Feminist Friendships and Greenwich Village’s Heterodoxy Club

Abstract

When the Heterodoxy Club began meeting in 1912, the term “feminism” was relatively new. The word, as the club’s founder Marie Jenney Howe believed, identified a “changed psychology” stemming from the “creation of a new consciousness in women.”1 A shared belief in this new attitude ofmind called feminism brought together some of the era’smost recognizable women in the heart of Greenwich Village. In her new history of the club, Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that SparkedModern Feminism, literary critic and cultural historian Joanna Scutts writes that when the women of Heterodoxy came together, they were not trying to do anything—they just wanted to talk about “the world and their place in it” (1). The Heterodoxy Club allowed members, all of whom were women, to engage in the free and frank discussion of ideas. Meetings took place on a biweekly basis, except during the summer months when most members left the city. They met first in public, in restaurants such as Polly’s or the meeting spaces of the Liberal Club, and then in private, meeting in members’ apartments for much of the 1920s. Following a group luncheon, members engaged in hours of informal discussion on a topic agreed upon at the last meeting. Topics ranged from philosophical considerations of the abstract mysteries of the universe to the immediate practical politics of women’s suffrage, birth control, workers’ rights, and economic independence. Regardless, the discussions always concerned women. By the 1920s, the Heterodoxy Club’s membership roll read as a veritable “who’s who” of Progressive Era women’s history, a self-described gathering of “the most unruly and