HOTBED

A social history of the downtown New York City club that nurtured the modern feminist movement.

Historian and literary critic Scutts, author of The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women To Live Alone and Like It, captivatingly explores Heterodoxy, the little-known social club whose members helped define feminism in the early 1900s. Formed in Greenwich Village in 1912 by Marie Jenney Howe, the group had 25 charter members, known as Heterodites. The membership eventually grew to more than 100 before it disbanded in the early 1940s. The author focuses on the period “from 1912 until the early 1920s, which was also the heyday of this particular incarnation of Greenwich Village as America’s countercultural epicenter.” Among the topics and causes the members of this invited group of women discussed were art, psychology, racial justice, and women’s rights, which included access to birth control, sexual autonomy, and the ability to work outside the home. As Scutts explains, members of Heterodoxy felt “suffrage was only a small part of the larger issue of women’s emancipation.” In an effort to clear up misconceptions regarding the meaning of feminism, Howe also held two public forums that were largely attended by men who felt they had a vested interest in women’s social position. Scutts also profiles the compelling lives of many of the members of Heterodoxy, revealing both their diverse backgrounds and their like-minded political and social interests. Perhaps the most important contribution of Heterodoxy was the sense of camaraderie it offered its members for expressing their ideas. These powerful bonds would provide continued shape and meaning to their lives. “If there is hope to be found for feminism today…it has to lie in the way we come together, to reexamine the past and redefine the future,” writes the author. “There is more awareness than ever of the ways that women, together, can create change and how much we have to learn from listening to their stories.”

An enlightening contribution to the history of feminism.