Helen H. Gardener
January 21
On this date in 1853, freethinker and suffragist Helen H. Gardener, née Alice Chenoweth, was born in Virginia, the youngest daughter of a minister. Changing her name in her thirties, Alice became a writer in New York City, studied biology at Columbia and met "the Great Agnostic" Robert Green Ingersoll. Helen undertook a lecture series in 1884, which was published the next year by the Truth Seeker in book form, Men, Women and Gods. A friend of feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Helen was a member of Stanton's Woman's Bible Committee. Chosen by Stanton to deliver her memorial service, Gardener quipped that while most suffragists found the Woman's Bible too radical, she found it not radical enough! Helen also used fiction to crusade for women's rights, writing novels, for example, showing the harm of the scandalously low age of consent laws of her era. Helen became vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1917, working as the chief liaison with President Wilson's administration, and credited with being a "worker of miracles" by sister suffragists. At age 67, Helen became the first woman appointed to the United States Civil Service Commission, serving with distinction for five years. D. 1925.
“I do not know of any divine commands. I do know of most important human ones. I do not know the needs of a god or of another world. . . . I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one. I do know that the needs of humanity and this world are infinite, unending, constant, and immediate. They will take all our time, our strength, our love, and our thoughts; and our work here will be only then begun.”
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