Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardner

When Ohio newspapers published the story of Alice Chenoweth's affair with a married man, she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York and devoted her life to championing women's rights and decrying the sexual double standard. She published seven books and countless essays, hobnobbed with the most interesting thinkers of her era and was celebrated for her audacious ideas and keen wit. Opposed to piety, temperance and conventional thinking, Gardener eventually settled in Washington, DC, where her tireless work proved, according to her colleague Maud Wood Park, "the most potent factor" in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.