page_title: Helen H. Gardener
section_title: Literary career
hierarchical_section_title: Helen H. Gardener / Biography / Literary career
caption_attribution_description: English: Helen H. Gardener
context_page_description: Helen Hamilton Gardener, born Alice Chenoweth, was an American author, rationalist public intellectual, political activist, and government functionary. Gardener produced many lectures, articles, and books during the 1880s and 1890s and is remembered today for her role in the freethought and women's suffrage movements and for her place as a pioneering woman in the top echelon of the American civil service.
context_section_description: During her first years in New York City Chenoweth-Smart made the acquaintance of Robert G. Ingersoll, the leading  rationalist orator of the day. At Ingersoll's persistent request in January 1884 Alice Chenoweth-Smart began herself to deliver a series of public lectures, talks dealing with such skeptical themes as "Men, Women, and Gods," "Historical Facts and Theological Fictions," "By Divine Right," and "Rome or Reason." Many of these were collected into her first book, Men, Women, and Gods, and Other Lectures, which was issued in hard covers by the radical freethought publication, The Truth Seeker. Chenoweth-Smart published this book under the pen name "Helen Hamilton Gardener" — a pseudonym which she would use professionally for the rest of her life, eventually adopting this as her own legal name.
  A number of short stories and essays by Gardener followed over the second half of the 1880s, pieces which were published in a number of leading magazines of the day. Throughout the period, Gardener's interest in feminism grew. Gardener's initial public lectures attempted particularly to demonstrate a linkage between Christianity and the subjugation of women and in 1887 the published views of former Surgeon General of the United States William A. Hammond attesting a neurological basis for female inferiority moved Gardener to even greater concern with the topic.
  Gardener began working with neurologist Edward C. Spitzka to refute Hammond's thesis of inherent inferiority of the female brain. Gardener ultimately produced a paper entitled "Sex in Brain" that was read to the 1888 convention of the International Council of Women in Washington, DC. In this work, Gardener argued that no connection between brain weight and intellectual capacity had been established and challenged Hammond's methodology of comparing the prized specimen brains of leading men with those of indigent women. Gardener emerged from the Hammond controversy as a leading public speaker for women's rights. In 1893 she would deliver three more scholarly papers on feminist themes to the Congress of Representative Women held in Chicago in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition.
  During the early 1890s, Gardener emerged as a novelist. A pair of books were written which together dealt with the theme of the double standard of morality between the sexes — Is This Your Son, My Lord? (1891) and Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? Both were published by a leading liberal political magazine of the day, The Arena. Is This Your Son, My Lord? was sharply critical of the low age of consent then in force and the ruin of innocence by the lustful desires of outwardly respectable men. The book sold an impressive 25,000 copies in its first five months after publication and elicited shocked commentary from critics and readers alike.
  In 1894, Gardener published a slightly fictionalized account of her father's life entitled An Unofficial Patriot. The book's protagonist, patterned after her father, represented a positive male character at variance with those which dominated Gardener's earlier books. The book was critically well received and served as the basis for an 1899 play by playwright James A. Herne, The Reverend Griffith Davenport..
caption: Helen H. Gardener (1894)
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