>> Elizabeth Novara: All right. I think we are ready to start. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome. Thank you all for attending today's event, Searching for Suffrage, a book talk organized by the Library of Congress' manuscript division in honor of women's history month. I'm Liz Novara and I'm the American women's history specialist for the manuscript division. And I co-curated the Library of Congress' shall not be denied women fight for the vote exhibition during the 2019 and 2020 centennial of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S Constitution. Joining me for our discussion today are Kimberly Hamlin and Bruce Kirby. Kimberly Hamlin is a professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She lectures about the history of women across the country, and she is a regular contributor to the "Washington Post" NEH humanities magazine, "Smithsonian" magazine, and other media. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, she published the book "Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener" in 2020 to coincide with the women's suffrage centennial. The American Library Association's book list named "Free Thinker" a top 10 biography of 2020, and "Free Thinker" will be the focus of our discussion today. Bruce Kirby is a reference librarian in the manuscript division's reading room. Bruce began his archival career in 1991 at the Smithsonian institution archives where he worked to preserve the institution's records and helped scholars to study Smithsonian history. In January 2000 he joined the library's manuscript division, arriving at the library just in time for its bicentennial celebration. Since then he has worked with a wide range of students, scholars, and librarians to share the division's rich collections. Today we're going to begin with a brief presentation from Kimberly that will give us a broad overview of her book and her research at the Library of Congress. Then Bruce and I will have a Q and A discussion with Kimberly after which we will open it up to questions from the audience. Please use the Q and A function to submit your questions, not the chat. The chat will serve as a space for the hosts to post relevant links to resources. So now, without further ado, I'll turn it over to you, Kimberly. Thank you so much for joining us today. >> Kimberly Hamlin: Thank you so much, Liz, for that great introduction. And thank you so much Bruce and Elizabeth for organizing this event, and thanks to all of you who have joined us today to think about women's history month and to learn about my research in "Free Thinker." So if we pause just a second I'll share my screen so I can share some images. I'm going to give a brief overview of who was Helen Hamilton Gardener, the subject of my book, and also some of the images that we're going to talk about later from the Library of Congress collections. So, as Liz mentioned, this is my new book. It came out in 2020 in time for the suffrage centennial, and I did most of my research or at least the sort of most vital aspects of the research at the Library of Congress manuscripts division. So I'm so excited to be here today and to discuss this process with Liz and Bruce who have been such wonderful associates and supports and experts of this whole entire process. So the first question you're probably wondering is who was Helen Hamilton Gardener. Well, I like to say that Helen Hamilton Gardener is the most interesting, most important, suffragist that no one has ever heard of. So that's partly what I'm going to try to impress upon you today is that she's really a vital figure for understanding suffrage history. So she began her life as Alice Chenoweth, and then after a sex scandal she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener. She was a fallen woman who had sex before marriage, and everyone found out about it. Rather than slink away in shame, though, she moved to New York City and changed her name. She begins life on the -- her public life, I should say, on the free thought lecture circuit. And she becomes one of the most important speakers and writers of the 19th century before turning her attention to suffrage in 1910. So that's where we'll delve in really today. And I want to highlight here some of the documents from the Library of Congress that we'll be talking about later, and where you can find them in case you want to look for them later. So these are the documents we'll reference, and this is the first one I'm going to talk about from the Adelaide Johnson collection, really one of my favorite collections in the manuscripts division. So when I first knew I was going to write this biography of Helen Hamilton Gardener was when I saw this letter in the Adelaide Johnson collection that Helen Hamilton Gardener wrote to her friend Mary Phillips. And you can see at the top she wrote, "Best destroy this letter." So of course I'm excited already. Right? And in this three page letter she details the big scandal of her life and how she was a fallen woman and how she managed to keep this a secret her whole entire life. And so I feel sort of conflicted about reviewing this in the book, but this is really when I knew there was such an important story to tell. So what I want to stress here is it's not just a fascinating story about a fascinating woman, but Helen Hamilton Gardener really encourages us to view suffrage history in a whole new light. How and why? One. Well, she shows us how sex and the sexual double standard really motivated women's entry in to public life and reform in the 19th century. Two. A look at H.H.G, as I call her, life really shows the important aspects of the relationship between the two rival suffrage groups, the National American Woman Suffrage Association that she belonged to and the National Women's Party. She also shows us how the 19th amendment got through Congress which is a fascinating and little known story that I was really so excited to be able to tell in "Free Thinker." And finally a look at Helen Hamilton Gardener's life really shows the importance of race and more to the point racism in how the 19th amendment got through Congress and the larger legacy of the 19th amendment. So I'll now show a few more pictures about H.H.G to give you a sense of some of her remarkable accomplishments. So, as I mentioned, I learned about her scandalous personal life from some of the documents in the Adelaide Johnson collection, and here you see the transition. She became -- she first was a school teacher with the name Alice Chenoweth. Then she has an affair with a married man and moves to New York City a few years later, changes her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener. As you can see on the right, this was the frontispiece from her first book called "Men, Women, and Gods." From the free thought lecture circuit. By 1893 she's one of the best known women in America. She gave more speeches at the 1893 world's fair than any other American woman and the "New York Sun" reported that next to Susan B Anthony, Helen Hamilton Gardener created the profoundest sensation. Then she has another reinvention. In 1902 after her lover and the scandal of her early life subsides she marries a Civil War hero named Selden Allen Day. They travel the world for seven years, and have many adventures, and then they move to D.C. And this is where her suffrage chapter starts. In 1910 they settled in this lovely house at 1838 Lamont Street, and H.H.G quickly establishes herself as the National American Woman Suffrage Association's most efficient volunteer in D.C. How does she do this? Well, in part, because she's charming and smart and witty. And it's like all of the strands of her previous life come together to inform her suffrage activities. Second. She draws on her husband's address book which is chock full of Civil War heroes, their sons, their nephews, all of the men who happen to be in charge in Washington by the time they move there in 1910. This gives Gardener and the suffragists entry in to the upper echelons of power that they had long sought, but never had before H.H.G moved to D.C. The other aspect of her becoming the most efficient volunteer is she happens to live right next door to James Beauchamp Clark, the speaker of the U.S House of Representatives. Gardener uses this proximity and her personal charms to the suffragists' great advantage in lobbying, negotiating, and cajoling representative Clark to basically do her bidding which we can talk more about later. The first major activity H.H.G does on behalf of the suffrage movement is to help Alice Paul pictured here with H.H.G plan the landmark 1913 suffrage parade. Helen Hamilton Gardener served as the press committee chair and she also helped arrange all the permissions for this landmark event. From there, Helen Hamilton Gardener develops a really bitter rivalry with Alice Paul as they are kind of duking it out to see who will be the lead voice of suffrage in the nation's capital. Gardener positions herself within NAWSA as that person, that key go to woman in Washington. Her NAWSA colleagues begin calling her their diplomatic corp in reference to her constant negotiations both with the Woodrow Wilson white house and with individual members of Congress. You can see here she was so successful in building a relationship with Wilson. This is just a page from the Library of Congress' index to Wilson's papers showing how often H.H.G appears in the Wilson collection. In fact, by my rough count, H.H.G appears more in Woodrow Wilson's papers than any other woman except for his wives. The first place that I found H.H.G in the Wilson papers is this letter to Woodrow Wilson's chief of staff, a guy named Joseph Tumulty. This is when she's writing to introduce herself and where we can really see her laying on her personal charms. She even includes a P.S of this first letter saying, "Is there a day when Mrs Wilson receives callers?" Well, guess who went to the white house the very next day? Helen Hamilton Gardener. You can see this is from July 1916, and for the entire second term of Wilson's presidency since she sent this letter gardener became a welcome daily presence at the Wilson white house calling, telegraphing, visiting in person, to help convince Woodrow Wilson to support the federal amendment and to get him to do her countless favors. She later boasts that she had asked the president for 22 favors and been immediately granted 21 without question. She and Carrie Chapman Catt pictured here frequently went to the white house, but Carrie Chapman Catt wouldn't even go there without Gardener or at least without first running it through Gardener to show just how close a relationship Gardener forged with the Wilson white house and how effectively she convinced Wilson to support the 19th amendment, to help get it through Congress and then later to help get it ratified. All the while her old rival Alice Paul is protesting outside the white house having no idea that her frenemy H.H.G is inside bringing apricots from her garden and other charming knick knacks for president Wilson and his staff with whom she worked so effectively. The other major way that Helen Hamilton Gardener proved herself the most potent factor as her NAWSA colleagues called her in congressional passage was with how skillfully she negotiated with members of Congress. Here is a letter from the Woodrow Wilson collection showing one of Gardener's major accomplishments which was the creation of the house committee on women's suffrage. And we'll talk more about these documents in the discussion with Liz and Bruce. The member of Congress that Gardener most often lobbied was a man named John Sharp Williams of Mississippi. Why him? Well, Gardener believed that he was the suffragist's best chance to turn a southern member of Congress from a no to a yes. All throughout 1918/1919 suffragists knew they needed a couple more votes in the senate and they knew a couple of these were going to have to be southern democrats. John Sharp Williams was known as the most erudite man in the senate, and he was a good friend of Gardener and her husband Colonel Day. So she spends a lot of time lobbying him. And what I saw in her negotiations with John Sharp Williams and other members of the senate was the centrality of race and racism. This really is the story of how the 19th amendment got through Congress. John Sharp Williams writes her a candid reply saying that he will never vote to enfranchise black women in Mississippi, and he goes on to explain why, and to reveal that it's really not the legal barriers to voting that keep black men from the polls, but it's violence. And he says, "We could never use violence against black women because they are women, after all. Thus I will never support the 19th amendment." So this really opened my eyes to the way in which race and racism is the story of congressional passage of the 19th amendment. And it wasn't just limited -- these ideas weren't just limited to southern democrats. They were voiced by men of both parties and from all regions, including William Borah, the lion of Idaho who the suffragists thought was one of their allies because women had voted in Idaho for so long and he was often speaking in favor of women voting. But only on a state by state basis. He did not want to enfranchise black women in the south either. So this really stood out to me in studying congressional passage of the 19th amendment as I followed H.H.G's correspondence. These are some of the documents we'll be looking at more closely after. But the main thing to keep in mind about H.H.G is that she was the voice of NAWSA, the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, from 1916 to 1920 in Washington. Here she is pictured at the suffrage house, 1626 Rhode Island along with NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt and Maud Wood Park. This is shortly after congressional passage when they're celebrating this first victory. And again this victory was only made possible not because anyone thought the 19th amendment would enfranchise black women in the south, but because everyone knew it wouldn't. Here is Gardener pictured at the signing ceremony. Why is she there? Well, because she organized it. The very first signing ceremony of its kind. She's pictured there just to the left on your screen. The speaker of the house as he signs the joint congressional statement. She even bought the fancy gold pen, and then she immediately sends it on to the Smithsonian in the hopes that the Smithsonian will mount the first ever exhibition on women's rights history. From there she becomes the highest ranking woman in federal government. President Woodrow Wilson appointed her to be a U.S civil service commission. This is her being sworn in. And she was so proud of this journey, but no one knew she kept her fallen woman secret her whole entire life. So she dies as a -- the highest ranking woman in federal government. And a national symbol of what it meant finally for women or white women at least to be full citizens. She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and we may have time to talk about this in question, she also was a lifelong science enthusiast. So she donated her brain which you can see here to Cornell University's brain collection to prove her lifelong contention that women were not inferior to men. Here she is pictured riding her favorite beloved Andalusian pony through the streets of D.C. I think this is her at Logan Circle in 1902. And I think she's saying, "Where's my statue?" She lived during the time, the peak years, of Civil War commemoration and statue building. And she really felt that women too should be included in the commemorative stories we tell about ourselves as a nation. So during this women's history month I wanted to leave you with this question. Whose stories do we tell? Whose names do we remember? Whose do we forget? If you've never heard of Helen Hamilton Gardener, you might also ask yourself, "Who else haven't I heard of? What other names do we not yet know?" Thank you so much for having me here, and I'm really excited for our conversation. >> Bruce Kirby: Well, Kimberly, thanks very much for that wonderful presentation. I have a feeling that this could be a lot longer of a presentation because Gardener's story is so rich. But Liz and I have a few questions to ask, and I wanted to start off the conversation with a question about her earlier years. I did not get the sense that she kept a diary as a youth or left behind a big collection of letters that might reveal her thoughts and movements before she got involved with the suffrage movement. And so I was wondering how you pieced together her story using various fragments of information. If you could discuss that, and also talk about why the technique in doing that is so important for women's history. >> Kimberly Hamlin: Great questions, Bruce. So you're correct. The only diary that remains is one from 1907 from when she and her husband Colonel Day were on their world tours. So this diary's at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. But beyond that she mandated in her will that all of her personal papers including surely many other diaries be destroyed. And then she even goes on in her will to like list all the places in her house where these letters and diaries are. So it's like, "Oh, my god. There were so many things." And I think she wanted them destroyed because of her life as a fallen woman. She had that affair as a young schoolteacher. And then she lived with the man she had the affair with for the next 25 years telling everyone that he was her husband all the while knowing he was totally not her husband. So imagine the toll this would take. Right? Keeping this secret your whole life knowing the precarious balance that all your success rests on this secret being kept secret. So she destroys all her papers. So how I tried to piece it together, there's a few main resources. One was her fiction. I didn't talk about this in my short presentation, but after her turn on the free thought lecture circuit, after her many speeches at other reform conferences, she turns to fiction, short stories and novels. Why? Because she wants to talk about the sexual double standard, and I think because she was really wrestling with the havoc it wreaked on her life. So in this fiction she also reveals a lot about herself, and she wrote letters to people later saying how autobiographical it was. And sometimes she even said who was who. Well, you know, this character in -- is this your son, my lord? Well, that's really my nephew who I hate. So you can sort of piece together the puzzles following the clues she leaves in her letters. So that's one place where I learned about her early life. And she also wrote the novel she was most proud of which went on to become a Broadway play. It was a novel about her father who was a Civil War hero. He was a southern slave owner who emancipated the people he held in bondage and ended up serving the Union. So she thought this was a really heroic story she wanted to tell in a novel called "An Unofficial Patriot." So I gleaned a lot about her early life from that as well. The second place where I found a lot of information about her early life, again it goes back to the Civil War. Her three brothers also all fought for the Union, and then her husband Colonel Day had fought for the Union and also been a career army officer. So in the records, the Civil War records, and pension files at the National Archives there's a ton of information, and it's fascinating to look at the sorts of details of people's personal lives that are in these pension files and [inaudible] service records. So I gleaned a lot from there. But the most interesting stuff, Bruce, as you already know because you watched along, you lived this along with me in the manuscripts reading room, is in the Adelaide Johnson collection which is really one of favorite collections. It's so quirky and gossipy and I just love it. So Adelaide Johnson is the sculptor of suffrage, as you may know. And among the many women who sat to have Adelaide Johnson sculpt them is Helen Hamilton Gardener. So Johnson was a devotee of this Delsartian method, and she believed that to really craft a likeness of someone you had to know their innermost selves. So while H.H.G and the other women were sitting for Adelaide Johnson, she would grill them with these, you know, deep questions about their lives, their loves, their beliefs in God, and then Adelaide Johnson would scurry back to her notebook and write them all down in her teeny tiny very hard to read handwriting. So H.H.G sat for Adelaide Johnson 12 times. So there was I can't remember how many total pages. More than 30 total pages of these sitting notes where she tells a lot about what Gardener has revealed. And then the sort of piece de resistance is that letter that I started with, the coded letters that H.H.G wrote her close friend Mary Phillips. And, for some reason, these letters where Gardener reflects on the scandalous life she led are also in Adelaide Johnson's collection. I think because Adelaide Johnson boarded with Mary Phillips during the time when H.H.G was writing these letters. And I don't know why Adelaide Johnson has them. I have a suspicion that she maybe took them as some sort of insurance policy knowing just how juicy they were. But that is how they ended up in the correspondence of others section of Adelaide Johnson. Now to your other question about why our -- how does this relate to like telling women's stories more broadly? I would say, you know, we have to be so much more creative when telling stories of women's lives, women who did not think to leave their papers anywhere, women who did not know that they could, women who tried to leave their papers only to be turned away. So we have to really be so much more creative in finding what sources we can and contextualizing them. So that I think was really the most fun part of this research for me because I was like part, you know, traditional historian and then part Magnum PI following her around and looking for clues. It was a really -- a thrill. >> Bruce Kirby: Very good. Well, thanks. That's very interesting. I think Liz has a question. Right? >> Elizabeth Novara: Yes. So, as you mentioned, the manuscript division has the records of two of the major women's suffrage organizations of the time, the National American Woman's Suffrage Association or the NAWSA and the NWP or the National Women's Party. And you mined these collections heavily for your research. And Gardener became such an important member of NAWSA, but I found it fascinating in your book that someone who became so vitally important to NAWSA was at first not really interested in being a member of that organization. Can you explain to us why Gardener was not initially attracted to joining NAWSA, and why she eventually changed her mind? >> Kimberly Hamlin: That's a great question, and also one of the reasons why I was saying earlier we learn so much about suffrage history and its organizational history I think from following H.H.G around. So not only was she not a member of NAWSA in the 19th century, she was actually opposed to it. Not to suffrage, but to NAWSA. Why? Well, H.H.G was best friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She and Stanton met each other on the free thought lecture circuit in the 1880s. And Stanton as I know Liz knows and some people joining us today might know -- Stanton also became -- ended her life kind of at odds with the formal suffrage movement over questions of religion. So when the two rival suffrage groups, the American Women's Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Suffrage Association, merged to found NAWSA in 1890, both Gardener and Stanton opposed that merger because they felt it represented their really -- the triumph of the Christian mainstream more small minded branch of the [inaudible] in their eyes -- branch of the suffrage movement. So Gardener didn't really want to go to meetings like that in the 19th century. She wanted to talk about sex reform. She wanted to talk about how the bible was the root of women's oppression. She wanted to work to raise the age of sexual consent for girls. None of which NAWSA was really interested in talking about. And she also wanted to support her best friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton. So in the final years of Stanton's life Gardener feels like it's her mission to kind of take up for Stanton. So after Stanton publishes the woman's bible which Gardener was a part of, she was on her revising committee, Stanton is really ousted from the movement. And so Gardener takes it upon herself to kind of keep doing her best, you know, to keep Stanton and her legacy alive. So that's one reason is that Gardener was on team Stanton, not team NAWSA. So and the reason why she eventually joins NAWSA in 1910 I think is because when Gardener leaves on her world tour in 1902 with the new husband she leaves the states as one of the most well known women in all of America. Right? But then she's gone for seven years, and when she comes back everyone has forgotten about her. Right? And she can't resume her career as a writer. No one is taking her calls. Her old contacts have retired. And so she's casting about for her next thing. And eventually they decide to settle in D.C, and I think it just sort of happens that she lives next door to the speaker of the house and she begins to see a path for herself in the suffrage movement. And also these debates that really animated suffrage in the 1890s about the role of religion, those have fallen by the wayside by 1910s. And Gardener really sees a place for herself in the suffrage movement, in being the voice of suffrage in D.C for the federal amendment. And, like [inaudible] said, all the strands of her life, her work with the press, her charming personality, her great humor, all really come together in this chapter of her life. >> Elizabeth Novara: And I know -- so she's back in D.C, and fairly early on she gets involved with NAWSA's efforts to organize the 1913 suffrage parade. And this was the first national suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. And it's been my observation that Alice Paul usually gets all the credit as the parade organizer, but you argue that without Gardener the parade would have been a very different occasion. Can you tell us more about how Gardener contributed to the parade, and also her relationship with Alice Paul which was, as you called her, a frenemy. I believe -- yeah. >> Kimberly Hamlin: So when Alice Paul first hatches the idea to put together this parade, she reaches out to D.C suffragists. So Gardener is the third person she calls, and Gardener becomes quickly Alice Paul's right hand woman. Alice Paul reflects later that the only woman at the makeshift headquarters from sun up to sun down every day was H.H.G. So that's why I showed that picture of the two of them together because I think that's often how it looks in the makeshift NAWSA DC headquarters. Now what did H.H.G do? Well, her first real contribution was getting all the permits for the parade. So this may sound super boring, but this is essential. So think of the like -- even that beautiful program image that I showed with the capital in the back. Think of those iconic images of the suffragists marching with the capital in the back of their tableau, as they called them, on the steps of the treasury. Well, who made it possible? H.H.G. They were repeatedly rebuffed by this guy named Rudolph Sylvester [assumed spelling] and other D.C officials because they wanted to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. They wanted to follow the inauguration route from the capital to the white house. And D.C officials repeatedly continually said, "Nope. Nope. Nope. You know, 16th Street would be so much better. That's the shopping street. You'll be so much more comfortable there, ladies." And H.H.G said, "No way. We want Pennsylvania Avenue." So she would do things like go to President Taft, try to work around these, you know, meddlesome D.C officials. She brought congressional wives and daughters with her. And then her final stroke of genius which really sealed the deal was while D.C officials had the right to approve the Pennsylvania street, she went to her friends in Congress and got permission to gather at the base of the capital. So she got congressional approval for the parade organizers and marchers to start there which naturally lends itself to walking down Pennsylvania. So from that sort of back channel there's no way that D.C officials could say no. So she got all the approvals through her clever charms. And then the second thing she did was work as press secretary. That was her kind of official title. She was press committee chair. And she worked all day on the phones calling her old friends and contacts, using her previous skills as a writer and literary person, to pitch stories to get first the D.C press on her side, and soon the national press. And this Alice Paul reflects on in multiple places, including in her oral history that you can find online about what a wiz H.H.G was at this, and how important that was to the overall success of the march. And really the first time that the women's suffrage movement received positive national press. So those were two of the great things she did. Now for one not great thing. Gardener along with other D.C suffragists bolstered Alice Paul and supported Alice Paul's decision to cold shoulder African American women who wanted to march in the parade. Alice Paul did not issue a segregation directive. What she did was cold shoulder all the African American women who approached her seeking permission to march. Now it's not widely known, but this was not the official NAWSA position. There was actually at least two really strongly worded missives from Mary Ware Dennett, the NAWSA secretary, to Alice Paul saying, "I've gotten wind of the fact that you are cold shouldering black women. Do not do that. That is antithetical to what we NAWSA believe." But, as in most NAWSA directives, Alice Paul blew them off. And she wanted to not have black women be a real visible presence in the parade. Why? Because in 1912 democrats took control of both chambers of Congress and the white house for the first time since the Civil War. So Alice Paul is thinking that it's going to be hard to get the 19th amendment through Congress with a 2/3 majority knowing that she's going to need some southern support. And Helen Hamilton Gardener supports her in this. So that's one of the lamentable legacies. And what started to convince me that this is -- it's really all about race. And you see that so much in the congressional negotiations about the 19th amendment and in this devil's bargain that the white suffragists made to get it through Congress. >> Bruce Kirby: Kimberly, I have a question about going back to the manuscript division and how you used the collections to bring Gardener's contributions to light. Could you talk about some of these collections in a little bit more detail? And how -- some of the challenges you might have faced with the way they were organized and described. Like, for example, I don't think there are many collections with like a subject file on women's suffrage, for example, for these congressmen. >> Kimberly Hamlin: Exactly. So that I think for, you know, people who want to know kind of the nitty gritty aspects of suffrage, I feel like that is, you know, a main contribution of "Free Thinker." Really tracing how the 19th amendment gets through Congress through these congressional records and files. So first I made a list of all of the members of Congress that Helen Hamilton Gardener was friends with or that she referenced in her various memos to her NAWSA colleagues. Who was she mostly focusing her lobbying efforts on? And then I went to the papers of those men and sometimes, like you said, there would be a subject file called suffrage, but what I learned is oftentimes there's not a suffrage file reflecting the priorities of the people who first cataloged these papers. Right? And they're thinking like, well, who the heck cares about women's suffrage? And even when there is a women's suffrage file, and I highlighted this in the PowerPoint so if people want to go back and see, that's not where the juicy stuff is. If there is a women's suffrage file, that's where like form letters on letterhead that says the word suffrage is. But that's not where the real negotiations happened. Where the real negotiations happened is in the correspondence files by date. So then I made a list of all the times. And I mostly was focusing on the senate in this part. I made a list of, you know, the dates that the senate was either scheduled to or actually did vote on the 19th amendment. And then I looked at the chronological correspondence files in the weeks leading up to those big votes. And that's where I found the letters between John Sharp Williams and Helen Hamilton Gardener. That's where I found William Borah, the lion of Idaho writing back and forth not to Gardener, but to the chair of the Idaho republican party. So that's the source I excerpted in the PowerPoint where everyone thought of course William Borah will be for the federal amendment, but it's in this long letter to the chair of the Idaho republican party where he says, "I don't care if you renominate me. I don't care if I lose. There is no way I'm voting for this amendment." And he says, We can't enfranchise all these African American women in the south. And he says furthermore -- and this is the part that really got to me. He says, "We," senators, "approved," we passed, "the 15th amendment, but we have never enforced it since 1877. And now you're asking me to write in to law another lie while we sit still and not enforce it. I'm not going to do that," he says. So that was a really powerful source to me. Again and it's in those -- the chronological files of the senators who were kind of the swing -- considered the swing voters in suffrage. >> Elizabeth Novara: Kimberly, let me just go back just a minute. Besides the 1913 parade, Gardener contributed to NAWSA suffrage campaign in so many more ways. And you mention this in your presentation. Besides this one very public spectacle of the 1913 parade, what were some other major contributions to the fight for suffrage? And why haven't we heard about them before? Tell us more about what she did kind of in the background. >> Kimberly Hamlin: The first thing I want to highlight which may sound super boring, but it was so important, was getting the house committee on women's suffrage set up. So this -- the reason that you needed a house committee on women's suffrage is that's what brings the amendment to the floor for a vote. So the senate -- the women had had a suffrage committee in the senate since the 1880s. But to get it in the house you needed a corresponding women's suffrage committee. And for years and years NAWSA had tried to get this committee. So after the success of the 1913 parade, H.H.G goes right to it. Like within days she's using, you know, all of her new contacts, all of the momentum. And she's writing these effusive letters to NAWSA headquarters saying, "Ladies, I'm on it. I think we'll have the committee by the end of the summer." But then Alice Paul announces that she's going to start campaigning against all democrats up for election in 1914. So these promises that H.H.G has exacted from her democratic friends start falling by the wayside as they are really annoyed with Alice Paul. So this is what starts that rift between H.H.G and Alice Paul. It's a difference -- a question of tactics. So for years H.H.G is trying to get this committee. She then -- so this is also a story of how well she works with Woodrow Wilson. After she first sends that charming letter to Wilson's chief of staff in 1916 her first -- well, not really her first. One of her early successes with Wilson is getting Wilson to support this house committee. So when Wilson declares that the U.S is entering war, and that Congress goes in to a special war session, the suffragists say, "Okay. We'll back off. We're not going to formally lobby." But they totally don't mean that. What they mean is, "We're going to do other things behind the scenes." And what Gardener focuses on is getting this house committee. So she goes to Wilson and she says, "Chairman Pew [assumed spelling] of the rules committee does not support my women's suffrage committee. Since I'm so supportive of World War I, and since all my NAWSA friends are doing all these things, and we're not asking you for anything, go get Pew to give us this house committee." So Wilson does. He sends a letter to Pew saying, "It's come to my attention. You want to know what I think. I think that you should give this -- you should approve this committee." Then when the committee comes to the floor for a vote some of the representatives say there's no way that president Wilson supports this committee. And Pew shows the letter. Nope. Wilson wants this committee. So the house committee gets approved in the fall of 1917. And then when Congress re-adjourns in January 1918 the house votes on this 19th amendment the very next day and passes it. So this is the -- that's the fruition of the seeds that H.H.G was planting all along. And through it you can see not just her clever negotiation with Congress and also there's a lot of ways that she used her friendship with her neighbor Champ Clark in that process too, but also how she gets Wilson to really do her bidding with Congress. So her two main achievements were getting Wilson on board and the house committee. >> Elizabeth Novara: And also getting Wilson and Congress to understand the differences between NAWSA and NWP. Yes. >> Kimberly Hamlin: How Gardener befriends Wilson in that first letter and throughout his second term is by saying, "I know you hate Alice Paul. Well, guess what? I hate Alice Paul too. And not all suffragists are Alice Paul." And then she even provides a very helpful memo that she sends first to Wilson's chief of staff and it later gets inserted in the congressional record, and she's delineating who's who and what's what. Who are the NWP people? Who are the NAWSA people? And that really stood out to me because in Wilson's reply the NAWSA women asked for a meeting shortly after Gardener makes this contact, and Wilson writes back, "Who are these ladies again? Are they the hecklers?" And so that shows me he's been president now for four years. He still has no idea who's who, what's what. Is Carrie Chapman Catt the same as Alice Paul? No idea. So it was Gardener who shows him there are different factions and you want to work with NAWSA. And that's a really important aspect of the story I think. You know, everyone knows about Alice Paul and National Women's Party's bold and brave and selfless protests in front of the white house, but most people don't know that while they were outside protesting, H.H.G was inside convincing Wilson to support the federal amendment and to do so many helpful things behind the scenes in terms of getting it through Congress. So lobbying individual senators, for example, which she did ardently and enthusiastically throughout 1919. >> Bruce Kirby: Well, that's interesting, Kimberly. It's -- you see the photographs of the pickets in front of the white house mostly. But you don't see the photographs of Gardener behind the scenes meeting with Tumulty and Wilson. You know. >> Kimberly Hamlin: Exactly. >> Bruce Kirby: We had some questions from the audience, and we thought we'd go ahead and pass those along to you. The first question was -- inquires about what Gardener's attitude was towards the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment. >> Kimberly Hamlin: That -- she was not in favor of that, and that was kind of the early years of her involvement in the NAWSA congressional committee. So Gardener was always in favor of the federal amendment. And the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment was a sort of workaround strategy when the suffragists are trying to decide what's going to be the difference between the National Women's Party which at the time was known as the congressional union and NAWSA. So one thing NAWSA did to try to distinguish themselves from Alice Paul who all along was pushing for the federal amendment was to say, "Well, what if we do things that make it easier for state referenda on suffrage to be approved?" And that's Shafroth-Palmer. So Gardener was not in favor of that because she too was about the federal amendment all the time. She just had a very different strategy and tactic than Alice Paul. >> Bruce Kirby: Okay. A second question asks from -- based on your review of the papers, is there any evidence that Gardener had regrets or felt conflicted about how black women were excluded from the wins of the suffrage movement? >> Kimberly Hamlin: Not that I found, and that was really something I tried to grapple with. I thought a lot about in writing like why. And especially why -- how could she be so iconoclastic on everything else? Right? She had no problem talking about sex. She had no problem critiquing the bible. She had no problem donating her brain to -- she did all of these things that were taboo or not supposed to be talked about. Why couldn't she see her way through race and racism? And what I came to believe I think -- and, like I said, she never wrote openly about African American women. I don't think she had any African American women friends or, you know, correspondents. But one thing that I think is that she had like Civil War fatigue. And she had this sense that she wrote of so many times that, you know -- I didn't mention this, but she was born in Virginia to a slave owning Methodist minister. And when she was one her -- she was the youngest of seven. When she was one, her father moves everyone to D.C where he could emancipate the people he held in bondage. And then they moved to Indiana. So she grows up knowing that she's like from these sort of first families of Virginia for having given it all away. So on the one hand she feels like that's what people like me do. That's what my family does. We sacrifice everything for our beliefs. But on the other hand then her dad dies during the Civil War. Her three older brothers, they don't die during the Civil War, but they get wounds or sicknesses from which they prematurely die during the Civil War. And her family loses everything again, and they move ultimately to Missouri and have to like live with other relatives and cousins. And I think she has this sense of like, "I already gave everything I had for the cause of abolition." And I think she somehow told herself that that was enough, that -- and I think a lot of abolitionists -- right? You could ask the question of like, "Why didn't everyone push for reconstruction to be upheld?" Why on earth would we fight a civil war only to take it all back by not enforcing the reconstruction amendments? Right? And I think a lot of white reformers had this similar feeling of that the main thing to do was to eradicate slavery. After that, not so much. And Gardener while she was too young to really have participated in the Civil War had the sense that her family had done their part and it was not her job to, you know, continue the fight for equal rights. That's my best guess. It's not excusable. I'm not saying this was a good choice. But I think that's maybe how she rationalized it to herself. >> Bruce Kirby: Okay. The next question touches on one of the last photographs in your presentation, her brain in a jar. They would like you to talk more about the after life of her brain after it was donated. Did they ignore it? Did they study it? Or did they leverage it for political arguments? >> Kimberly Hamlin: Well, okay. That's a great question. So Gardener hoped they would leverage it for political purposes, and in fact -- so the first time Gardener ever spoke to -- at a NAWSA meeting was in 1888 when her pal Elizabeth Cady Stanton invited her to give one of the keynotes at the international council of women held in D.C in 1888. So that was when Gardener was really invested in brain research, and in particular in disproving the idea that women couldn't go to college, couldn't enter the professions, because their brains were naturally inferior to men. This was a popular idea in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. And Gardener thought it was a bunch of hooey, and she sought to disprove it. So she wrote a series of essays in popular science monthly and Stanton invited her to turn it in to a speech and deliver it at this 1888 congress which Gardener does. And what she says at the conclusion of this, you know, really well received speech is that science, you know, could be a great friend of feminists, but so far it had not been because most men were -- most scientists were men with their ingrained male biases. And also because male scientists studied the brains of great men like themselves and compared them against the brains of female hospital pick ups she called them, women who died in insane asylums or on the streets. So she said to her 1888 audience, "The brain of no educated woman has ever been studied." And she says, "I want you all to write this." So she convinces Stanton to donate her brain to the Burt Wilder collection at Cornell. Stanton's signed brain request is in the Cornell archives. But when Stanton dies her children, led by Harriot Stanton Blatch say, "Oh no. There's no way that my mom signed off on this." And this causes a real rift between H.H.G and the Stanton children who end up uninviting H.H.G to deliver a speech at Stanton's memorial. So then when Gardener dies in 1925 still no brain of an educated woman has been studied. So she goes through many leaps and bounds to make sure that her brain is immediately removed at Walter Reed, sent to Cornell. It's front page headlines across the country. The "New York Times" has like five or seven, you know, brain removed, brain shipped, brain received. And then when the brain is studied the "New York Times" said that there's a 25 page report detailing every crevice and nook and cranny, and the "New York Times" headline says, "Women's Brain not Inferior to Men." So that's what Gardener wanted all along. But by the time this happens this is now we're in the late 1920s. Brain weight to brain size is no longer the fulcrum of women's rights to date. So yes it does make this sort of flashy "New York Times" headline, but it didn't have the political import that she really hoped it would have. It's at Cornell. So the brain is on display outside the psychology department in Uris Hall at Cornell to this day. But hardly anyone knows why or what the stakes were, who H.H.G was. >> Bruce Kirby: That's something. We have one last question, and they would like you to talk about Gardener's relationship to Jeannette Rankin whose appointment to the house women's suffrage committee was also critical to getting the amendment approved by the house. >> Kimberly Hamlin: Yes. So -- and Gardener was so proud because there's a lot of memos and details and letters back and forth about once the house committee gets created who's going to be on it. And so Gardener was assured by her pal Champ Clark that she could pretty much name the membership. So Gardener was very pleased with that, but Gardener was not -- there's no record of any correspondence between the two women, Jeannette Rankin and Gardener, although when Jeannette Rankin is sworn in Gardener was one of the NAWSA women who hosted a breakfast for her at suffrage house, and who escorted her to the capital to be sworn in. I think there was only three NAWSA women that accompanied her, and Gardener was one. But NAWSA also sort of has a -- you know vexed relationship with Jeannette Rankin in part because of World War I. Right? NAWSA's trying to prove we're patriotic, we're 100% behind the war effort, and so Jeannette Rankin's no vote puts them in a bind. And so Gardener I think would have had the same feelings about Rankin that her other NAWSA colleagues did. So but I don't think that they were friends on their own. Gardener's best friend during these years was Maud Wood Park. So Maud Wood Park eventually becomes the chair of the NAWSA congressional committee. And Gardener was her vice chair. And Maud Wood Park tells a lot of great anecdotes about their research in her really funny and witty memoir "Front Door Lobby." And you know Liz had asked another question earlier which I didn't circle back to which is why have we never heard of Gardener. Maybe should I circle back to that, Liz? I don't think I answered that. So in part it's because she mandated in her will that all of her papers be destroyed. So that makes it a challenge for historians. Right? You have to really want to tell Gardener -- you have to be looking for her. Right? To tell this story. You're not going to stumble across a few files in the NAWSA collection and think, "Oh, maybe I really need to tell this story." Or the few files in NWP. It's -- you have to be looking for Gardener. And people have mentioned her before. Like in sex reform history and free thought history and suffrage history. But people hadn't really put the pieces together that the sex reform Gardener is the brain science Gardener is the free thought Gardener is the suffrage Gardener. Right? So it's part about papers and sources and where they are, and it's also because a lot of what she did on behalf of the 19th amendment was behind closed doors. Right? So there's not records of all the phone calls or there's records that the phone calls took place with Wilson and Tumulty, but not so much what they said. Right? And so that was a real concern for Maud Wood Park, the congressional committee chair, who spent the final decades of her life really trying to make sure the story of women's rights was known. Right? It's Maud Wood Park's collection of papers that start the Schlesinger collection at Radcliffe. And so as part of this Maud Wood Park tried really hard to make sure that Helen Hamilton Gardener's contributions were known. There's multiple attempts that she makes to have a memorial to H.H.G, to collect various reminiscence about H.H.G, H.H.G's secretary from the civil service commission, a woman named Raina [assumed spelling] B Smith writes a biography of Gardener as part of -- along with Parks' urging to try to get this story known. But she sent it to another suffragist for proofing, and the suffragist lost most of it. So it's like oh, all these efforts to try to tell the story did not come to fruition. So it's a variety of missing papers, behind the scenes, and also Gardener's own kind of scandalous life. Right? And her own efforts to cover it up, and the challenge of telling a story of someone with many names. >> Elizabeth Novara: Right. And Adelaide Johnson never actually completed a sculpture of Gardener either. And also -- did it also have to do with just the reinventions of herself over time? >> Kimberly Hamlin: Exactly. >> Elizabeth Novara: She had so many different lives and to piece them back together was a challenge. >> Kimberly Hamlin: Exactly. >> Elizabeth Novara: Well, I think we're just about out of time. And I'm not seeing any additional questions in the Q and A. So I'm going to wrap things up and thank you so much, Kimberly, for joining us today to discuss your research and your new book "Free Thinker." I think we all learned a great deal from you on women's suffrage history, writing biography, and also the challenge of doing our research in primary sources. If you're interested in learning more about research in the manuscript division, please check out our webpage for more information or submit a question to ask.loc.gov/manuscripts. And thank you everyone for joining us today, and happy women's history month.