Hotbed

Book excerpt: 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.