Welcome to the History Extra Podcast, fascinating historical conversations from BBC History Magazine

and BBC History Revealed.

In downtown New York in the early 20th century, a secret club of women met regularly to discuss

ideas, politics, art and their own lives. They forged friendships and alliances and took

up some of the most significant social fights of the day. Joanna Skutz joined the podcast recently

to tell Eleanor Evans more about the women of the heterodoxy club, which is a subject of her new

book, Hotbed. Joanna, thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the History Extra Podcast,

and I wanted to start by diving right into the club at the centre of your book, Hotbed.

What was the heterodoxy club? So it was a group for women that was essentially a group of friends

that began with about 25 women meeting essentially to discuss kind of anything and everything that

interested them. The thing that made the group unusual was that they were what they called

advanced women or as one of the members put it, women who did things and did them openly,

which means essentially at the time that they were professional women, they were writers and

journalists, they were political activists, and they were sort of known to each other and known

to the world for their prominence in all kinds of fields. And they met in Greenwich Village in

downtown New York beginning sometime in 1912. We don't know exactly the details because they

didn't keep records of their meetings, which was a deliberate policy to allow the women to

air all kinds of opinions, to debate, to disagree and to change their minds, which has made it hard

to research them historically, but definitely freed them up to forge really strong friendships

and intellectual bonds. So it's a groundbreaking group that we're going to dive into just a while.

I wonder first, can you take us inside Greenwich Village at this time in the 1910s? What was this

neighborhood this place like? So it was changing a lot. It had since the beginning of the century

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