Helen Hamilton Gardener

Mar 2

Writer, Suffragist, Government Employee

Helen_Hamilton_Gardener_portrait,_Wellcome_L0070273_(cropped).jpg

Can you imagine being a defiant female in the late 1800s that objected to the bible and how it was used as a device to subjugate women? Can you imagine being shunned for having an affair with a married man and having to flee your home and change your name because of it? Enter Helen Hamilton Gardener, influential writer, politician, and women’s rights advocate.

Helen became a well-known speaker, gaining notoriety when she refuted, with a well-researched essay title “Sex in the Brain,” a previously publicized study that female brains were inherently inferior to male brains. Gardener's well-researched rebuke pointed out that the male brains in the study were from intelligent, accomplished men, while the female brains in his study had come from indigents and criminals. She also pushed for the age of consent to be raised which, in many states, was 12 or lower at the time.

Helen Gardener also planned the signing ceremony for the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote. Afterward, she secured a place for suffrage artifacts, including a portrait of Elizabeth Cady Stanton who she referred to as “our Thomas Jefferson” in the Smithsonian. She called the suffrage movement “the greatest bloodless revolution ever known,—the achieving of political and financial independence by one-half of the people without a drop of blood being shed.”

Powerful Quotes by a Powerful Woman

“Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a Christian country has been ‘authorized by the Bible’ and riveted and perpetuated by the pulpit.”

“The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.”

“This religion and the Bible require of woman everything, and give her nothing. They ask her support and her love, and repay her with contempt and oppression.”

“It has been well said that an Englishman cannot speak French correctly until he has learned to think in French. It is far more true that no one can speak or write the language of human liberty and equality until he has learned to think in that language, and to feel without stopping to argue with himself, that right is not masculine only and that justice knows no sex.”