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. Joanna Scutts tells the dazzling story of these Greenwich Village feminists who blazed the trail for the movement’s most radical ideas. Heterodoxy’s 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.

Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, joins in conversation with the author.