Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism

Literary critic Scutts (The Extra Woman) delivers a vibrant tale of the radical political and social activism swirling through New York City’s Greenwich Village in the early 20th century. She focuses on the Heterodoxy Club, launched in 1912 by suffragist Marie Jenney Howe as a place for “unruly and individualistic” women to freely debate such issues as women’s suffrage, socialism, workers’ rights, and antilynching campaigns. Heterodoxy had no bylaws, written rules, meeting minutes, or programs or projects. Scutts creates indelible portraits of influential members including “The Yellow Wallpaper” author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, suffragist Inez Milholland, lawyer and ACLU cofounder Crystal Eastman, antilynching advocate Grace Nail Johnson (the only Black woman in Heterodoxy), and labor activists Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Rose Pastor Stokes. When WWI began in 1914, debates over pacifism drove a wedge into Heterodoxy’s camaraderie, while passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 sparked disagreements about the future of women’s rights and the meaning of feminism. Scutts’s comprehensive account skillfully situates Heterodoxy’s members at the forefront of the era’s most important movements for change and renders lively portraits of suffrage parades, labor strikes, and birth control advocacy. This feminist history shines. Illus. (June)