Voting rights are under sustained assault, and feminists continue to turn out into the streets in the thousands to demand rights that the Heterodites were also fighting for—as well as some that they could only have dreamed about.
Hotbed: Bohemian New York and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism is Joanna Scutts’ dazzling story of the early feminists who blazed a trail for the movement’s most radical ideas.
In 1912, a group of women gathered in Greenwich Village, New York City, with a plan to change the world. This was the first meeting of ‘Heterodoxy’, a secret social club. Its members were advocates of women’s suffrage, labour rights, equal marriage and free love. They were socialites and socialists, reformers and revolutionaries, artists, writers and scientists and their audacious ideas and unruly acts transformed an international feminist agenda into a modern way of life. The group included writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Inez Milholland, whose beauty inevitably made her a poster girl for suffrage, and Grace Nail Johnson, an anti-lynching advocate and the club’s only Black woman.
Though Heterodoxy lasted into the 1940s, Joanna Scutts focuses on its turbulent first decade of existence and Hotbed tells an enthralling story of rebellion but also of the power of female friendship.
‘In vibrant prose that summons the idealism and daring of the very existence of Heterodoxy as a center for sisterhood and women-led political thought, Scutts brings to life the stories of women who formed friendships among their ranks, the majority of whom were upper-middle-class authors, journalists, sociologists and artists.’ Washington Post
