The All-Woman Secret Society That Paved the Way for Modern Feminism | History

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The All-Woman Secret Society That Paved the Way for Modern Feminism | History

Heterodoxy’s illustrious members included (clockwise from top right) Marie Jenney Howe, Susan Glaspell, Crystal Eastman, Rose Pastor Stokes, Doris Stevens, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Rheta Childe Dorr.
Illustration by Meilan Solly / Images via Newspapers.com, Wikimedia Commons under public domain

In the early 20th century, New York City’s Greenwich Village earned a reputation as

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, a neighborhood where everyone from artists and poets to activists and organizers

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their dreams.

“In the Village, it was so easy to bump into great minds, to go from one restaurant to another, to a meeting house, to work for a meeting or to a gallery,” says

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, author of

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. Here

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where rents were still affordable, creative individuality thrived, urban diversity and ******** experiments were the norm, and bohemian dissenters could come and go as they pleased.

Such a neighborhood was the ideal breeding ground for

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, a secret society that paved the way for modern feminism. The female debating club’s name referred to the many unorthodox women among its members. These individuals “questioned forms of orthodoxy in culture, in politics, in philosophy—and in sexuality,” noted

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in 2017.

Heterodoxy: The Secret Club That Sparked The Feminist Movement

Born as part of the

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of modern feminism that emerged during the 19th and early 20th centuries with suffrage at its center, the ******** ideologies debated at Heterodoxy gatherings extended well beyond the scope of a women’s right to vote. In fact, Heterodoxy had only

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for membership: that a woman “not be orthodox in her opinion.”

“The Heterodoxy club and the work that it did was very much interconnected with what was going on in the neighborhood,” says

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, executive director of

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, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting and preserving the distinct heritage of Greenwich Village. “With the suffrage movement already beginning to crest, women had started considering how they could free themselves from the generations and generations of structures that had been placed upon them.”

Unitarian minister

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founded Heterodoxy in 1912, two years after she and her husband, progressive reformer

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, moved to the Village. “Howe was already in her 40s,” says Scutts, “and just got to know people through her husband’s professional connections, and during meetings and networks where progressive groups were very active at the time.”

Heterodoxy member Ami Mali Hicks, a feminist, writer and organizer

Jessie Tarbox Beals

Howe’s mindset on feminism was clear: “We intend simply to be ourselves,” she once said, “not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.”

Many of the

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moved in corresponding circles and maintained similar beliefs. They were “veterans of social reform efforts,” writes Scutts in Hotbed, and they belonged to “leagues, associations, societies and organizations of all stripes.” A large number were public figures—influential lawyers, journalists, playwrights or

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, some of whom were the only women in their fields—and often had their names in the papers for the work they were performing. Many members were also involved in a wide variety of women’s rights issues, from promoting the use of birth control to advocating for immigrant mothers.

Heterodoxy met every other Saturday to discuss such issues and see how members might collaborate and cultivate networks of reform. Gatherings were considered a safe space for women to talk, exchange ideas and take action.

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, a visual artist whose

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is currently on display at Philadelphia’s

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, says, “Their meetings were taking place without any kind of recording or public record. It was this privacy that allowed the women to speak freely.”

Scutts adds, “The freedom to disagree was very important to them.”

Installation view of Jessica Campbell’s “Heterodoxy” exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia

Carlos Avendaño

With 25 charter members, Heterodoxy included individuals of diverse backgrounds, including

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and ********* women,

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and socialites, and artists and

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. Meetings were often held in the basement of Polly’s, a

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established by anarchist

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. Here, at what Berman calls a “sort of nexus for progressive, artistic, intellectual and political thought,” the women would gather at wooden tables to discuss issues like fair employment and fair wages, reproductive rights, and the antiwar movement. The meetings often went on for hours, with each typically revolving around a specific subject determined in advance.

Reflecting on these get-togethers later in life, memoirist

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them as gatherings of “fine, daring, rather joyous and independent women, … women who did things and did them openly.”

Occasionally, Heterodoxy hosted guest speakers, like modern birth control pioneer

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, who later became president of the

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, and anarchist

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, known for championing everything from free love to the right of labor to organize.

A photo of Polly’s, the Greenwich Village restaurant where Heterodoxy held many of its gatherings

Jessie Tarbox Beals

While the topics discussed at each meeting remained confidential, many of Heterodoxy’s members were quite open about their involvement with the club. “Before I’d even heard of Heterodoxy,” says Scutts, “I had been working in the

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, researching for an [exhibition on] how ******** politics had influenced a branch of the suffrage movement. That’s when I began noticing many of the same women’s names in overlapping causes. I then realized that they were all associated with this particular club.”

These women included labor lawyer, suffragist, socialist and journalist

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, who in 1920 co-founded the

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to defend the rights of all people nationwide, and playwright

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, a key player in the development of modern ********* theater.

Other notable alumni were feminist icon

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, whose 1892 short story, “

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,” illustrates the mental and physical struggles associated with postpartum depression, and feminist psychoanalyst

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, the first woman physician in the ******* States to hold a public health position.

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, the suffrage cartoonist whose work was used as a

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for the design of Wonder Woman, was a member of Heterodoxy, as was ******* socialist activist

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.

Grace Nail Johnson, the only ****** member of Heterodoxy

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, an advocate for civil rights and an influential figure in the

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, was Heterodoxy’s only ****** member. Howe “had personally written to and invited her,” says Scutts, “as sort of a representation of her race. It’s an unusual case, because

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was quite uncommon at the time.”

While

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did exist, the majority of Heterodoxy’s members were middle class or wealthy, and the bulk of them had obtained undergraduate degrees—still very much a

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for women in the early 20th century. Some even held graduate degrees in fields like medicine, law and the social sciences. These were women with the leisure time to participate in political causes, says Scutts, and who could afford to take risks, both literally and figuratively. But while political activism and the ability to discuss topics overtly were both part of Heterodoxy’s overall ethos, most of its members were decidedly left-leaning, and almost all were ******** in their ideologies. “Even if the meetings promoted an openness to disagree,” says Scutts, “it wasn’t like these were women from across the political spectrum.”

Rather, they were women who inspired and spurred each other on. For example, about one-third of the club’s members were divorced—a process that was still “incredibly

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, expensive and even scandalous” at the time, says Scutts. The club acted as somewhat of a support network for them, “just by the virtue of having people around you that are saying, ‘I’ve gone through the process. You can, too, and survive.’”

Heterodoxy members Doris Stevens (left) and Alison Turnbull Hopkins (center), with suffragist Eunice Dana Brannan (right), during the trio’s detention at Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia

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According to Campbell, Heterodoxy’s new inductees were often asked to share a story about their upbringing with the club’s other members. This approach “helped to break down barriers that might otherwise be there due to their ranging political views and professional allegiances,” the artist says.

The Heterodoxy club usually went on hiatus during the summer months, when members relocated to places like Provincetown, Massachusetts, a

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for Greenwich Village residents. As the years progressed, meetings eventually moved to Tuesdays, and the club began changing shape, becoming less ******** in tandem with the Village’s own shifting energy. Women secured the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, displacing the momentum that fueled the suffrage movement; around this same time, the

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saw the arrests and deportations of unionists and immigrants. Rent prices in the neighborhood also

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, driving out the Village’s bohemian spirit. As the club’s core members continued aging, Heterodoxy became more about continuing friendships than debating ******** ideologies.

Installation view of Jessica Campbell’s “Heterodoxy” exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia

Carlos Avendaño

“These women were not all young when they started to meet,” says Scutts in the “

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” podcast. “You know, it’s 20, 30 years later, and so they stayed in touch, but they never really found the second generation or third generation to keep it going in a new form.”

By the early 1940s, the biweekly meetings of Heterodoxy were no more. Still, the club’s legacy lives on, even beyond the scope of modern feminism.

“These days, it’s so easy to dehumanize people when you’re only hearing one facet of their belief system,” says Campbell. “But the ability to change your mind and debate freely like the women of Heterodoxy, without any public record? It’s an interesting model for rethinking the way we talk about problems and interact with other people today.”

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