New York City, 1912: in downtown Greenwich Village, a group of women gathered, all with a plan to change the world.

This was the first meeting of 'Heterodoxy', a secret social club. Its members were passionate advocates of women's suffrage, labour rights, equal marriage and free love. They were socialites and socialists; reformers and revolutionaries; artists, writers and scientists. Hotbed is the never-before-told story of the club whose audacious ideas and unruly acts transformed an international feminist agenda into a modern way of life.

For readers who loved Mo Moulton's Mutual Admiration Society and Francesca Wade's Square Haunting.

The dazzling story of the early feminists who blazed a trail for the movement's most radical ideas

About the Author

Joanna Scutts is a literary critic, historian and the author of The Extra Woman. She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post and New Yorker, and created the Paris Review series 'Feminize Your Canon'. Raised in London and educated at Cambridge and Sussex universities, she gained her PhD from Columbia University and lives in New York.

Reviews

'Joanna Scutts' fascinating secret US club of early twentieth-century feminists... An enthralling story of rebellion but also of the power of female friendship... Rigorous social history is enlivened by brio and belief throughout' Hephzibah Anderson, Observer

'Sets out to recover these forgotten activists, women who were engaged in some of the most important campaigns of the twentieth century... A series of illuminating vignettes that remind us how far feminism has come over the past century, but also how much remains familiar and yet to be achieved' Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times

'[A] lively and absorbing new social history... it was only after I read Hotbed that I realized the type of feminist friendship from which I am more directly descended was that of the Heterodites' New York Review of Books

'Incredibly resonant in today's times, and a profound read' Fiona Davis, New York Times-bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue

'Deeply researched and deftly rendered... a spirited, inspiring history' Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse

'A transporting tour-de-force of storytelling' Janice P. Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell

'Spirit and panache... one for anyone interested in the history of feminism, friendship, or New York City' Ruth Franklin, award-winning author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

'A wonderful tribute to the "restless audacious [and] creative spirit" that pushes a culture beyond convention and complacency and toward something new... fascinating' Maggie Doherty, award-winning author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s

'This enlightening book covers the first ten or so years of the club's existence. It is also the story of the early feminist movement in the US, and highlights the underacknowledged part that these activist women played in psychology, education, theatre, journalism, anti-lynching legislation and the early-twentieth-century American labour movement' Ann Kennedy Smith, Times Literary Supplement

'A deeply researched and kinetic historical telling of Heterodoxy's fruitful, if also fraught, period, from its inception until the early 1920s. In vibrant prose that summons the idealism and daring of the very existence of Heterodoxy as a center for sisterhood and women-led political thought, Scutts brings to life the stories of women who formed friendships among their ranks, the majority of whom were upper-middle-class authors, journalists, sociologists and artists' Washington Post

'Joanna Scutts hones in on one particularly fascinating corner of this world: the Heterodoxy Club, a coterie of women that included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Kimball, Alison Turnbull Hopkins, and Susan Glaspell, among other influential figures. Hotbed brings you to the heart of the social world that sustained and supported them, and it is filled with fascinating details for anyone remotely interested in this history' LitHub

Book Information
ISBN 9780715655085
Author Joanna Scutts
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint Duckworth
Publisher Duckworth Books