Helen Hamilton Gardener

Whoever differs with the multitude, especially with a led multitude…will find out from their leaders that he has committed an unpardonable sin. It is a crime to travel a road of your own, especially if you put up guide-boards for the information of others.

— Helen Hamilton Gardener

Born this day in 1853: Helen Hamilton Gardener (orig. Alice Chenoweth, 1853–1925), author, feminist, social reformer, and freethinker

Alice Chenoweth adopted the pseudonym Helen Hamilton Gardener after collecting a series of freethinking lectures she had delivered in 1884 into a volume titled Men, Women, and Gods, and Other Lectures (1885). She came to the attention of feminists, however, after writing “Sex in Brain,” a carefully researched refutation of the notion that the female brain is inferior to the male brain.

Gardner continually questioned the status quo, especially in regards to sexual equality. She decried the sexual double standard and the inferior position of women in marriage. She explored these themes in several novels. Is This Your Son, My Lord? (1890) won widespread attention and succeeded in its aim of using fiction to shine a light on fact. One topic of the novel was the age of consent for girls, which was exceedingly low in the nineteenth century—as low as 7 in one state.  (Please see below for an excerpt of the preface she wrote for the second edition. It’s a very stirring defense of her choice of topic for a novel and shows what insight feminists and freethinkers had—and needed to have to challenged entrenched notions.)

In 1913, after the Congressional Committee of the National American Women Suffrage Association defected to the more militant National Women’s Party, Gardner was invited to help organize a new Congressional Committee. She served as an unofficial lobbyist to President Wilson, with whom she was very close and on whom she was very influential. She worked quietly behind the scenes to effect passage of the 19th Amendment. 

In 1920 President Wilson appointed Gardener to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. At the time it was the highest federal position ever held by a woman.

From the author’s preface to the 1894 edition of Is This Your Son, My Lord?

 The double system of morals which has legal and therefore social support—which makes of man a free and dominant human being and of woman a dependent function only and always—is not understood one whit better than was physical slavery in 1853. Race ownership with its double code of moral obligation is now illegal, and therefore looked upon as immoral and wholly pernicious. Sex ownership is still legal, and for that reason, and for that only, is it recognized as less vicious that a double standard of moral obligation should exist between the sexes. There is but one depth of degradation below that which allowed men to hold in bondage their fellow men and make of them financial dependents, and legal and social and moral pensioners because they were black; and that is the depth which is touched when, by all legal, moral, social and financial conditions the marriage altar is but an auction block upon which, for the sake of the right to live, the purity and devotion and loyalty of womanhood are sold—not on equal terms—with no pretence of fair exchange—into a perpetual servitude of body and soul that knows no limit and can hope for no escape.

The black man had his food and clothes and code of morals and duties, in which he had no voice, served to him by a dominant race from which he could make no appeal. He was a dependent mentally, morally, and physically. That was the reason of his degradation. It was not that he suffered physical hardships. He was frequently better off in that regard, than was his free brother. It was the root of the system that degraded him. He was held as an inferior with no voice in his own control and no right to his own development.

Woman stands in that position to-day. She has no voice in her own government, nor in fixing the standards by which she is judged and controlled. She is a dependent morally, mentally, financially and physically.

It is all very well—and very silly—to say that women control society and make the moral standards that govern it. They do nothing of the kind. Financial dependents and political nonentities create no standards. They receive them ready made. The merest modicum of reason will supply the proof of this.

No subject class—no unrecognized, dependent class—ever yet made public opinion either for itself or for others. It always did, and it always must, simply reflect the sentiments and opinions of its rulers.

It is true that many a woman treats with scorn the “fallen” of her sex while receiving the companion in crime as a suitable son or husband. Who makes that sentiment? Who decides what woman is “fit to be a wife and mother”? Who makes the laws that give divorce to a husband for the least fault of the wife, but places another standard upon the loyalty of the husband?

Who talks about “making an honest woman” of his companion in guilt? Who makes him “honest”? Who enacted the legal standards upon which all these social sentiments rest? A man is valued of men for many things, least of which is his chastity. A woman is valued of men for few things, chief of which is her chastity. This double code can by no sane or reasonable person be claimed as woman made. Woman has had no voice whatever in its establishment. She has the same voice and power possessed by all financial and legally dependent creatures in its continuation and reflection. She is a very good mirror; but she cannot be accused of being the creator of the original of the reflection.

The willingness to accept a degraded and subordinate status in the world, and the assertion that they like it, are the lowest depths of human degradation to which human beings can be reduced. A system which produces willing legal, moral, financial and social dependents and inferiors is one that cannot fail, as all history shows, to breed crime and vice, poverty and insanity, imbecility and moral obliquity enough to make of a beautiful world a mere den of discomfort, discord, and despair.

This lesson has been taught and learned with classes and with races; but it is yet to bear but withered fruit while the mother of these classes and races is beneath justice and outside of freedom, while she is a financial dependent (which is always a slave ) a political non-existent, (which is always a creature without defence) a moral beggar at the feet of her companion in degradation and a social echo of the opinions, expressed or insinuated, of those who hold over her not only all physical, financial, and social power, but who also sway her through the tenderest and holiest ties, and scruple not, alas, to make her the victim of her own virtue.

Freedom of religion had its novelists long ago and, in its newer, broader phase, has them to-day. Freedom of political choice and action has numbered many a romancer and poet as its champion. Labor has not failed to dramatize its cause in literature and on the stage. The cause of manhood as against kingcraft, priestcraft, or slave driver, was exploited by many a gifted soul who with the dash of a poet’s or novelist’s pen showed more people the hideousness of the old and the hope in the newer thought than could have been induced to read or made to understand dry legal argument or sociological treatise.

Shall not woman have her novelists also ?

I welcome your feedback! React, comment, subscribe below.

Lucretia Mott

“I am no advocate of passivity.” —Lucretia Mott

Born this day in 1793: Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880), pioneering social reformer and founder of the U.S. women’s movement

Mott was born Lucretia Coffin in Nantucket, Massachusetts, to a Quaker family. Her father was a whaler and her mother was a shopkeeper. Their example and Quaker teachings gave Mott a firm foundation in the concept of equality between the sexes. While teaching at a Quaker school in New York State, Mott discovered, however, that Quakers preached better than they practiced: as a woman teacher, her salary was half that of the men’s.

In 1811 she married fellow teacher James Mott. The couple moved to Philadelphia and had six children.

Mott became a social reformer of the first order and radical in the depths of her reform. She was an abolitionist and advocated for equality between the races, equality between the sexes, Native American rights, religious liberty, religious tolerance, and pacifism. A woman of strong, steadfast moral convictions, Mott was a moving and effective speaker. In 1821 she was ordained a Quaker minister.  She also toured and lectured on the anti-slavery cause and, increasingly, on the cause of women. Her outspokenness and the fact that she lectured to audiences comprising both men and women (“promiscuous” audiences) often aroused anger. More than once she was threatened with mob violence.

Like many early feminists, the sexism she faced while participating—or trying to—in the abolition movement led her to believe in the equal urgency of women’s liberation.  In 1840 she and the other women delegates were denied seats at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. It was there, screened behind a curtain in a remote balcony, that she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two women then and there decided to launch a full-scale women’s movement in the United States. The movement was formally launched in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. The Seneca Falls Convention presented the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Stanton, who drafted it, included suffrage for women, a radical notion even among feminists.  Mott did not initially support inclusion of suffrage because, as a Quaker, she was boycotting the vote as a pressure tactic against slavery. She later relented and subsequently opposed the fourteenth amendment because it limited suffrage to males. She believed white or black, man or woman, everyone had the same inherent right to vote, and advocated suffrage for all.

Mott remained a prominent figure in the women’s movement, attending conventions, lecturing, and writing on such topics as legal, political, and social inequality, inequality in women’s education and employment, and women’s subordination, legal and otherwise, in marriage. She, along with her husband (who wholly supported and aided her efforts) continued also in her opposition to slavery and aided fugitives on the Underground Railroad. She remained a pacifist, even as civil war loomed, advocating instead boycotts of products made by slave labor. In 1866 she became the first president of the newly formed American Equal Rights Association, which advocated equal rights and suffrage for all Americans, regardless of “race, color, or sex.”

In 1923, at the 75^th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, Alice Paul introduced the Equal Rights Amendment, which she named the Lucretia Mott Amendment in honor of this most visionary of founding feminists. Mott was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1983.

I welcome your feedback! React, comment, subscribe below.

Martha Coffin Pelham Wright

Born this day in 1806: Martha Coffin Pelham Wright (1806–1875), founding feminist, abolitionist

Martha Coffin Wright was the sister of Lucretia Coffin Mott. Like her sister, she was both an abolitionist and suffragist. She was part of the group of women’s rights activists, including Lucretia and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who planned the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. She was active in women’s rights organizations at both the state and national level. She served as secretary of the 1852 and 1856 National Women’s Rights Conventions, an officer at the 1853 and 1854 National Women’s Rights Conventions, and president of three other conventions. She also helped found the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. She was president of the NWSA in 1874.

Wright and her husband, David Wright, were both active in the American Anti-Slavery Society. They were agents in the Underground Railroad and harbored fugitives in their Auburn, New York, home. 

Wright was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2007.

I welcome your feedback! React, comment, subscribe below.

Jane Cunningham Croly

“The somewhat churlish treatment accorded to Mrs. Croly’s application for a ticket, and, subsequently, to other ladies who applied for an extension of the same privilege upon the same terms as men, suggested to Mrs. Croly the idea of a club composed of women only, that should manage its own affairs, represent as far as possible the active interests of women, and create a bond of fellowship between them.”

— Jane Cunningham Croly, A History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America

Born this day in 1829: Jane Cunningham Croly (1829–1901), journalist, feminist, pioneer of the woman’s club movement

Jane Cunningham Croly was born Jane Cunningham in Leicestershire, England, and grew up in New York state. In 1855 she moved to New York City to pursue a career in journalism. She began writing a weekly column in the Sunday Times and Noah’s Weekly Messenger. “Parlor and Side-walk Gossip” was one of the earliest instances of a woman’s department in a city newspaper. It also became what is believed the first syndicated column authored by a woman. She wrote for several other publications as well. As was the standard for women writers, she wrote under a pseudonym, “Jennie June.”

In 1856 she married fellow journalist David Goodman Croly. The couple would have four children, one of whom died in infancy. In 1860 both began working for the New York World. Croly managed the World’s women’s department from 1862 to 1872. She also wrote for the Weekly Times, and for 27 years was the chief staff writer for Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions (later Demorest’s Monthly Magazine). She also created the first newspaper shopping guide. She wrote for many other publications as well, including Godey’s Lady’s Book and The New York Times.

Although much of her writing was about fashion, she poked fun at the confining clothing of the day (as well as the more extreme fashion reforms). She devoted much of her writing to the improvement of women’s standing in society. She urged middle class women, who were freed from the more burdensome household duties, not to waste their minds on trivialities. She believed deeply that the key to women’s emancipation was financial independence and economic equality—gained through equal opportunity for employment. She believed that all other freedoms would follow, including the right to vote. She insisted that women, if they wanted equal outcomes, should put equal effort into their endeavors.

In 1868, the New York Press Club held a reception honoring Charles Dickens—and did not allow women to attend. Croly was incensed. In response she created a professional women’s association called Sorosis—the first major woman’s club in the nation.

She threw herself into the woman’s club movement. She held a national convention of woman’s clubs in 1889. It brought together representatives from more than 60 woman’s clubs to help organize their social reform efforts. The convention led to the creation of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Croly wrote a history of the movement, The History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (1,170 pages long!), published in 1898. She also founded, in 1889, the Women’s Press Club of New York. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994.

Other books by Croly include Jennie Jungian: Talks on Women’s Topics, 1869; For Better or Worse, 1875; Cookery Book for Young Beginners, 1866. See also this tribute to Croly, Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, “Jenny June,” by the Women’s Press Club of New York City.

I welcome your feedback! React, comment, subscribe below.