Book Talk: Hotbed – the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism

Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism. Named one of the best 16 books of 2022 by Vox Magazine, 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. It’s 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.

Joanna Scutts is a feminist historian and literary critic. She is the author of Hotbed: Bohemian New York and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism (Seal Press, 2022), and The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It (Liveright, 2017). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review, and New Yorker online. As the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in women’s history at the New-York Historical Society, she helped plan and launch the museum’s Center for Women’s History in 2017. She holds a BA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in New York, where she lives with her husband and son.