Helen Hamilton Gardener, 1918. 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. After the former Surgeon General of the United States, William A. Hammond, published a paper attesting a neurological basis for female inferiority, Gardener began working with neurologist Edward C. Spitzka to refute Hammond's thesis of the inherent inferiority of the female brain. She ultimately produced a paper entitled "Sex in Brain" (1888) that argued that no connection between brain weight and intellectual capacity had been established, and which challenged Hammond's methodology of comparing the prized specimen brains of leading men with those of indigent women. Gardener emerged from the Hammond controversy as a leading public speaker for women's rights. In 1920, Woodrow Wilson appointed Gardener to the United States Civil Service Commission, the first woman to occupy such a high federal position.