0:04

Women's impact on their

0:07

time and their circumstances is often

0:09

so hard to measure because it exists in

0:11

these kind of social spaces, it exists

0:14

in these gaps in the archive,

0:16

and it was really a pleasure

0:18

to go back and find what these women

0:21

had written to each other and to read

0:23

letters and memoirs that really

0:25

bore out this sense

0:27

that Heterodoxy was, you

0:29

know, a politically engaged space,

0:31

but also just a place where really

0:34

lifelong friendships were forged. That

0:38

was the story in Joanna Scots talking

0:41

about Heterodoxy, a woman's

0:43

Club that flourished in New York City

0:46

starting in nineteen twelve. She

0:49

reveals its secrets in her new book

0:51

hotbed, Bohemian Greenwich

0:54

Village and the secret club that

0:56

sparked modern feminism.

0:59

I'm a land for dear and this is Seneca's

1:01

one hundred women to hear. We

1:03

are bringing you one hundred of the world's

1:06

most inspiring and history

1:08

making women you need to hear. In

1:12

hot bed, Joanna Scots tells

1:14

how heterodoxy brought together women

1:17

with a passion for ideas and activism

1:20

and fostered not only feminism

1:22

and suffrage, but also other

1:25

social movements like workers

1:27

rights and racial justice. Scotts

1:30

is a literary critic and a cultural historian

1:34

with a focus on women in the early twentieth

1:36

century. Her previous

1:39

book was the extra woman.

1:42

How Marjorie Hellis led a generation

1:44

of women to live alone and

1:47

like it. Listen

1:49

and learn why Joanna Scotts and

1:51

the women of Heterodoxy are amongst

1:54

Seneca's one hundred women.

1:56

To hear. I'm

2:01

speaking today with historian and author

2:04

Joanna Scotts. Welcome, Joanne.

2:06

I'm still looking forward to our conversation.

2:09

Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward

2:11

to it too well. You've written a book

2:13

about Heterodoxy, a secret

2:15

club for women in Greenwich Village

2:17

in the nineteen tens. Tell

2:20

us about this club and why was

2:22

it secret? So heterodoxy

2:25

was a social and a discussion

2:27

club. There were lots

2:29

of these in Greenwich Village at the time. It

2:32

was a very um kind of active

2:34

community of lots

2:36

of idealistic people, and

2:39

what had made heterodoxy distinct was

2:41

the fact that it was only for women and

2:44

the secrecy had a couple of

2:46

functions. I think the one that

2:48

the members remember

2:50

was the idea that it was so

2:53

that they had space to doubt and

2:55

disagree so that if they were arguing,

2:58

they wouldn't be stereotyped as

3:00

Um, disagreeable women, but

3:03

that they would be able to kind of

3:05

argue in shape and change their opinions.

3:08

I also think that the club

3:11

was quite a personal space

3:14

for a lot of the women. One of the members

3:16

remembered that the members thought

3:18

that they covered the whole ground, but

3:20

really we discussed ourselves. So

3:23

I think because there was a lot of blending of

3:25

the personal and the political that

3:27

really affected what they you

3:29

know, what they wanted to share, and the secrecy

3:32

gave them freedom. So fascinating.

3:34

And did the club have impact? And

3:37

wondering who some of the very

3:39

famous names associated with

3:41

it were. Yeah, it's Um,

3:43

it's a it was a club for

3:46

prominent women. When it it

3:49

was sort of an open secret. When it started

3:51

to be written about and written up, the idea

3:54

was often that a lot of the women were already

3:56

well known in their day. Um,

3:58

not that many of them have sort of continued

4:01

to be sort of popularly known, but

4:04

some of the famous names include

4:06

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who we know

4:09

best now as a novelist.

4:11

She wrote the yellow wallpaper but

4:14

she also was a very prominent

4:16

social theorist and economist and

4:18

she's sort of one of the bigger names.

4:21

Um. Then a couple of

4:23

the other women that I write about a lot in the book

4:25

include Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,

4:28

who was a young organizer with

4:30

the I W W, the industrial

4:32

workers of the world, and Rose

4:35

Pastor stokes, who was also a very prominent

4:37

socialist activist, and they were sort of

4:39

the two most notorious figures

4:42

in the club. There

4:44

was also a very creative side to the

4:46

club. A lot of artists and writers

4:48

in the group, Susan Glass

4:51

Bowl, who was one of the main founders

4:54

of the province town players, the Avant Garde

4:56

Theater Club. She was

4:58

also a member when she arrived in Greenwich Village.

5:00

So it was a real nexus of creativity

5:03

and politics to be a

5:05

fly on the wall for those conversations.

5:08

You describe the women in the book as

5:10

New Women. How were

5:13

they different from, let's call them

5:15

the old women, the early

5:17

suffragists and activists, like names

5:20

we know so well, Elizabeth Caddy Stanton

5:23

and Susan B Anthony. How were they

5:25

different from each other? So the club,

5:28

it did include a range of ages.

5:31

It wasn't just a young women's Club, but

5:33

certainly, I know you're

5:35

asking, you more about the sort of attitudes

5:38

and Um and approaches

5:41

the new women. They were sort of a

5:43

social phenomenon. They were kind

5:45

of discussed and derided

5:47

the way that millennials,

5:50

you know, probably have have also spent,

5:52

you know, the last twenty years being being talked

5:54

about in this way new women, even in at

5:57

this time where we're not that new.

5:59

But they sort of wrapped presented women who had

6:02

been highly educated were advocating

6:04

for their rights, but they did

6:06

they were doing so in a different way. They

6:09

weren't embracing the

6:11

idea of kind of the

6:14

the more Victorian approach of the

6:17

older suffragists who argued

6:19

that women needed the vote because women were sort

6:22

of morally superior to men and

6:24

they were very wedded to the idea

6:26

of sort of feminine decorum.

6:28

These were women, the new

6:30

women with women who were willing to be out

6:33

in public unaccompanied. They wanted

6:35

to March and be visible.

6:38

Um. One of the most famous women

6:40

at the time who was in the club was

6:43

a young activist called Anez Mill

6:45

Holland, who tragically

6:47

died very young, but she was a

6:50

real celebrity, one of the first

6:53

suffragists to be photographed, to

6:55

be asked about her fashion choices,

6:57

you know, to be really a kind of a I

7:00

word for this modern,

7:02

looking, forward thinking, kind

7:05

of new generation of activists.

7:07

Interesting. And how was

7:09

the women's feminism of

7:11

these women tied to other

7:14

social movements of the early nineteen hundreds?

7:16

If it was tied, it certainly was

7:18

the the women. So

7:21

the group was meeting in Greenwich Village which

7:24

at the time, in the nineteen tens, was

7:27

really this epicenter

7:29

of activism in all

7:32

different arenas. A lot of the women

7:34

were very involved in the

7:36

Labor movement and the socialist activism

7:40

of the time. So the

7:43

I w w the wobbles were

7:46

really a very prominent force in

7:48

Um in labor activism and left

7:51

wing politics at the time. The

7:53

group was also pretty closely

7:55

involved with the INN double a C P, which

7:57

was founded in n nine

7:59

in the village. And heterodoxy

8:02

is unusual for social clubs

8:05

of this era in that it

8:07

wasn't entirely segregated.

8:09

It had one African

8:12

American member who was the wife

8:14

Grace Neil Johnson. She was the wife of James

8:17

Weldon Johnson, who was an extremely

8:19

accomplished activist and a very prominent

8:21

figure and she was invited to join

8:23

the club a little later

8:26

in its founding. So there was very

8:29

close ties between heterodoxy

8:32

and sort of really any

8:35

socially progressive movement in New

8:37

York and and on the national stage.

8:40

Suffrage was went

8:43

without saying, but it was definitely a group

8:45

of women who believe that the vote

8:47

was just the beginning. And

8:50

were these feminists that you

8:52

mentioned? You mentioned some of the names.

8:55

I'm wondering, as you tipped off their

8:57

names. Many of them perhaps the more

9:00

sleep forgotten or overlooked, but can

9:02

you tell us a little bit about some of them?

9:04

Absolutely, um it was one

9:06

of the pleasures and the challenges

9:09

of researching this book that I kept thinking

9:11

that this roster of women, which

9:15

was around about a hundred women over the course

9:17

of the club's existence, surely

9:19

there would be some who were just, you

9:22

know, sort of forgotten and just

9:24

showed up a two occasional meetings but didn't really

9:26

leave a mark on history. But that

9:28

really wasn't the case. Sort of everybody

9:31

that I researched had sort

9:33

of multiple interests. There were women

9:37

who were acclaimed

9:39

and esteemed writers at the time.

9:42

One of the women who sort of forgotten

9:44

now but deserves

9:46

some rehabilitation is Katherine

9:48

Anthony, who was a feminist biographer.

9:51

She wrote biographies of Prominent

9:53

Women Like Elizabeth the first

9:55

and Mary Antoinette and these kind

9:57

of Catherine the great I believe, in she

10:00

sort of approached that with a distinctive

10:02

feminist Lens Um,

10:04

so the idea of women recovering

10:07

and white writing about other women's lives. That

10:10

was something that was was happening in

10:12

this group. The founder of the

10:14

Heterodoxy, who I who I should mentioned,

10:17

was a woman named Marie Jenny how

10:20

she was a suffragist and a feminist

10:23

who will pulled the club together after she

10:25

arrived in New York. She was already

10:27

in her early forties at the time. She wasn't

10:30

herself a kind of young activist,

10:32

but she was very connected to the

10:34

city politics and the suffrage movement

10:36

and she was a really creative thinker

10:38

and it had an extraordinary gift, it seems,

10:41

for bringing people together and facilitating

10:44

and fostering friendship. She's

10:46

remembered with enormous affection by

10:48

all the women in the club and one

10:50

of the things that I really wanted to do in the book

10:53

was think about how history

10:55

remembers and doesn't remember women

10:58

and the ways that women's impact

11:00

on their time and their circumstances

11:03

is often so hard to measure because

11:05

it exists in these kind of social spaces,

11:08

it exists in these gaps

11:10

in the archive, and it

11:12

was really a pleasure to go back and find

11:14

what these women had written to each other and

11:17

to read letters and memoirs

11:19

that really bore out this sense

11:22

that Heterodoxy was, you

11:24

know, a politically engaged space,

11:26

but also just a place where really

11:28

lifelong friendships were forged and

11:31

they were women who were really leaders

11:34

in their times in terms of what the

11:37

future would bring. And yet

11:39

I think it's not just certainly the case

11:41

of these women, but so many

11:44

throughout history who have not gotten the

11:46

acknowledgment for their achievements.

11:48

Hopefully that's changing now and books

11:50

like yours really do spot

11:53

like them. I wanted also to give

11:56

a little shout out to one of my subjects,

11:59

Crystal Eastman, and who is a really important

12:01

figure who has been very much historically

12:04

overshadowed by her younger brother Max,

12:06

who was a very,

12:08

you know, prominent figure in left

12:10

wing politics and outlived

12:13

her by by many decades. But

12:16

she, crystal, was a CO founder

12:18

of the A C L U Um. She

12:20

was involved in labor organizing,

12:22

she was involved in suffrage and she

12:24

was extremely prominent locally and

12:27

nationally in the peace movement and

12:29

the opposition to World War One. That

12:32

time, that period was really of fractious

12:35

one for the club. There were women who believed

12:37

that the United States should enter the war.

12:40

There were many others who believed that it

12:42

was a destructive and suicidal

12:45

endeavor and that women's it

12:47

was really women's job to oppose

12:50

it with all their force. And so

12:52

she's just got so many pieces of

12:54

her biography and such a such

12:57

an extraordinary impact in these different areas.

12:59

And he had a wonderful biography

13:02

was written about her, I think now

13:04

three years ago. And so finally

13:06

people of women like that are are coming out

13:09

of the shadows and getting the attention that they

13:11

deserve. And I hope there are so many other subjects.

13:14

If anyone is looking for a wonderful

13:16

woman to write a biography about, please

13:19

come and look at my look at my book,

13:22

because there's so many women still with stories

13:24

to tell. Yeah, so many

13:26

trailblazers that we really need to

13:28

know more about and and take

13:30

for granted in terms of what they've done

13:32

to pave the way Senecas

13:38

one hundred women to hear. We'll be back after

13:40

the short break. Well,

13:51

let's talk a little bit about you, Joanna.

13:54

What was euro upbringing like, and let's

13:57

set you on the path that you're on

13:59

being in his story and where you always

14:01

curious about what happened

14:04

in the past? Well, as you can probably

14:06

tell, I'm not a native New Yorker. Um,

14:09

I was raised in London and

14:11

I was always you know, where sort of the history

14:13

and presence of history just in this

14:15

sort of built environment of London

14:18

is. It's everywhere, and so I

14:20

was curious. But, Um, I think when

14:22

I went to I went to Cambridge for my undergraduate

14:25

education and there it's really striking

14:28

the weight of history and the and the lack

14:30

of women in it. Um, my

14:33

college is celebrating fifty years

14:35

of admitting women this year and

14:38

my college was founded in fourteen forty

14:40

one. So it's really you know, those

14:42

kinds of moments really bring

14:44

home to you how recent women's

14:47

inclusion and women's involvement

14:49

has has been in sort of national just

14:51

access to history, and

14:54

so I've really felt I kind of have come

14:56

to history through literature.

14:59

I studied literature and was always just interested

15:01

in both in books themselves but in

15:03

the circumstances of their production

15:06

and the women writers who were just

15:09

not there on the syllabus

15:11

or not there in the libraries, and I have really

15:14

sort of in the last few years, devoted

15:16

myself to trying to explore

15:19

and uncover those neglected stories.

15:22

So wonderful to hear you helped

15:25

a plan and launched the Center for

15:27

Women's history at the New York historical

15:29

society. So you've been keeping

15:31

at this interest of yours. What

15:34

is so special about the center? Tell

15:36

us about it. So the center

15:38

opened in twenty seventeen and

15:41

it was the first dedicated

15:43

center of women's history within

15:45

the walls of a major museum.

15:48

And our our goal was really

15:50

too just to have

15:52

us a permanent space that put women's

15:55

experiences at the center of the

15:57

story instead of having them be something

15:59

that as an afterthought or a temporary

16:02

conclusion, just for, you know, one

16:04

month of the year. And the

16:07

space of the center, the physical space includes

16:10

a gallery with rotating

16:12

exhibitions, but there's also the

16:14

center really serves as this kind of hub

16:16

of scholarship. Um, it's really a

16:18

place where anyone interested in

16:20

the history of women in New York can

16:23

come, can find research support,

16:26

can find community, and

16:28

we've also worked very hard to expand

16:31

the curriculum for younger students

16:33

to try to make sure that school children

16:36

are growing up with the awareness that women are

16:38

just are always in the picture, are always

16:40

part of the story, and I think

16:42

that that work is really vital to helping

16:45

to sort of change those narratives

16:47

and understanding that just because you haven't

16:49

heard of somebody that they didn't have an

16:51

impact and that their story isn't worth

16:53

telling. Um, the people that we've heard

16:56

of are such a very small a small

16:58

group, and also such a uh,

17:01

you know that that group is very selective,

17:03

and so it's very important,

17:06

I think, to me too, just kind

17:08

of try to widen, you know, widen

17:10

those stories and introduce visitors

17:13

and students to all the wonderful

17:16

women and women's stories that they just haven't

17:18

heard indeed. And and

17:20

so wonderful that finally the center

17:23

exists at the New York historical society,

17:26

and how fitting that it does. I might

17:28

add as an historian.

17:31

Certainly you're aware of some

17:33

of the issues of the past,

17:35

that we're confronting some similar issues

17:38

today. And I I wonder, given

17:40

that sense of history telling us about

17:42

today and tomorrow, what makes

17:45

you optimistic? Well, what gives you

17:47

hope for the future? Well,

17:49

I certainly think that the

17:52

sense of the

17:56

sense that there is history, that

17:58

there are issues in history that are are still

18:00

fighting over today. That

18:02

in itself doesn't inspire a great deal

18:04

of optimism. It can feel like you're

18:07

exhausting, that we haven't moved further

18:09

forward and moved beyond these kinds of

18:12

arguments. But I do think we're

18:14

in a moment where understanding

18:18

the importance of history, the politics of

18:20

history, I think those those are

18:22

becoming very obvious.

18:24

Um and I think to a new, younger

18:27

generation of students

18:30

are growing up knowing that, AH,

18:34

perhaps the stories they're being told and not the

18:36

full story. Um and I think that

18:38

there's you know, there's more access

18:40

than ever to information

18:43

and if if

18:46

we can find ways to filter it and

18:48

sort of help help people find kind

18:50

of what's true, I mean that's a that's a very

18:52

big challenge. But I do think there's an

18:54

interest in questioning what

18:58

what we're being taught, and I hope

19:01

that that leads, you

19:03

know, leads everyone, as young people but

19:05

really everyone, leads them to think, think

19:09

about why you haven't been

19:11

told a certain story. What what is

19:13

the you know, if you are

19:15

hearing about a particular argument

19:18

or theory or personality for

19:20

the first time, ah,

19:23

what's that about? You know, where do these who's

19:25

in charge of the kind of telling

19:27

us what the stories are? It feels like a

19:29

moment where history is

19:33

being seen for its really for its vitality,

19:36

but also for its Um for

19:38

its gaps and oversights, Um and I hope

19:40

that that brings, you know,

19:43

a new set of readers too to

19:46

discover what what academics

19:49

are doing and what

19:51

what popular writers are trying to do to just

19:54

kind of show

19:56

how history is relevant today. And I

19:58

do think the days of is re being seen

20:00

as some kind of dusty, irrelevant

20:03

story, I think those days are definitely behind

20:06

us. So I hope that students

20:08

are inspired to study and pursue

20:10

history and realize how vibrant and how relevant

20:12

it is. Well, you've certainly

20:14

inspired us today, and I know I'm speaking

20:17

for so many of our listeners and

20:20

thanks to your book, we are able

20:22

to better understand the achievements

20:25

of these great women in the early nineteen

20:27

hundreds and what they mean to our own

20:29

history. So, Joanna Scotts,

20:31

thank you so much for being with us. Thank

20:34

you so much. How

20:39

wonderful to shine a light on those

20:42

almost forgotten women who

20:44

made such a difference. Here

20:46

are three things I took from that conversation.

20:50

First, it's always fascinating

20:53

to hear how the women's suffrage movement

20:55

evolved over time. The

20:58

women in the Heterdoxy were so called

21:00

new women. They rejected

21:02

earlier notions of how women should behave

21:04

in public. They were willing

21:07

to make themselves seen and heard

21:10

and to march for their rights. Second,

21:13

heterodoxy reminds us that

21:16

human rights don't exist in isolation.

21:19

The club's members were involved in issues

21:21

like labor rights, racial

21:24

justice and the international

21:26

peace movement. Finally,

21:29

as Joanna Scotts tells us,

21:32

these feminists drew strength from the

21:34

connections they made in Heterodoxy.

21:37

Through the club and its intense discussions,

21:40

they forged lifelong friendships.

21:45

Tune in next time to hear about our next

21:47

featured woman and discover

21:49

why she's one of Seneca's on women

21:52

to hear. Seneca's

21:55

one hundred women to hear is a collaboration between

21:57

the Seneca Women podcast network and I heart

22:00

video, with support from founding partner P and

22:02

have a great day, m

22:08

HM.