Award-winning historian, speaker and writer Kimberly A. Hamlin, PhD will reveal the fascinating story of the “fallen woman” who reinvented herself and became the “most potent factor” in the Congressional passage of the 19th Amendment. Offered by Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum, Hamlin will give her talk titled “Helen Hamilton Gardener, Fallen Woman, Free Thinker” via Zoom from her home in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hamlin’s presentation is based on her book Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener. Exposed in Ohio newspapers for an affair with a married man, Alice Chenoweth refused to cower in shame. Instead, she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, pretended to be married to her lover and became a wildly popular lecturer and author.