Writer, Suffragist, Government Employee

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

-Helen Hamilton Gardener