquee girls’s suffrage occasion.

And that’s only one instance of locations the place I assumed, “I ponder if she’s there?” After which not solely is she there, she’s completely answerable for most of the key parts of that occasion.

BackStory: How did you go about recreating Gardener, particularly on condition that she went by way of a significant identification change? Was there an opportunity that you just simply weren’t going to uncover the particular person she was earlier than she turned Gardener?

Hamlin: In Gardener’s will, she decrees that her executors burn her correspondence or destroy it in another means. I feel that’s as a result of she had had a scandalous youth and an enormous affair. She didn’t depart behind a set of conventional papers. Largely it was sort of a looking and pecking train to hint her comings and goings. 

Due to this affair and the ensuing intercourse scandal she had in her early twenties, she modified her title. I cherished this undertaking as a result of I did a whole lot of conventional historic analysis, after which a whole lot of sleuthing, which was the actually enjoyable half.

One factor that made this ebook doable is the digitization of small native newspapers. I discovered a whole lot of particulars about Gardener’s youth, together with the affair that she had in Ohio, by way of the digitization of small native Ohio newspapers. It could have been unattainable to go to each county in Ohio and bodily look by way of previous newspapers, however as a result of they’d been digitized, I may discover her.

One other supply that was actually useful to find her in these early years, was this Freethought periodical known as Fact Seeker, which has been posted on-line and digitized and you may search it. In Fact Seeker, Gardener wrote a whole lot of entries and essays for Fact Seeker, however additionally they cherished her, so that they continuously profiled her comings and goings. That was one other vital avenue to hint her early years.

BackStory: It’s fascinating how her affair was litigated in public in these newspapers.

Hamlin: Precisely. She’s this 23-year-old girl with hardly any household to help her. She has nothing actually to fall again on. But she has this power in herself to say, “You understand what, no. I’m not going to only sneak away in disgrace over this. I’m going to query, why are girls held to such a special commonplace by way of intercourse? Why is a lady’s virginity thought of her most precious asset?”

She strikes to New York Metropolis, adjustments her title and reinvents. And I simply love that about her.

BackStory: That brings up one other level, in how clearly you’ll be able to hyperlink Gardener’s private experiences with the causes that she fought for. That is particularly fascinating contemplating her lack of expertise about racial points, particularly as they concern girls’s freedom and equality.

Hamlin: I feel that’s precisely proper. A professional and a con of Gardner’s activism, is that it was very a lot rooted in her private expertise.

It’s admirable to assume that you may flip your private struggles into political actions and social change. That’s what she did by way of the sexual double-standard and her work to boost the age of sexual consent.

However then a con of drawing so intently on her private expertise, is considering herself as a stand-in for all girls. This actually blinded her to the experiences of African-American girls and restricted her capability to problem the racist ideologies of her day.

Gardener was such an iconoclast. She had no concern calling out the church for its misogyny, or writing controversial articles about intercourse. However even she couldn’t see her means by way of racism.

I feel that’s largely as a result of her upbringing and her experiences in the course of the Civil Conflict. I’ve this sense that as a result of Gardener’s household had sacrificed a lot in the course of the Civil Conflict, and to finish slavery, that she felt this by some means absolved her from having to do something extra. 

It’s an unlucky a part of her legacy, however one which I feel we actually have to grapple with by way of our bigger understanding about voting rights and the historical past of girls’s rights.

BackStory: I wish to ask about this concept of legacy and historic reminiscence, and the way that ties in with the person. Gardener was clearly very conscious of her legacy. In your ebook, you additionally clarify how the Suffragists held their particular coalition and motion to face for girls’s suffrage general.

Hamlin: I’ve a whole lot of ideas on that, and I’ve printed some shorter items about it. Most just lately, in a Washington Publish op-ed known as “The Drawback With Girls’s Historical past Month in 2020,” I argue that the suffragists had been in some ways the nation’s first historians of girls.

They had been the primary to compile and write in regards to the contributions of girls as a result of they thought it helped advance their claims for citizenship. And so they had been the primary to assemble archives for girls, as a result of they realized the significance of documenting girls’s contributions to American life, not only for historical past, but additionally for politics.

For instance, in 1909 the Nationwide American Girls’s Suffrage Affiliation had a committee, and their cost was to analyze all of the historical past and civics textbooks in America, to evaluate how girls had been represented. On the annual conference, the committee chair reported that historical past and civics textbooks mainly inform the story that the world was made by, and for, males.

I’d say that though many great positive factors have been made in historical past textbooks over the previous a number of many years, that though there’ve been generations of pioneering historians of girls, our nationwide narratives nonetheless are mainly the story of previous nice white males. 

In 2017, the Nationwide Girls’s Historical past Museum performed a complete survey of all historical past textbooks to see how girls had been represented. They discovered that ladies are nonetheless sidebarred from the bigger tales of American nationwide life. 

We have now a protracted technique to go. Just like the suffragists mentioned, the tales we inform about our previous form what we expect is feasible within the current and sooner or later. It’s actually vital that we inform new tales and totally different tales about our previous if we wish to see change sooner or later.

BackStory: It’s fascinating, in addition to disheartening, how related Gardener and her beliefs are right this moment.

Hamlin: I feel Gardener is mostly a suffragist for the Me Too period, as a result of her life, work and writing present so clearly the hyperlinks between girls’s political and bodily autonomy. So whereas Gardener didn’t advocate for contraception or something – that will have been a bit too radical even for her in her day – she needed the world to acknowledge that ladies had been “self-respecting human items with brains and our bodies sacredly their very own.”

That was actually the core of her life’s mission. To see that there was a spot for autonomous girls who may make their very own cash, who may behave as they needed to in non-public and in public, and take part equally in politics. I feel a testomony to that’s, when Gardener died in 1925, she was the very best rating girl in federal authorities and a nationwide image of what it meant for girls to be full residents.

 

A recipient of the NEH Public Scholar Award, Kimberly A. Hamlin teaches historical past and American research at Miami College of Ohio and contributes to the Made by Historical past collection within the Washington Publish. The writer of From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Girls’s Rights in Gilded Age America, she lives in Cincinnati.