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

When I was working my history degree way back in the mists of time I took a class on the history of feminism. The class was very interesting and at one point the professor made a glancing reference to an organization in Greenwich Village called Heterodoxy. At the time I was interested in studying all kinds of 19th and 20th century radical organizations so I started looking for books about them. There were pitifully few and I remember thinking “I really wish someone would write a book about Heterodoxy.” Well 20 years later someone finally has and I can’t wait to start reading it. – Jim

On a Saturday in New York City in 1912, around the wooden tables of a popular Greenwich Village restaurant, a group of women gathered, all of them convinced that they were going to change the world.

It was the first meeting of “Heterodoxy,” a secret social club. Its members were passionate advocates of free love, equal marriage, and easier divorce. They were socialites and socialists; reformers and revolutionaries; artists, writers, and scientists. Their club, at the heart of America’s bohemia, was a springboard for parties, performances, and radical politics. But it was the women’s extraordinary friendships that made their unconventional lives possible, as they supported each other in pushing for a better world.

Hotbed is the never-before-told story of the bold women whose audacious ideas and unruly acts transformed a feminist agenda into a modern way of life [goodreads]