The Only Taboo is Taboo: The Heterodoxy Club

In her doctoral thesis, researcher Kate Wittenstein writes the Heterodoxy Club, "forged a modern conception of feminism by drawing on the developing disciplines sociology, anthropology, and especially psychoanalysis to emphasize the personal, sexual, and psychological dimensions of emancipation." In this, Wittenstein writes, the all-women's organization distinguished itself from the 19th century "woman's rights tradition" and their contemporaneous suffrage movement. [1]

The Heterodoxy Club was founded in 1912 by Unitarian minister and leader in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Marie Jenney Howe.

Membership was granted on a single condition: that the prospective member “not be orthodox in his or her position.”

I'd add the unwritten, explicit condition that prospective members and attendees be women.

The Club's motto: "The only taboo is taboo."

The organization met weekly and discussed alternatives to marriage, sexual freedom, lesbian relationships, socialism, communism, labor organizing, and internationalism.

The recent commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Daughters of Bilitis - on September 21, 1955 - as this country's first lesbian organization made me recall this earlier organization, much less well known, with less popular culture celebrity, but with a Who's Who list of members and ardent supporters, it shook the 20th century in ways worth noting and emulating.

Among this Who's Who were Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Crystal Eastman, Zona Gale, Susan Glaspell, Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn, Mary Heaton Vorse, Elizabeth Irwin, Grace Nail Johnson, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Agnes de Lima, Margaret Sanger, Louise Bryant, Mary Ware Dennett, among others ...

These women were often achieved in their own fields, but together, more things were forged.

* Flynn and Sanger were both labor organizers with the IWW. Flynn went on to become chair of the Communist Party USA.

* Eastman and Flynn were among the co-founders of the ACLU.

* Sanger and Houghton Hepburn cofounded Planned Parenthood 

It is said that much of the initial funds to start the early Planned Parenthood came from the women of the Heterodoxy Club. [2]

Like Bilitis, Heterodoxy was predominantly, if not exclusively, white women, but both made a cultural impact and should be celebrated as models for what we can and must do as a progressive society - not one that is backward-looking and wants to undo achievements, like MAGA fascism and Project 2025 seek to do.

Since the ending of the earlier queer movement of the 80's and 90's, the disappearance of dyke culture, and the softening of feminism - all for conventional Republican and Democratic Party consensus, such organizations such as Heterodoxy are also blurred into obscurity by bourgeois historians and desktop social media commentators. This tactical or ignorant oversight is to the detriment of radical and truly progressive forces, because it is from those organizations, like Heterodoxy, from concepts of gay liberation that do not accommodate heteronormativity, from rejections of the capitalist premises of Republican and Democratic politics [which we see at this hour in their facile leadership] in favor of socialist and communist ones that progress and advance is seeded and rooted to take form. 

This is what those women of Heterodoxy, albeit all white women as far as we know, did for women's history and, therefore, our collective history.

[1] Wittenstein, Kate E., "The Heterodoxy Club and American Feminism: 1912-1930," Boston Univ, 1989

[2] Off the Grid: The Village Preservation Blog

Further reading: 

Scutts, Joanna, Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism [Seal Press, 2022]