Hotbed
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.
Book details
- Format
- Paperback
- ISBN
- 9780715655085
- Published
- 20 July 2023
- Pages
- 416
- Duration
- Dimensions
- 129 x 198 mm
- Genre
- Memoir and Biography
- Imprint
- Duckworth
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’
‘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’
'[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'
'Incredibly resonant in today’s times, and a profound read'
'Deeply researched and deftly rendered... a spirited, inspiring history'
'A transporting tour-de-force of storytelling'
'Spirit and panache... one for anyone interested in the history of feminism, friendship, or New York City'
'A wonderful tribute to the "restless audacious [and] creative spirit" that pushes a culture beyond convention and complacency and toward something new... fascinating'
‘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’
‘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’
'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’
