Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  31.HHG, “A Battle for Sound Morality, II,” The Arena, September 1895, 1.

  32.Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

  33.“To Protect the Girl,” Chicago Tribune, March 3, 1895, 4, notes that Pray You Sir was given out to members of Illinois State Legislature by the WCTU.

  34.Based on descriptions of NAWSA convention speeches and resolutions, 1890–1900, in HOWS, vol. 4.

  35.HHG, “Have Children a Right to Legal Protection,” pamphlet (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1896), v.

  36.HHG, “The Battle for Sound Morality, I,” The Arena, August 1895, 353–354

  37.HHG, “Heredity and Ethics,” in The First Annual National Purity Congress, Its Papers, Addresses, and Portraits, ed. Aaron Powell (New York: The American Purity Alliance, 1896), 99, 104.

  38.Agnes Scott, “How I Saw Helen Gardener,” Free Thought, January 1897, 3; revised as Scott, “Helen Hamilton Gardener,” The Woman’s Voice and Public School Champion, July 17, 1897, 3. “Woman’s World,” Atlanta Journal, October 17, 1895.

  39.Described in Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, 181–185.

  40.HHG, “The Woman’s Bible,” Free Thought, June 1896, 400.

  41.“Woman’s World,” Atlanta Journal, October 17, 1895.

  42.Blurb, Atlanta Constitution, October 22, 1895, 6.

  43.“A Truly Noble Woman,” Morning Telegram (Eau Claire, WI), November 2, 1895, 3, widely reprinted.

  44.HHG, “Battle For Sound Morality, III” Arena, November 1895, 415.

  45.HHG, The Arena, September 1895, 29.

  46.HOWS, vol. 4, 240. For an analysis of suffrage in the West, see Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

  47.“Eminent Suffragists,” The Woman’s Journal, November 9, 1895, 1; HHG, “Shall Women Vote,” The Arena, December 1895, 73.

  10. Wee Wifee

  1.HHG, “To the Evergreen Club,” Free Thought, March 1896, 167; unsigned editorial (likely HHG), “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Woman’s Bible, and the Resolution Passed at the Woman’s National Convention,” Free Thought, May 1896, 329; HHG, “The Woman’s Bible, Free Thought, June 1896, 400; HHG “The Negro in the North,” Atlanta Constitution, June 16, 1896, 4; HHG, “Where Had John Been,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1896, 575–576; HHG, “Philosophers Afloat,” The Arena, August 1896, 480; HHG, “A Bugle Note,” Free Thought, November 1896, 717.

  2.Listed as chairwoman in Mary Lowe Dickinson, “The National Council of Women of the United States,” The Arena, February 1897, 496; “Woman’s Congress Closes at Boston,” Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1896, 6.

  3.Excerpted in “Woman’s World,” Weekly Wisconsin (Milwaukee), January 26, 1897; revised version of “Divorce and the Proposed National Law,” The Arena, March 1890.

  4.Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, rev. ed. of Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 55–72, 80–85.

  5.LCW, “The Congress of Mothers,” Congregationalist, February 25, 1897, 8.

  6.HHG, “The Moral Responsibility of Woman in Heredity,” National Congress of Mothers: First Annual Session (New York: Appleton, 1897), 130–147. This is a revised version of the talk she gave under the same title at the 1893 world’s fair, published in Facts and Fictions. In the 1893 version, she drew on then-popular racialized evolutionary arguments about “civilization” [such as those described by Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)], claiming that “civilized” white people had become less physically hardy than nonwhite races. The 1897 version focuses on education and autonomy.

  7.“Mothers are the Rage,” Chicago Tribune, February 19, 1897, 9.

  8.Edward Drinker Cope, “Mrs. Helen Gardener on the Inheritance of Subserviency,” American Naturalist 31, March 1897, 253–254.

  9.Roger E. Stoddard, “Vanity and Reform: B. O. Flower’s Arena Publishing Company, Boston 1890–1896, With a Bibliographical List of Arena Imprints,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 76, 1982, 279.

  10.Frederick J. Jones vs. Arena Publishing Company, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, April 16, 1898, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives.

  11.“Flower Arrested, C. S. Smart Arrested too,” Boston Post, February 17, 1897, 1; “Held in $3000 Bail Each,” Boston Daily Globe, February 18, 1897, 10; Lowell Sun, March 17, 1897, 3.

  12.Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes, Day Three, August 9, 1902, LOC.

  13.Lowell Sun, March 17, 1897, 3.

  14.“Helen Gardener Coming to San Francisco,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1897, 9; “The Women’s Congress,” San Francisco Call, March 31, 1897, 14.

  15.Garfield Safe Deposit Company claim receipt, April 12, 1897, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 66, LOC.

  16.“Mayor Phelan Called on Her,” San Francisco Call, April 26, 1897, 10.

  17.“Sex in Brains,” Los Angeles Herald, July 16, 1897, 6.

  18.Agnes L. Scott, “How I Saw Helen Gardener,” Free Thought, January 1897, 30–32.

  19.“Little One” [HHG] to “Little Phil,” [Mary Phillips] August 11, 1901, Adelaide Johnson Collection, LOC.

  20.“Helen Gardener Coming to San Francisco,” 9.

  21.“Read Papers on Mental Training,” San Francisco Call, April 30, 1897, 5.

  22.“Lectures at Stanford,” San Francisco Call, May 5, 1897, 4; Stanford Daily, May 6, 1897, 4.

  23.“Helped to Save His Country,” San Francisco Call, May 8, 1897, 5; “Extracts from the Latest Novel Will Entertain an Audience,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 6, 1897, 8.

  24.Mrs. [Marie] Selden Day reported attending the 1894 Women’s Congress, San Francisco Call, May 14, 1894, 7. Various documents in Day’s Pension File at NARA record her death in March 1895.

  25.“The Story of a Patriot,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 1897, 5.

  26.Oakland Tribune, May 15, 1897, 19.

  27.“Well Known in Journalism,” Boston Globe, May 23, 1897, 2; “Deaths of the Day,” New York Times, May 23, 1897.

  28.“Descendants of Catherine Chenoweth,” genealogical research prepared by Chenoweth family, shared with the author by Jon Egge.

  29.“At the Summer Resorts,” Los Angeles Herald, July 25, 1897, 9, and August 4, 1897, 10.

  30.HHG, “How the California Woodpecker Fattens his Pork,” Illustrated American, March 19, 1898, 355–357; HHG, “A Queen Bee and Her Subjects,” The Arena, June 1899, 683–699.

  31.HHG, “Queen Bee,” 683.

  32.Los Angeles Herald, October 24, 1897, 10.

  33.HHG wrote her address as 19 West 38th Street in a letter dated October 29, 1898, published in Free Thought, January 1899, 22–26. The 1900 census records their address on W 123rd Street.

  34.HHG to Dr. E. B. Strickland, February 6, 1894, SLRI.

  35.Herbert Edwards and Julie Herne, notes for biography of Herne, chapter 10, “Griffith Davenport,” James A. Herne Collection, Raymond H. Fogler Library Special Collections Department, University of Maine, Orono, Maine.

  36.“At the Theaters,” Evening Times, January 17, 1899, 8.

  37.Edwards and Herne, notes for chapter 10, “Griffith Davenport.”

  38.“Cut for a Fresh Deal,” Washington Post, January 15, 1899, 25.

  39.“At the Theaters,”Washington Times, January 17, 1899, 3.

  40.“The Passing Show,” Washington Times, January 22, 1899, 18.

  41.Edwards and Herne, notes for chapter 10, “Griffith Davenport.”

  42.HHG to Paul Kester, June 10, 1912, Kester Collection, NYPL.

  43.“The Theatrical Forum,” Washington Times, January 22, 1899, 19.

  44.“An Eclectic Afternoon,” New York Tribune,
May 10, 1900, 7; “For Galveston Homeless Orphans,” Montgomery Advertiser (AL), October 21, 1900, 11.

  45.“To Study Occult Sciences,” Evening Times, Washington, DC, April 19, 1899, 4.

  46.“Women’s Press Club Torn by Factions,” New York World, February 27, 1899, 2; HHG’s involvement substantiated by minutes of the Woman’s Press Club of New York City, Woman’s Press Club Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York.

  47.HHG, “The Man at the Window,” Free Thought, September 1900, 520–523. Her final short story: “One Little Yankee Soldier—a Spirit Likeness,” Free Thought, March 1901, 148–151.

  48.HHG, “The Lady of the Club.”

  49.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 11, 1901; eleventh sitting of Helen Gardener, Tuesday, August 19, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes, LOC. Address listed in her March 1901 letter published in Free Thought and in itemized list of her property, by landlord Miss Van Buren, attachment to “Little One” to “Little Phil,” October 8, 1901.

  50.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 11, 1901.

  51.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 11, 1901.

  52.“Deaths in the Town of Westport” Record Book, Courtesy of Westport Sanitarium; Death notice, New York Herald, January 12, 1901; Smart’s State of Connecticut Death Certificate, Selden Day Pension File, NARA.

  53.Smart obituary, Free Thought, March 1901, 172–173; Col. C. Selden Smart, Application for Cremation, January 12, 1901, courtesy of Fresh Pond Crematory; HHG, “Two Views,” The Truth Seeker, August 18, 1888, 520–521.

  54.Wills described, Mary Phillips to Mr. Milnor, June 17, 1903, Adelaide Johnson Collection, LOC.

  55.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 11, 1901. There are no probate records for Smart in New York, where they lived, or in Connecticut, where he died.

  56.Last Will and Testament Charles S. Smart, June 30, 1893, Charleston, WV, Kanawha County Clerk of Court.

  57.Garfield Safe Deposit Company claim receipt, April 12, 1897.

  58.Smart obituary, Free Thought, March 1901, 172–173; “Wee wifee,” T. H. MacQueary to Rena B. Smith, November 16, 1926, in Smith unpublished biography, Stantial Collection, SLRI.

  11. Around the World with the Sun

  1.First sitting August 7, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes, LOC.

  2.“Little One” [HHG] to “Little Phil,” [Mary A. Phillips], August 11, 1901, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 66, LOC.

  3.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 11, 1901. The 1900 census enumerates a servant named Maud Baldin living with Gardener and Smart in New York. It is possible that she was “Mrs. B.”

  4.HHG to Stanton, May 7, 1901, reprinted in the Boston Investigator, May 25, 1901, The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Patricia Holland and Ann D. Gordon (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1991), reel 42.

  5.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 11, 1901.

  6.Summary of Day’s biography and military career in Lawrence Wilson, Itinerary of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry, 1861–1864 (New York: Neale, 1907), 416–419; Selden Day pension file, NARA.

  7.Diary entry of Dr. Craven, the chief medical officer of Fort Monroe, quoted in Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America, A Memoir (New York: Belford’s, 1890), 694; eighteenth sitting, Friday, September 3, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes.

  8.Day obituary, Army and Navy Register, undated clipping, Day’s Pension File, NARA.

  9.Day’s 1903 passport application describes face, features, and height, available via ancestry.com.

  10.Photo lot 97, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (NAA).

  11.HHG to Stanton, May 7, 1901, The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, reel 42.

  12.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 11, 1901; HHG Last Will and Testament (1923) and Probate Inventory, HHG Papers, SLRI and as filed in Washington, D.C.

  13.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 11, 1901.

  14.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” November 1, 1901, Adelaide Johnson Collection, LOC.

  15.Leslie J. Gordon, “LaSalle Corbell Pickett,” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, October 27, 2015; website access April 5, 2019.

  16.Pen Women Yearbooks and promotional material, National League of American Pen Women Archives, 1300 17th Street NW, Washington, DC.

  17.Story of horses in “Helen Gardener in this City,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 27, 1903, 8. Horse names appear in the list of slide names, Gardener Collection, Photo lot 98, National Anthropological Archives (NAA), Smithsonian Institution; Society, Town Topics, undated clipping, April 1902, 6.

  18.Frances E. Willard, A Wheel within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle with Some Reflections by the Way (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1895).

  19.Twentieth sitting of Helen Gardener, September 7, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes, LOC.

  20.Clipping, Town Topics; “The World of Society,” Evening Star (Washington), April 9, 1902, 5; “Society and the Clubs,” Sandusky Daily Register, April 2, 1902, 2; “Helen H. Gardener Wed,” United Service: A Quarterly Review of Military and Naval Affairs, May 1902, 543; “Col. Day and His Wife, Helen Gardener,” Free Thought, July 1902, 427–429.

  21.“Authoress at White House,” The Times (Washington), June 11, 1902, 2.

  22.Sandra Weber, The Woman Suffrage Statue: A History of Adelaide Johnson’s Portrait Monument at the United States Capitol (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2016), 9–11; “Mrs. Adelaide Johnson Is the Sculptor of Suffrage,” Washington Post, April 4, 1909, 9.

  23.HHG to AJ, April 1, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Collection, LOC.

  24.Weber, The Woman Suffrage Statue, 11–12.

  25.Eighteenth sitting, September 3, 1902; first sitting, August 7, 1902; seventeenth sitting, August 31, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 71, LOC.

  26.Tenth sitting, August 18, 1902.

  27.Twelfth sitting, August 19, 1902. This is the only place I have found this book mentioned. I have not been able to locate a draft.

  28.Tenth sitting, August 18, 1902; sixteenth sitting, August 29, 1902; third sitting, August 9, 1902.

  29.“Revisiting Battlefields,” Harrisonburg Evening News, September 30, 1902, 1; “Distinguished Visitors in Town,” Harrisonburg Rockingham Register, October 3, 1902, 3; horses mentioned in “Helen Gardener in this City,” 8.

  30.HHG to Dr. Spitzka, Nov. 15, 1902, SLRI; “Tributes to Mrs. Stanton . . . Miss Helen Gardener Absent,” New York Times, November 20, 1902, 9.

  31.“Tributes to Mrs. Stanton . . . Miss Helen Gardener Absent,” 9; “No, Not Mrs. Stanton’s Brain,” unidentified clipping, November 1902, Susan B. Anthony Papers, LOC, quoted in Ellen Carol Dubois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 86, note 112. Blatch denial also reported in Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), November 18, 1902, 6. Additional coverage of the brain bequest kerfuffle: “Brains: Wanted by this Trust,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 27, 1902, 6. Reprinted from New York Sun.

  32.HHG to Burt Wilder, October 27, 1915, Burt Green Wilder Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; twenty-third sitting, Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes, October 30, 1902.

  33.HHG “Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Woman’s Tribune, November 21, 1902, 1; reprinted in Free Thought, January 1903, 3–10.

  34.HHG to Dr. Edward A. Spitzka, December 30, 1902, SLRI.

  35.HHG to Dr. E. A. Spitzka, December 30, 1902; “Helen Gardener in this City,” 8.

  36.Mary Phillips to Mr. Milnor (her lawyer), March 7, 1903. Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 66, LOC. Mary Phillips owned a large boarding house at 120 W. 72nd Street (address on her letterhead, confirmed in Evening World (New York), November 23, 1911, 2). There are other Mary A. Phillips letters in the Adelaide Johnson Collection that suggest she served as a sort of
fixer for other people in addition to Gardener.

  37.MP to Milnor, March 15, 1903, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 66, LOC.

  38.MP to Milnor, June 17, 1903, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 66, LOC.

  39.MP to Milnor, March 16, 1903, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 66, LOC.

  40.MP to Milnor, March 16, 1903.

  41.MP to Milnor, May 21, 1903, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 66, LOC.

  42.“A Good Woman Gone,” Weekly Register (WV), September 2, 1903, 1.

  43.HHG to Dr. Spitzka, March 20, 1903, 218 B, SLRI.

  44.“Maru Has Few Passengers,” Honolulu Advertiser, June 18, 1903, 7; “Distinguished Authoress Here,” Hawaiian Star, June 19, 1903, 6; “Helen Gardner Will Write of Hawaii,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, June 24, 1903, 5.

  45.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 14, 1903, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 18, LOC. Gardener’s fascination with Japan was part of a larger trend; see Christopher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New York: Random House, 2003).

  46.“Ran Away on Tantalus: Col. and Mrs. Day Have Narrow Escape,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, June 26, 1903, 7.

  47.HHG 1919 will (she updated it in 1923), 3, HHG Papers, SLRI.

  48.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 14, 1903.

  49.Thursbys mentioned in HHG to MP August 14, 1903, LOC, and in HHG to Spitzka, April 13, 1904, SLRI.

  50.Gardener collection, photo lot 98, NAA.

  51.HHG to Spitzka, December 1, 1903, SLRI; Duane E. Haines, “Edward Anthony Spitzka,” American National Biography Online 2000.

  52.HHG, “Japan: Our Little Friend to the East,” The Arena, January 1895, 178.

  53.HHG to Spitzka, April 27, 1904, SLRI; HHG to Spitzka, December 1, 1903, SLRI; HHG to Spitzka, February 17, 1904, SLRI. Using the information HHG provided, Spitzka published several articles on the brains of Japanese people.

  54.“Little One” to “Little Phil,” August 14, 1903.

  55.HHG, “China as I Saw It: Outside the Home” and “China as I Saw It: Inside the Home,” lectures in her series Ourselves and Other People, brochure, Day’s Pension File, NARA; lantern slide note cards, lists of slides, and slides, lot 98, NAA.