Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  Most of the blacklisted states were in the South. These states refused to raise the age of consent because, as the historian Estelle Freedman has established, Southerners viewed such reforms as challenges to white supremacy and to white men’s prerogative to sexually assault black females without recourse. In 1904, for example, Mississippi state senators blocked efforts to raise the age of consent from ten to fourteen because they did not want black girls to be able to charge white men with a crime. Even when Southern states did raise the age of consent, several inserted clauses clarifying that statutory rape laws only applied to white girls or to girls who could prove, in the words of the Georgia law, that they “knew the difference between good and evil.”30 Gardener lobbied ardently to raise the age of consent in all states for all girls, and she even clarified that her ultimate goal would have been to pass legislation that applied equally to boys and to girls under the age of eighteen.31 But the larger movement defined its goal as ending “white slavery,” testifying to the extent to which reformers were mainly concerned about young white working-class and immigrant women.32

  Next, Gardener rallied her troops to action. She and her team of volunteers sent personal letters to the 9,000 men (and a few women in Colorado) who served in the country’s state legislatures, asking for their positions on the age of consent. She claimed to have received 6,000 letters of support, and only two men went on record in opposition. She printed these two letters in entirety. She also arranged to have autographed copies of her novel Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? sent to each member of the legislature in states, including Kentucky and Illinois, where consent legislation was pending.33

  Gardener’s efforts to raise the age of consent for girls and to advocate for a uniform moral standard among men and women brought her into an unlikely alliance with purity reformers and anti-vice crusaders, including the WCTU and Anthony Comstock. NAWSA members occasionally praised efforts to raise the age of sexual consent at their annual conventions, and state chapters helped with petition drives, but in the 1890s, the organization was not actively engaged in sexual reform efforts.34 Thus, Gardener allied with the people she believed to be most forcefully fighting for fallen women and against the sexual double standard, even if she disagreed with them on core issues, such as censorship, the role of religion in American life, and the roots of vice.

  While Gardener shared the anti-vice crusaders’ interests in protecting women from sexual assault and in holding men accountable for sexual crimes, at every opportunity she stressed that her motivation was not the same as theirs. She even chafed at the terms moral reform and purity campaign. Codifying a woman’s right to consent to sex, Gardener proclaimed, was not a moral issue but a “vital, social, and economic measure” related to public health, justice, and the rule of law.35 It was not illegal to burn down another man’s house because arson was immoral. It was illegal because the state recognized the property rights of the homeowner. For the same reason, she declared, it should be illegal to have sex with a young girl; she should have the right to protect her own person, which the state should guard even more fiercely than a right to mere property. Moreover, Gardener clarified, this right should not be voided if the girl had already been unchaste. A woman’s body was sacredly her own, no matter what.36

  At the First Annual National Purity Congress, held in Baltimore in October 1895, Gardener explained that she came to sex reform via science and because she wanted women to be protected by law, not Christian ideals. “I shall ask this Congress to look at the question with which I shall deal,” Gardener began, “upon strictly natural and scientific grounds.” To her audience of devout Christians, this would have come as a startling request. To them, the whole point of reform was to make communities align more closely with what they perceived to be God’s vision for America. Gardener invited them instead to think in terms of heredity, environment, and the intergenerational transmission of traits.

  Nor, she stressed to her Christian audience, was marriage a sacred institution. To the contrary, marriage provided the vector through which the majority of women contracted syphilis and gonorrhea, which they then passed on to their children in visible and invisible ways. Purity and anti-vice reformers, Gardener charged, focused altogether too much on what happened outside of marriage—among young men in boarding houses and in popular places of entertainment—and not nearly enough on what happened inside the “marriage bond” where most “crime and disease” originated because of husbands who were “living lies.”37

  From Baltimore, Gardener and Smart traveled on to Atlanta, Georgia, where she headlined several meetings held in conjunction with the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition. After listening to Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech, Gardener delivered a keynote address on October 17, which was NAWSA’s Suffrage Day.38 Even though she had headlined several of the group’s national events since 1888, Gardener was still not a member of NAWSA. In fact, at their next annual meeting, NAWSA members would vote to officially disavow the recently published Woman’s Bible, prompting Gardener to editorialize against the decision.39 The NAWSA censure, Gardener prophesied, would set the cause back years and prove to detractors that women should not be voting because they were incapable of logical thought. When nearly every biblical passage pertaining to women was so degrading, Gardener pondered, “how anyone can be an absolutely orthodox Christian and a woman suffragist at the same time is always one of those conundrums that I have to give up.”40

  Brewing controversy aside, Gardener delivered a “brilliant and inspiring” speech at NAWSA’s Suffrage Day in Atlanta. Entitled “A Theory in Tatters,” her lecture eviscerated the premise that women should not be educated alongside men because their delicate brains could not handle it and because their bodies were destined only for maternity. Gardener cited the successes of the first generation of women to graduate college and those who pursued so-called masculine careers in fields such as mathematics. Now, she urged, it was time to grant women the political rights that matched their educational and professional attainments. As a woman of the South, she suggested that Southern men “prove your chivalry by deeds that will shame your Northern brothers into justice.”41 This was not quite as radical as her suggestion that purity reformers focus on science, not religion, but it was a close second.

  After her NAWSA speech, Gardener and Smart stayed on in Atlanta for a few additional weeks so that she could attend the meeting of the International League of Press Clubs, along with her friend Jane Cunningham Croly (“Jennie June”), president of the New York Woman’s Press Club. Being in Atlanta afforded Gardener the opportunity to highlight her Southern heritage and femininity. She mentioned her Southern birth multiple times in her talks, and Atlanta newspapers welcomed her as one of their own.42 One profile of this “truly noble” Virginian described Gardener as a “well-born and well-bred” woman who came “from a long line of fighters and writers.” In conclusion, this profile proclaimed, “she is happily married and is an excellent housekeeper.”43 When she was not busy writing and lecturing, Gardener had a great knack for public relations and was not one to let the facts get in the way of her self-making.

  LATER THAT FALL, Gardener and Smart returned to Boston, where she concluded her legislative advocacy to raise the age of sexual consent for girls. In November 1895, she published a revised national map and blacklist, showing the many states that had raised the age to at least sixteen. In her closing report for 1895, Gardener rejoiced that “we feel like congratulating the country upon the fact that so much more than we hoped for has been accomplished by concerted action.” She also expressed her hope “that no state will rest content to have it said that her lawmakers wish, and her men are willing, to take legal advantage of the girl children whose guardians and protectors they claim they are and should be.”44

  Gardener’s involvement in the age of consent campaign further convinced her not only that women needed the vote but also that the nation needed women officeholders, an idea at the vanguard of
radical reform in the 1890s. She repeatedly observed that men “who are fathers, husbands, and brothers have met in secret session and passed” laws legalizing the rape of girls. If women could vote and hold office, Gardener believed such laws would never have been enacted. “I yield to no one in my belief that women should take active part in legislative as in all affairs of life,” Gardener proclaimed in The Arena.45 Proving her point, that same year, Colorado state representative Carrie Holly—one of three women elected to the state legislature after women attained the vote in Colorado in 1894—proposed a bill to raise the state’s age of consent to eighteen. At the annual NAWSA convention, suffragists noted with pride that this was the very first bill introduced by a woman member of any state legislature.46 Suffragists may have differed on tactics and policies, but they all agreed that women voting and holding office would surely lead to women attaining bodily autonomy.

  Back in Boston, Gardener attached her name to a petition demanding municipal suffrage for women—though Massachusetts voters, male and female, resoundingly rejected this nonbinding referendum—and she published a sarcastic review of an anti-suffrage treatise. What that book had succeeded in demonstrating, Gardener declared, was that men alone cannot “legislate wisely and successfully and fairly for both sexes.”47

  Gardener’s efforts to raise the age of consent provided the ideal preparation for her later suffrage activism. Indeed, the national age of consent campaigns, even more than individual state suffrage referenda (which overwhelmingly failed), foreshadowed the issues—namely racism and Southern intransigence—that would handicap congressional passage of the federal amendment. In the 1890s, Gardener followed the progress of consent bills in several states, monitored the shifting positions of legislators, figured out who knew whom and how to best target the men whose votes she desired, compiled extensive lists and maps, and organized a large team of volunteers to keep the pressure on individual elected officials, all the while mobilizing publicity. Gardener published thousands of words on the issue, dispatched untold numbers of letters, and succeeded in her first legislative crusade. But because NAWSA rejected The Woman’s Bible as well as Gardener’s unorthodox critiques of marriage, she did not yet see a place for herself among the suffragists. Instead she decided to continue raising public awareness of the unspoken (and unspeakable) problems women often encountered in marriage, perhaps inspired by yet another crisis brewing in her own home.

  10

  Wee Wifee

  The woman of the street may own herself, she may change her life, she may refuse to continue in the course which has lost her her self-respect. The unwilling wife is helpless. She has lost all. She has no refuge.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1890

  WHILE SHE CONTINUED to publish essays and coedit The Arena and Free Thought (previously Freethinkers’) magazines, by the end of 1896 Gardener shifted her focus to marriage, divorce, and maternity reforms.1 She was appointed chair of the National Congress of Women’s Divorce Reform Committee, and in December, she “held the audience in closest attention” when she spoke about divorce at the Woman’s Congress in Boston.2 Would a legislature ever consider writing a law about the railroad without consulting railroad companies, Gardener demanded? For a woman, whom to marry was often the only major life decision she got to make, yet she had no say over the terms of her marriage, and once enacted, the bond was nearly irrevocable. Worse still, in marriage women lost control over their own bodies, including even the decision of when to have children.3 Since the 1870s, female reformers had been advocating for “voluntary motherhood”—a wife’s right to refuse to have sex with her husband—but marital rape would not be recognized as a crime for another hundred years.

  Gardener’s work on behalf of divorce reform, her writings on heredity and the sexual double standard, and her efforts to raise the age of consent were of a piece. All three issues pivoted on a woman’s right to determine what happened to her body, when to have sex and with whom (though she did not go so far as to argue for women’s right to have sex outside of marriage, as she herself had been doing for the past twenty years), and to reproduce only when a baby would be welcomed and well cared for. At the end of the nineteenth century, such arguments were still very much at the vanguard of American reform; unlike Gardener, the women who demanded voluntary motherhood generally did not also talk openly about divorce, venereal disease, and female sexuality.4 While many nineteenth-century women no doubt entered reform movements with their own personal stories of cheating husbands, unhappy marriages, and unplanned pregnancies, Gardener explicitly inserted these private concerns into the larger program for women’s political rights.

  In February 1897, Gardener presented her case for female autonomy in an unlikely venue: the first annual National Congress of Mothers, a group that grew out of the kindergarten movement.5 Eager to discuss how mothering practices might be improved to reduce social problems and produce healthier children, women from across the country traveled to Washington, D.C., for the event. Attendance exceeded all expectations, and at the last minute, a larger venue had to be rented to accommodate the unexpectedly large crowd. Facing an audience of women intent on discussing childhood feeding, educational best practices, music for children, and other pleasant aspects of motherhood, Gardener spoke instead about the inherent right of women not to be mothers—the path she herself had chosen. “I fear that I shall strike a less pleasant note than those who have preceded me,” Gardener began, “who have so generally dealt with ideal motherhood, who have sung the praise side of the song. My theme is scientific.” Marshaling evidence from the natural and social sciences, she demanded that women—including mothers—first and foremost be considered as individuals.

  Gardener enumerated the countless ways mothers were praised on stage and in literature but noted that “in the building and maturing of this ideal, there runs ever and always the one thread of thought that self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-effacement are the grandest attributes of maternity; that in order to be a perfect, an ideal wife and mother, the woman must be sunk, the individual immolated, the ego subjugated.” What if that were not true, Gardener posed? What if forcing women to lie to themselves and to their husbands, to deny their intellects and their desires was actually bad for women, bad for marriages, and bad for children? Women who could not take care of themselves nor determine the conditions into which they would bring children surely did not endow their offspring with the best possible traits. Throughout much of human history, women had lacked control over their own bodies. But now, Gardener charged, when women were more educated and engaged, “she who permits herself to become a mother without having first demanded and obtained her own freedom from sex domination and fair and free conditions of development for herself and child will commit a crime against herself, against her child, and against mankind.”6

  The Chicago Tribune characterized Gardener’s address as the conference’s “pièce de résistance,” noting that “enthusiastic plaudits were frequent in some parts of the house and dubious looks among the orthodox.”7 Scientists quibbled with her discussion of “heredity,” particularly the way she blended the passing on of traits with the passing on of diseases. To scientists the difference between a trait and a disease mattered a great deal.8 To Gardener, it mattered not if “syphilis teeth” were considered a trait or a disease—it only mattered that they were passed on to unborn children whose mothers had no say in the matter.

  Gardener’s unusually explicit emphasis on the frequency of venereal disease transmission to unsuspecting wives might have indicated a personal familiarity with gonorrhea or syphilis. Smart’s ongoing health struggles and her focus on the disease suggest he may have had syphilis, but it is impossible to document with certainty. Untreated syphilis can severely damage the heart and brain, both of which impacted Smart. The presence of venereal disease may also account for why the couple did not have children—either by choice or because of disease-related infertility. Even if Smart did not suffer from venereal disease,
Gardener was closely attuned to the ravages such infections caused other women and was among the most vocal in linking women’s sexual health to their political position.

  Gardener’s relationship with Smart and the couple’s economic prospects continued to deteriorate after their move to Boston in 1894. By the summer of 1896, they were no longer even getting paid by their employer, The Arena magazine. Even worse, on the evening of February 17, 1897—just as Gardener would have been socializing at the Mother’s Congress reception in Washington, accepting compliments for her talk that morning—Police Inspectors Bogan and Abbott arrived at her home in Boston to arrest Smart for committing fraud as The Arena’s business manager.

  TO OUTSIDE OBSERVERS, The Arena contained a disproportionate number of advertisements for the books that its in-house publishing arm printed. Eventually, disgruntled authors came forward alleging that the Arena Publishing Company was essentially a Ponzi scheme whereby authors fronted the money for a first edition of 2,000 books—covering all expenses and, unbeknownst to them, a 20 percent profit for Arena. The Arena Publishing Company then advertised the books in The Arena magazine, but beyond a few big sellers like Gardener, most authors never sold the 2,000 books. In 1895, authors and employees sued the company for fraud and back pay. But by then, The Arena was far too indebted to pay either its authors or its own staff. In 1896, the magazine declared bankruptcy, and B. O. Flower was forced out as editor. Gardener and her friend John Clark Ridpath, the famous historian whom she had known from Greencastle, Indiana, continued as editors of the struggling magazine for a few more months.