Helen Hamilton Gardener (1853–1925), born Alice Chenoweth, was an American author, rationalist public intellectual, political activist, and government functionary. Gardener produced many lectures, articles, and books during the 1880s and 1890s and is remembered today for her role in the freethought and women's suffrage movements and for her place as a pioneering woman in the top echelon of the American civil service. Alice Chenoweth, best remembered by her pen name, Helen Hamilton Gardener, was born near Winchester, Virginia, on January 21, 1853. She was the youngest of six children born to Rev. Alfred Griffith Chenoweth, an Episcopalian minister who had become a Methodist circuit rider, and his wife, the former Katherine A. Peel. The Chenoweth family traced its American antecedents back to a certain Arthur Chenoweth who had arrived in the fledgling Province of Maryland in 1635 to receive a grant of land for honorable service to Lord Baltimore. During her first years in New York City Chenoweth-Smart made the acquaintance of Robert G. Ingersoll, the leading rationalist orator of the day. At Ingersoll's persistent request in January 1884 Alice Chenoweth-Smart began herself to deliver a series of public lectures, talks dealing with such skeptical themes as "Men, Women, and Gods," "Historical Facts and Theological Fictions," "By Divine Right," and "Rome or Reason." Many of these were collected into her first book, Men, Women, and Gods, and Other Lectures, which was issued in hardcovers by the radical freethought publication, The Truth Seeker. Chenoweth-Smart published this book under the pen name "Helen Hamilton Gardener" — a pseudonym which she would use professionally for the rest of her life, eventually adopting this as her own legal name. A number of short stories and essays by Gardener followed over the second half of the 1880s, pieces which were published in a number of leading magazines of the day. Throughout the period, Gardener's interest in feminism grew. Gardener's initial public lectures attempted particularly to demonstrate a linkage between Christianity and the subjugation of women and in 1887 the published views of former Surgeon General of the United States William A. Hammond attesting a neurological basis for female inferiority moved Gardener to even greater concern with the topic. In 1907, Gardener returned to Washington, D.C., where she took up the suffrage cause. In 1913 she was appointed a position to the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, becoming, six years later, its vice-chairwoman; she was elected as one of NAWSA's vice-presidents as chief liaison under the Woodrow Wilson administration, in 1917. In 1920, Wilson appointed her to the United States Civil Service Commission, the first woman to occupy such a high federal position. Less