Stephanie Jane reviewed Free Thinker by Kimberley A. Hamlin
An informative and interesting biography
3 stars
I didn't know much about the American women's suffrage movement prior to reading Free Thinker although I have a good awareness of the English fight through books such as Helen Lewis' Difficult Women and, of course, Emmeline Pankhurst's autobiography, My Own Story. Women's experiences between the two countries through the late 1800s and early 1900s have numerous similarities, but I discovered in Free Thinker the extent to which the aftermath of the American Civil War tainted the American struggle through so many white people's determination to preserve as much as possible of the social structure they enjoyed before slavery was officially abolished.
As a Southern woman who often played up her ancestry whilst hiding her more immediate personal past, Helen Hamilton Gardener was an amazingly determined fighter for women's rights and I appreciated this opportunity to discover this formidable woman. It is interesting to see how many of her contemporaries, …
I didn't know much about the American women's suffrage movement prior to reading Free Thinker although I have a good awareness of the English fight through books such as Helen Lewis' Difficult Women and, of course, Emmeline Pankhurst's autobiography, My Own Story. Women's experiences between the two countries through the late 1800s and early 1900s have numerous similarities, but I discovered in Free Thinker the extent to which the aftermath of the American Civil War tainted the American struggle through so many white people's determination to preserve as much as possible of the social structure they enjoyed before slavery was officially abolished.
As a Southern woman who often played up her ancestry whilst hiding her more immediate personal past, Helen Hamilton Gardener was an amazingly determined fighter for women's rights and I appreciated this opportunity to discover this formidable woman. It is interesting to see how many of her contemporaries, such as Annie Paul and Elizabeth B Stanton, are still household names whereas Gardener has all but faded into obscurity. Personally, and solely influenced by the evidence given in Free Thinker, I don't think I would have actually liked her much myself, but as a template for an early political lobbyist who repeatedly became successful in her own right, Helen Hamilton Gardener should be an inspirational historical figure.
I found Free Thinker to be an informative and interesting biography both in its well-researched details of Gardener's life and in its ability to place her in the rapidly changing history of the times. One of the first female public speakers, a novelist and inspired pamphleteer, and she even rewrote the Bible! I was less enamoured with Hamlin's repeated labouring of two points - Gardener's not actually having married the man she lived with and her focus on white women's suffrage at the expense of all women's suffrage.
The lack of unified sisterhood within the women's rights movement is still a major issue now, a century after the nineteenth amendment was passed. At least today it is openly acknowledged that advances gained by one group aren't automatically granted to all - for example black women wouldn't all enjoy their basic right to vote in America until the 1960s - but for Gardener and many of her race and class it seems to have been unthinkable to delay their own advancement until they had convinced American society to grant votes to all women. I don't think that attitude is particularly of the era though as I see intersectional women today still being left to catch up on their own. Helen Hamilton Gardener was certainly a woman to forge ahead though and I would have been interested to read her speeches alongside her life story. Perhaps Project Gutenberg will have them?