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.

Joanna Scutts is a literary critic, historian, and author of The Extra Woman. She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, and the Paris Review series “Feminize Your Canon.” She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She lives in New York.