The dazzling story of the Greenwich Village feminists who blazed the trail for the movement’s most radical ideas
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.
"On a Saturday afternoon in New York in late 1912 ... 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 supper club. The goals of the group were simple: they would meet to talk about their lives, their politics, and the still-not widely recognized idea that women were fundamentally equal to men. In a move of liberation, they kept no records of their meetings, leaving them free to discuss a new term borrowed from the French: feminism ... [The] members were passionate advocates of free love, equal marriage, and easier divorce; several lived openly in same-sex relationships. The friendships of Heterodoxy made their unconventional lives possible, through its reassurance that other women felt differently about the world and wanted more from it than they had been raised to expect"--Publisher marketing.
