An intellectual, activist and champion of women’s rights, Helen Hamilton Gardner used her life experiences as inspiration for the social change she strongly advocated. Born Mary “Alice” Chenoweth, she sought independence early on by training at the Cincinnati Normal School to become a schoolteacher. At the time, teaching was one of the few acceptable paid professions for young women to pursue. She graduated in 1873 and took a position as a teacher in Sandusky, Ohio, where she quickly rose to become the principal of Sandusky’s new teacher training school.
However, Chenoweth’s success in Sandusky turned out to be short-lived, despite her excellent performance. After newspapers exposed her for having an affair with a married man, she resigned from her position. At the time, such accusations ruined a woman’s professional and moral reputation. Undeterred, she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardner. She refused to let her status as a “fallen woman” define her, and under her new name, she spent the rest of her life pushing against the social, sexual and religious norms that limited women’s independence.
As part of her evolution, Gardener immersed herself in the freethought movement, an intellectual movement that advocated for freedom of thought, secularism and the importance of science. She read widely, independently advancing her education, and she eventually became a protégé of Robert Ingersoll, a leader in the freethought movement who supported women’s rights. With Ingersoll’s support, Gardener emerged as a popular speaker. She steadily gained national prominence and notoriety, as well as criticism for espousing views that many found unseemly coming from a woman.
While Gardener’s speaking career included hardships and setbacks, she eventually flourished and also became a published writer of both non-fiction and fiction. Much of her writing focused on issues related to women’s rights. For example, in an 1887 letter to the editor of Popular Science Monthly, Gardener publicly sparred with William A. Hammond, former surgeon general of the U.S. Army (buried in Section 1 of ANC). She critiqued an article he had written, in which he claimed that physiological differences in the female brain made women intellectually inferior to men and unsuited to study subjects such as math. The issue escalated into a debate between Gardener and Hammond in Popular Science Monthly, and while the publication allowed Hammond the final say, the incident inspired Gardener to take a bold step. Upon her death, she willed her brain to Cornell University so it could be studied as an example of the brain of an accomplished female intellectual. According to the New York Times, Gardener believed that scientists had not had enough opportunities to study the brains of “the women who think,” and she hoped her brain would fill this scientific gap.