98. Heterodoxy with Joanna Scutts

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY HELMES: And I'm her co-host Amy Helmes. Listeners, try to imagine all the creative, badass, forward-thinking women from all different walks of life that you know.

KIM: Yeah, now picture them starting a secret club at a happening little restaurant in the cool part of town. A salon, if you will, to share all their thoughts and ideas about how to fix society.

AMY: A smart girl's superhero justice league! Sounds pretty incredible, right?

KIM: Yeah. And we were intrigued to learn about a club just like this that existed in New York's Greenwich Village a century ago. It was known as Heterodoxy, and the women who counted themselves as members were each uniquely incredible.

AMY: They were among the ladies catching that first wave of modern feminism, and they voiced their convictions through their work, their activism, and their writing.

KIM: Yes, scour the Heterodoxy rosters over its 25 years of existence and you'll find lots of writers among its ranks, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman of The Yellow Wallpaper fame.

AMY: We've got a special returning guest who's about as well versed in the Heterodoxy club as it gets. So let's raid the stacks and get started! 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is literary critic and historian Joanna Scutts, and you may remember she originally joined us on the show back in Episode 21 to discuss self-help author Marjorie Hillis. Joanna wrote the compelling 2017 biography of Hillis, The Extra Woman. We had a great time talking about fancy pajamas, as I recall.

AMY: Yeah, I almost considered wearing pajamas on this Zoom, but I got dressed. Joanna's latest book out just last month is called Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism. I love that title. It's so enticing. Anything with a secret club, right? Kirkus calls it "an enlightening contribution to the history of feminism" and Bust magazine named the book a lit pick for this summer. Joanna, congratulations on this book. I remember that you had briefly mentioned that you were writing Hotbed the last time you were on the podcast, and so we're glad to have you back on to discuss it finally.

JOANNA SCUTTS: Thank you so much. Yes, that feels like a really long time ago. Um, but then also like yesterday, because what is time? 

AMY: It's funny, it actually seems like a short amount of time for me. When I saw you starting to promote it, I was like, "Wow, she got that done fast." 

KIM: Yeah, a lot happened in a couple years. So Joanna, how did you first discover Heterodoxy? And at what point were you like "I've gotta make this my next book"?

JOANNA: Well, it's a little connected to that question about time. I think that's why it feels like a long time to me is that I actually came across Heterodoxy in 2016. I was working at the New York Historical Society here in New York, and we wanted to do an exhibition that would mark the hundredth anniversary of women's suffrage in New York state. And we wanted to do something a little bit more unexpected, looking at suffrage not just as a sort of isolated movement, but as something that was embedded in the wider kind of social justice culture of the city at the time in the 1910s. And so we started zeroing in on Greenwich Village, and Heterodoxy was part of the larger Village culture. And what really interested me was the way that same women's names were coming up in connection with all of these different movements and groups, and sure enough, pretty much everyone that we read about who was prominent in the activist scene was also a member of Heterodoxy. But the story of the club was kind of not really told. And I think that's sort of always the short answer is always kind of, because I wanted to read the book that wasn't there. Heterodoxy has been written about. There's one book that really deals with it, but it was very old and very short and very limited in its research, and it certainly wasn't aimed at a general audience or something you would pick up in a bookstore. So I just really, you know, in the course of curating an exhibition, you're just always cutting things out and the stories have to be incredibly brief, so I really just felt like there was more to say and to really kind of try to get a flavor of what this club felt like in its time who was there and what they did.

AMY: So this idea of the club, Heterodoxy, is new to Kim and I, and I'm sure it's new to a lot of our listeners. We'd love to have you kind of set the stage for us a little bit by reading the very beginning paragraphs of your book.

JOANNA: Okay. “On Saturday afternoon in a place that feels just then like the brightly pulsing center of the universe, a group of women gathers to talk about the world and their place in it. They haven't come far. Physically, at least most have walked from shared apartments, boarding houses, cooperative lodging, or from red brick mansions and smaller family homes to a townhouse on McDougal Street in the middle of a busy scruffy block just below Washington Square Park, the heart of the Bohemian New York neighborhood they call Greenwich Village. In the basement is a restaurant everyone knows simply as Polly's. It's walls painted with sunny, yellow chalk paint and hung with local artists' work and its wooden tables cramed close together. The whole point is to overhear your neighbor's conversations, lean over and join in. It's what makes the Village, the Village, this contagious buzz, sitting elbow to elbow with artists and radicals, waiting for the chef and anarchist poet to bang down your plate of goulash, your liver and onions with his signature hiss, "Bourgiouse pigs!" At the head of the table in Polly's, a pretty woman in her early forties with a pile of dark gold hair, raps a gavel on the tabletop and brings the meeting to order. The women around the table describe themselves as the most unruly and individualistic females you ever fell among and pride themselves on their voracious interests and varied outlooks. They are Democrats Republicans, prohibitionist, socialists, anarchists, liberals, and radicals of all opinions. Sometimes they accuse each other of being cranks on certain subjects, but no woman obsessed by a single issue lasts long in their proudly eclectic meetings. To give each other space to doubt and disagree the women keep no records at their meetings. They give their secret unruly club a name that celebrates the difference of opinion: Heterodoxy.”

AMY: I love that. You just transport us there right away.

KIM: Oh my gosh. It's like, after two years of mostly being at home and also living in Los Angeles, too, the idea of everyone just being together and sharing all these ideas and everything sounds incredible.

JOANNA: Yeah. You even feel like the cigarette smoke would be kind of nice. Smokey basements.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

AMY: the food wasn't so great, but that's okay.

KIM: Mm-hmm yeah, 

JOANNA: Yeah, it's probably terrible.

AMY: um, So why was Greenwich Village such an obvious location from which a club like this would spring?

JOANNA: I mean, it's got this history, even in the 1910s, of being a place where sort of poets and writers like to gather but at the time it was largely pretty cheap. It was still mostly an immigrant neighborhood. Lots of fairly laid-back landlords who didn't really care when you came and went. Everything felt very new and radical and a little bit daring.

KIM: A lot of the women that we've discussed, who lived in the U.S. actually ended up in Greenwich Village at some point or another, especially from a certain period. So it keeps, it comes up over and over. 

JOANNA: Yeah, it definitely has this identity that feels like it's welcoming to anyone who wants to live a slightly different kind of life or push the boundaries a little bit.

KIM: Right. So Heterodoxy was founded by a woman named Marie Jenney Howe sometime in 1912. The club met every other week and its members were college educated professionals from various career fields, including law, medicine, anthropology, psychology, artists, and there were many writers and journalists, of course. So what was the draw of a club like Heterodoxy for these women, and how did one get to join?

JOANNA: Well, that's one of the things that we don't really know, unfortunately, with a couple of exceptions. But for the most part, it seems to have been a little bit of a word of mouth sort of thing. Um, Marie Jenney Howe was a suffrage leader in the area. She was fairly new in New York, new in the Village, and so I think it just began sort of as a way to meet people, you know? Through her husband, she was connected to these sort of like left wing, liberal social circles, and so they met people that way. And then it's a little bit this sort of rarity of being a prominent woman. So there were women who were journalists and lawyers and they tended to know each other just because there weren't very many of them, you know? It was very nice to be able to meet somebody else who was also doing social research or who was a practicing doctor or was a practicing lawyer.

AMY: Makes sense. It's like, you're basically in amongst the old boys club and you need to somehow find your gals, you know?

KIM: Your people. Yeah.

JOANNA: Absolutely. 

AMY: So you say in the book that there were no real rules or bylaws of the club. It wasn't, you know, structured in that way in that they didn't really do anything, quote unquote, and yet as individuals, these Heterodites, as they called themselves were unstoppable forces in terms of moving the needle on big social issues of the day, right?

JOANNA: Absolutely. So suffrage was very visible and very much a place where women could kind of get a name for themselves. It was, for a lot of women, kind of an onramp into other forms of organizing. Suffrage is sort of the obvious cause, and pretty much everyone in the club was to some degree, active in the movement. But for the most part they were women who did not think that was enough. The vote wasn't going to do enough by itself to change things. So you also had the other very visible, very active cause when the club starts meeting is the Labor Movement. There were two women in particular who were really at the forefront of that movement. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was a labor activist, and then her friend and colleague Rose Pastor Stokes, who was a socialist organizer, married to a millionaire. So she was also very famous for that. So those two women actually sort of buck the trend of the club. Neither of them were college educated, and Rose was Jewish, which was unusual in the club. But they were really influential figures, and they kind of pushed the club a little bit more to more radical left positions. As World War I began in Europe, the Peace Movement was something that women were very active in, especially in New York, so, the New York City Women's Peace Party kind of overlaps with the Heterodoxy membership very closely. A lot of the women were also active in the birth control fight. There's a great moment of, a group of women, some from Heterodoxy, some just kind of friends of the club who rented a limousine to drive around lower Manhattan distributing leaflets about birth control until they got themselves arrested in Union Square. Getting arrested was a big part of their strategy. As wealthy women who were generally treated well, they could afford to take those kinds of risks. And then the final sort of movement that I'll mention is the movement for racial justice, which is something that the women of Heterodoxy were involved in. One of the things I really think is important that these movements are all, you know, people who are involved in different kinds of social movements are connected together. They know each other, they're working together and they're seeing connections between these different fights in all kinds of ways.

AMY: We still are. I mean, the, the list you just rattled off, those are all still things that are foremost on women's minds today. Now you mentioned the suffrage movement. Um, that was a pivotal. Issue for them and rightly so, because if they have all these other issues that they wanna tackle, you can't really do that if you don't have a say in who's making the decisions for society. I loved this whole section of your book because you make the story feel so visceral, I think. And there were so many stories I didn't know, just little fun anecdotes about, you know, what these women were going through trying to get the word out. Do you have any favorite anecdotes from any of the Heterodites' fight for suffrage that you wanna share?

JOANNA: Yeah, it's definitely a really new way of approaching activism and organizing, and they were very inspired by the labor movement and by the kind of the power at that time of women just physically being together in the streets. The sort of marching around with sashes and banners and waving flags, and this is all very new and very shocking to some of the older organizers who think it's not done for women to appear in public like that . So it's still controversial, even though it kind of very quickly gains traction. I think what I loved about it was how sort of theatrical it was. There's so much sort of joy and, and pleasure and fun to that period of organizing. It's very complicated and there's a whole other side to it that's a lot darker, but I do think that it's worth remembering how well they tapped into this idea that if you could get people to like the idea of something there was a power to that. So I think this sense of accessing kind of joy and, sort of the visual spectacle is very new. Photographs in the newspaper are quite a new thing and, and it really escalates. So the more they capitalize on the visuals, the more they realize, well, our big asset here is we've got beautiful young women. Everybody wants to photograph them. And so the movement really uses some of those activists and one of them who's a Heterodoxy member who I particularly love, is a woman named Ynes Mulholland. She was a Vassar graduate. She went to law school at NYU, having fought with Harvard publicly in the pages of the newspaper over whether or not she had a right to attend Harvard, kind of making fun of them for not letting her in. And so she's already kind of famous as you could be at this time. And she was always in the newspaper. She's very attractive, and so she's a really fun and interesting figure who was kind of ubiquitous in the early part of the decade. And then really tragically, she was actually very unwell and didn't know it, and as a result of her really overzealous campaigning, she had this infection that eventually killed her. Very suddenly she collapsed and never recovered while she was in the middle of a suffrage speech. She was only 30 when she died and she became this kind of martyr figure. So she's sort of an example of how the visual quality the movement was really powerful, but also kind of had this really unintended, um, effect. Her story isn't really well known, but I think she's an extraordinary, figure.

AMY: She was one of my favorite women from your book. The image of her riding that white horse down the street, that was one of the visuals that you mentioned that got everybody's attention. She's kind of like a more likable, smart Kim Kardashian. If you had that kind of person for your movement, you know, that everybody knew, everybody thought was gorgeous and she just knew how to take a good picture or whatever. I mean, you have her as one of the faces for your movement. 

JOANNA: Yes. Yes. She's quite something.

AMY: So every now and then the members of Heterodoxy would actually have what they called Husbands Evenings, where they would let the spouses come along for the night. Is it safe to say that these were supportive, enlightened husbands who were, you know, on board with what they were doing?

JOANNA: Sometimes. Rarely , um, let's say, to be fair, there were definitely some husbands and partners and boyfriends who were very interested in feminism and very aware that women's second class status in society was not only unjust, but also not what they wanted either. There were some men who definitely recognized that patriarchy was not working for anybody and certainly not for them. Unfortunately, when it came to being fathers, that's when it broke down as a rule. So simply the idea that women were naturally programmed to understand how to take care of babies and young children, that was very widespread. Um, I don't think it's that much less widespread now. I think it's very common for men to just assume that, I don't know, somehow women all get together and are taught how to take care of babies or it comes from inside us or something. And so, it's definitely a range. There are certainly marriages and partnerships that lasted. Often, when they were heterosexual, they tended to last if the couple didn't have children. Children were definitely the problem, the challenge and the thing that was hardest to maintain sort of equality and expectation and happiness. The other sort of situation that is very common in Heterodoxy was that women were in long term partnerships with other women. Certainly, the women had a lot of examples of alternative ways of living, and they kind of joked about them within the club, about just sort of how many different forms of partnership and family they were able to create. So it was certainly a club, I think, where women were emboldened to live more authentic and rebellious lives just by having the examples around them of people who were doing that or had done that and survived.

KIM: As we mentioned, you wrote this book during the pandemic lockdown. And you had a little baby at home, speaking of children. Amy and I are super impressed. We don't know how you managed that, so kudos to you for doing it all. But that does bring up an important point about the Heterodites in that they were struggling, as women still do today, to balance their careers with a happy home life. 

JOANNA: Yeah. I mean, I think there are several factors that went into it. One was birth control, which the women of Heterodoxy recognized as an issue as much of free speech and of class as it was of physical access to devices. They understood that birth control is something that wealthy women had always had access to. There was always a way if you're well enough connected, and if your husband was supportive, you know. Quietly and discreetly, it was possible to get not perfect by any means, but certainly, uh, reasonably reliable contraceptives. If you were a poor woman, especially one who was an immigrant who didn't speak English well, the chances of you being able to find a sympathetic doctor and be able to pay , it was just impossible. So, the women of Heterodoxy, for the most part, were able to make their own decisions about their families and tended to have much smaller families than women at the time usually did. Most of them had one or two children, which was very unusual back then. So it was about limiting your family in the first place. It was also about finding ways to care for them. And that was also something that was dependent on your means. There's all these wonderful ideas though, that I write about in the book, where members were trying to figure out ways around that. They were thinking like, okay, what about collective living? What about apartment buildings where we put a Montessori school on the roof and we employ highly trained childcare experts and highly trained chefs and cooks? And it will allow women to pursue, you know, professional careers outside the home if they want them but if they, you know, if their skills lie in sort of domestic work, then they can at least be well paid and respected for it. Um, they just could never make the economics work. It was always just too expensive. Women have relied, as they always have, on this kind of patchwork of other women's labor. This was how you managed to balance family and career, was by paying working class and black women to do the work that you otherwise couldn't do. It was absolutely an imperfect system. I think this has always been something that, unfortunately in the United States, women have had to figure out for themselves. And even though the situations are similar, for some reason, the ability to kind of come together and solve it collectively has just never gained traction. So yeah, it felt very relevant to what I was going through, the difficulty of just trying to do two things that were incompatible.

KIM: Yeah, it sounds exactly the same as now. I mean, there's really not much difference. But that Montessori building sounds great. Sign me up for that. 

JOANNA: Yeah. I know.

AMY: And then of course you had probably the most famous Heterodite, Charlotte Perkins Gilman who made the choice to ship her kid off, basically, to live with family on the other side of the country, right? And she's not the only woman of her time who made that decision. 

JOANNA: Yeah. This is kind of a moment, I think, where there's a shift in attitudes, because in a previous generation if a couple divorced the expectation was that the father had custody, and women had to fight for any kind of access, so the idea that mothers had a sort prior claim on their children as custod,y that's a relatively recent historical development. And Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who divorced in, let me see the mid 1890s. I'm not getting the exact date, but she had a child with her husband. She had a horrific, pregnancy and postpartum depression out of which her most famous now, most famous, uh, book, The Yellow Wallpaper, was written. And she wrote about the experience of kind of losing her mind and being forcibly detained by medical authorities, which was something she had gone through herself and she had a horrendous time. She never wanted to have another child. And her husband, when they separated, he married her best friend or one of her closest friends and she kind of engineered that. She's like, "No, you two should be together." So essentially, yeah, she decided when her daughter was, I think, nine, that she would be better off with the father. "I trust his wife, she's my friend. She's gonna raise you. Well, you know, you were gonna have better life with her. And this frees me up to be this kind of public figure." And we remember her now mostly as a novelist, but at the time she was much better known as like an economist, a social theorist, a leading feminist.

AMY: We should mention also that Zona Gale was a member of the club, and listeners, if you heard our episode on Margery Latimer, which was Episode 69, you'll remember that Zona Gale was sort of her mentor who had told her that you can either have a rich and fulfilling career, or you can have a family, but you can't have both. So some familiar names will pop up in Joanna's book.

KIM: Yeah. And we also thought it would be fun to learn about some other lost ladies of lit from the Heterodoxy club. So Joanna, could you tell us maybe about a few you think ought to be more widely known today than they actually are?

JOANNA: Well, there's so many. Um, 

KIM: Where do you start, right?

JOANNA: Well, I think one person who's actually maybe one of the better known names is Susan Glaspell. So she is best known as a playwright, although she won, I believe she won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel in the early 1930s. So another very important artistic aspect of Heterodoxy was the theater, but also, the kind of avant garde theater. So there were women who were Broadway actresses or kind of mainstream theatrical actresses. And then there was this much larger contingent who were really involved in, especially the Provincetown Players, which was the club that, um, so Susan Glaspell and her husband moved from the Midwest in 1913 and started this theatrical troupe when a whole bunch of the villagers were on vacation in Provincetown, um, in Massachusetts. They were rehearsing plays and performing them, mostly for fun and for each other, but it quickly became, bigger than that. And so Heterodoxy women were writers and playwrights actresses in what became known as the Provincetown Players in Provincetown. And then back in the Village when they established a theater on McDougal street. They're best known really now and best remembered for sort of launching the career of Eugene O'Neill who joined the group I think in 1916, and O'Neill kind of has overshadowed the history of that group. But Susan Glaspell tried to bring sort feminist ideas onto the stage and dramatize some of the personal costs of trying to live a feminist life that we've been talking about. She was trying to do this on stage. So her work is, is fascinating. Mary Heaton, her friend who owned this house in Provincetown where they started the theater, um, she made a living as sort of a writer of fiction, and she wrote a wonderful satire of Greenwich Village, which is really fun. But she basically kind of pivoted and became a labor journalist and she had been at the forefront reporting on strikes and labor movements for decades. And she really made these strikes feel personal. Like she focused on the women, um, and children. And she talked about the lives of the workers. So she was really covering this in a very human way, which is a very new thing in journalism. So she's a really, I think, uh, an important voice who we've kinda lost sight of. And then I, I would say , finally, Mabel Dodge, who wrote endlessly about her own life in this most extraordinary, self-dramatizing, self-mythologizing, way. But she's a really fascinating kind of chronicler of the period. And you kinda can't do better than her memoirs if you want to get a sense of how strange and exciting and " anything goes" this period really was.

AMY: Yeah, her salons sounded pretty fun.

JOANNA: Yeah. You know, they also discussed, you know, books and plays and art exhibitions. I mean, it's kind of, in some ways Heterodoxy was a glorified book club. And they kept coming back sort of week after week. I think Marie Jenney Howe was a very determined leader. People describe her as very motherly. She also was not herself, a mother, so she's... 

KIM: Her club was her baby ...

JOANNA: Yeah. She, she seems to have channeled her sort of maternal instincts into friendship and she really held the club together, and I think sometimes you need a leader like that to keep your club going. These things don't just go on ideas, you know, they continue on personalities and on, you know, warmth and love and friendship. And these are the ties that I think keep us connected. And that's how they were able to do so much is because they had this bedrock of support.

KIM: So they had a good long run with all of that until just before the start of 1940. So do you think there's any particular reason it ultimately came to an end?

JOANNA: You know, it changed shape over the years. The original group, they got older, they moved away. People's lives changed. Certainly, I think the run up to World War II was probably extremely difficult and disheartening and, as the Thirties kind of tick down there was probably a sense that, you know, "We were young and we fought so hard and nothing held." People moved away, people aged out, people died off. These women were not all young when they started to meet. 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 kind of like, keep it going in a new form. 

AMY: Yeah, it makes sense. Um, so this book required you to research so many women, as well as all the people that the women were peripherally connected with. It was mind-boggling how many people's lives you delved into. And I was kind of in awe of the scope of your research there. How long did it take you to research all this, and was it a struggle to track down information about the women in the group, given that, as you said, there was really only the one other book that had been written about the club?

JOANNA: The problem was actually less about finding information than it was about having too much. I'm so glad that I had too much rather than too little. This previous researcher, Judith Schwartz, who wrote this book called The Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy in the late Seventies, early Eighties as a dissertation. I would go back to her book and be like, "Okay, let me see if I can find anything out about this woman." And every now and again, I'd be like, "I really hope this was just, you know, somebody who passed through the Village and then maybe went off to just like, I don't know, got married or went and just like lived in the country." And it was always like, "Oh no, she was the first woman to get this degree. Or oh, it turns out she's the first practicing psychoanalyst in the country. Oh, she's the head of this organization." and every single time I would think like, "Oh, this person is a minor character. I can bracket her off. I can just mention her once and have done." And you would Google it and be like, "Oh, the most prominent, like women's columnist in the 1910s." She was the first, she was the only, she was the leading blah, blah, blah, head of this head of that long careers. You know, these women who did multiple things, you know, had teaching positions for their whole lives at Columbia University, or did all these things. And it was just trying to organize this information and try to find a, a narrative thread that wasn't just kind of constantly going off and talking about, "Oh, let me research the history of legal education in the United States."

AMY: Yeah, I could see where you could get really sidelined. In terms of the club itself, though, this scrapbook that you came across wound up being pretty important, right?

JOANNA: Yes, the scrapbook is wonderful. We should link to it somehow. It's digitized. You can go into it through Harvard's Library Portal and you can look at the pictures. They digitized the pages of the scrapbook beautifully. It was put together for Marie's 50th birthday, which was in December of 1920. It's photographs and tributes to Marie personally, that talk about her, and this is where you get this sense of like the warmth and affection and the bonds and the ties of friendship, because they're constantly talking about how wonderful it is to be with these incredible women, feeling inspired, feeling intimidated, feeling just at one with their people and also giving these really emotional tributes to Marie as kind of the mother of the group and the person who holds them together and who disciplines them with her little gavel and is always bringing the meetings to order. It's this beautiful faded album you can go through if you're a little bit of an archive nerd. It's a wonderful document to just browse 

AMY: Yeah. We will definitely try to link to that in our show notes. If you guys wanna see actual pictures of the members of Heterodoxy and what they were writing in this sort of celebratory journal sort of thing.

JOANNA: And they chose the pictures, which is fun. So they're always like, "This is a picture of me from 20 years ago. Um, I just think I look great." And so here's me, or it's like, "This isn't what I look like anymore. But here you go."

AMY: Yeah, I love that. Um, so one of the things that, like the takeaway, when I read your book was all of these issues that they were fighting for... causes... there were moments throughout the book where I would feel like a punch to the gut when things didn't go their way; when legislation didn't go their way or when they didn't quite get votes for women just yet, it reminded me that progress comes in fits and starts and that's what they were living through. You know, there were moments of victory and moments of defeat and it's impossible not to read the book in light of the issues we're still reckoning with today, right, Kim?

KIM: Yeah, and listeners, that's why we think this book is really important for you to add to your reading list. Reading about the determination of these women and what I'm sure they felt at times was really an uphill battle is inspiring, and it's a reminder that we can't just shrug our shoulders and be apolitical, especially right now. Joanna, do you think the experiences of the women of Heterodoxy can shed any light on the battles we're still waging today?

JOANNA: Absolutely. I think you both said it beautifully. These setbacks are just a part of the process. Um, And really, I think the way that they survived and went through that is finding their people and finding their friends and having a place where they could talk and vent and rage together and also kind of pick each other up. That was, I think, essential. I don't think you can do this work alone. And even those times when they were kind of out there on a limb and feeling like they were the only ones who believed in having these rights even when they shocked people and got pilloried in the press, they had each other. They weren't on their own. And I think that's really what I took from it was the importance of that friendship.

AMY: One anecdote from the book that still lingers with me from the suffrage movement was when there were women in the bitter cold holding their signs in front of, I think the White House, unless it was like the state capital building or something. And it was so cold out and some of the other women would bring them hot bricks so that they could stand on them to keep their feet warm. It's those little stories that really make the book come alive, I think. 

KIM: I'm starting to tear up right here right now. Just hearing that. We really need to band together right now for sure. Yeah,

JOANNA: Extraordinary. 

AMY: I am so impressed with all the work you put into this book, and we are so glad to have been able to have you back on the show to discuss it.

JOANNA: Thank you so much. There's so many great stories, great women to discover in this book. Um, you know, I want biographers to pick up on all the people I didn't have a chance to talk about and just, there's so many stories to tell here. This was great, yeah, thank you. 

AMY: So that's all for today's podcast. As always check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show and further information.

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.