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American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century
A brilliant account of the American bohemians whose experiments in living, writing, and loving created the modern world and made New York its capital.
In the early years of the twentieth century, an exuberant band of talented individualists living in a shabby neighborhood called Greenwich Village set out to change the world. Committed to free speech, free love, and politically engaged art, they swept away sexual prudery, stodgy bourgeois art, and political conservatism as they clamorously declared the birth of the new.
Christine Stansell offers the first comprehensive history of this legary period. She takes us deep into the downtown bohemia, which brought together creative dissenters from all walks of hobos and Harvard men, society matrons and immigrant Jews, wobblies and New Women, poets and anarchists. And she depicts their lyrical hopes for the century they felt they were sponsoring-a radiant vision of modernity, both egalitarian and artful, that flourished briefly, poignantly, until America entered the First World War and patriotism trumped self-expression.
In the early years of the twentieth century, an exuberant band of talented individualists living in a shabby neighborhood called Greenwich Village set out to change the world. Committed to free speech, free love, and politically engaged art, they swept away sexual prudery, stodgy bourgeois art, and political conservatism as they clamorously declared the birth of the new.
Christine Stansell offers the first comprehensive history of this legary period. She takes us deep into the downtown bohemia, which brought together creative dissenters from all walks of hobos and Harvard men, society matrons and immigrant Jews, wobblies and New Women, poets and anarchists. And she depicts their lyrical hopes for the century they felt they were sponsoring-a radiant vision of modernity, both egalitarian and artful, that flourished briefly, poignantly, until America entered the First World War and patriotism trumped self-expression.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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April 26, 2022
Massively disappointing! A chasm exists between my expectations and what this book actually delivered. Christine Stansell took a subject full of fascinating characters and causes concentrated in the emblematic and picturesque Greenwich Village and made it mind numbingly boring. I mean, here we had John Reed, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Margaret Sanger, Eugene O’Neill - extraordinary people pursuing monumental passions like modern art, feminism, free speech, free love, anarchy, and labor rights. How do you make that boring?
Stansell meticulously researched her subject. It was the writing of it where she failed. The book plods through endless details while never creating any vivid sense of the actual passion of the historical moment. The facts are all here gathered in a dense forest of uninteresting words. What is missing is any sense of life or vitality behind those words.
Reading this book about a fascinating time and place that has long interested me should have been a joy. Instead it was a chore. I give it two stars because the research was impressive, but my enjoyment level was closer to one star. I cannot recommend this book.
Stansell meticulously researched her subject. It was the writing of it where she failed. The book plods through endless details while never creating any vivid sense of the actual passion of the historical moment. The facts are all here gathered in a dense forest of uninteresting words. What is missing is any sense of life or vitality behind those words.
Reading this book about a fascinating time and place that has long interested me should have been a joy. Instead it was a chore. I give it two stars because the research was impressive, but my enjoyment level was closer to one star. I cannot recommend this book.
June 10, 2018
This book, the second of Stansell's two big popular historical works, details the arrival of late 19th century European modernism in American through the conduit of the Greenwich Village Bohemia that arose between 1890 and 1920.
That 30-year scope is a broad outline but we really get into detail from 1910-1919, a period that in turn divides somewhere around 1916, when, as the U.S. got drawn into WWI, all forms of political radicalism got lumped together as "sedition".
Stansell can generally be regarded as a feminist historian but doesn't start out declaring that she will focus on women or feminism, rather lets that emerge as she goes along. In an era where women became intellectual equals and the significant figures of the time were often couples who operated as a partnership, you can't really tell the story of the men without the women.
Of course, even though for many of the men "...feminism had been a - perhaps *the* - preeminent source of...fresh and true ideas...", when there were children to be taken care of, the women did that in addition to being intellectual equals.
In conclusion, she is clear that the accomplishments of the big names (Emma Goldman, Margaret Anderson) and the (to me) lesser known ones (Mabel Dodge, Ida Rauh, Louise Bryant, Neith Boyce and Crystal Eastman) significantly define the era.
One thing I note about this time and place is that it is about as far back as you can go and it still feels generally familiar.
Having read Malcolm Cowley's two books covering the 1920s and 1930s, I was inclined to fit this into my recent reading as the "prequel", despite the big difference of perspective. Cowley only gets a glance in this book, partly because he arrives at its close in 1919 and promptly dismisses the entire prior generation for its "atmosphere of middleagedness" with "defeats to be concealed."
That 30-year scope is a broad outline but we really get into detail from 1910-1919, a period that in turn divides somewhere around 1916, when, as the U.S. got drawn into WWI, all forms of political radicalism got lumped together as "sedition".
Stansell can generally be regarded as a feminist historian but doesn't start out declaring that she will focus on women or feminism, rather lets that emerge as she goes along. In an era where women became intellectual equals and the significant figures of the time were often couples who operated as a partnership, you can't really tell the story of the men without the women.
Of course, even though for many of the men "...feminism had been a - perhaps *the* - preeminent source of...fresh and true ideas...", when there were children to be taken care of, the women did that in addition to being intellectual equals.
In conclusion, she is clear that the accomplishments of the big names (Emma Goldman, Margaret Anderson) and the (to me) lesser known ones (Mabel Dodge, Ida Rauh, Louise Bryant, Neith Boyce and Crystal Eastman) significantly define the era.
One thing I note about this time and place is that it is about as far back as you can go and it still feels generally familiar.
Having read Malcolm Cowley's two books covering the 1920s and 1930s, I was inclined to fit this into my recent reading as the "prequel", despite the big difference of perspective. Cowley only gets a glance in this book, partly because he arrives at its close in 1919 and promptly dismisses the entire prior generation for its "atmosphere of middleagedness" with "defeats to be concealed."
September 9, 2013
I was excited when I first saw this book on my reading list... the title reminded me of a book I read Nights out: Life in cosmopolitan London (which came out after American Moderns). I was expecting a similar book, but set in NY. While the book was very interesting, particularly the section on "The Human Sex," it did not make my favorites' list. I was not expecting a book filled with mini-biographies on individuals and found it difficult at first to keep track of all the characters. I found the individual character's stories to be distracting from the overall influence bohemians as a group had on American culture.
However, the book was an intersting piece on society in the late 18th - early 19th century NY (particularly in the area called Greenwhich Village) and how bohemian influences on society contributed to the modernization of America.
However, the book was an intersting piece on society in the late 18th - early 19th century NY (particularly in the area called Greenwhich Village) and how bohemian influences on society contributed to the modernization of America.
May 28, 2015
The last chapter was the best part of the book. "Loving America with Open Eyes" describes what happened to the left with the coming of WWI. With the enactment of the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, along with the earlier Comstock Laws, the voice of the left was shut down.
July 11, 2018
Illuminating account of the "Bohemians" of Greenwich Village, 1910–1920, with special emphasis on geography and space. Stansell conveys the geographic origins and intellectual currents of the people who settled in the Village, and she explains the distinct cultures of neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan. The book is directed toward a popular audience, so there's no discussion of the historical literature on this topic, aside from a brief recommendation that historians not romanticize the period. Stansell, however, finds something compelling, if not romantic, in democratic socialists, free thinkers, and artists who overcame anti-Semitism and Victorian conventions to form a new culture.
July 9, 2024
During the 1950's Greenwich Village in New York city was famous for jazz, comics, and beat poetry which is where the term beatnik comes from. In the early and middle 1960's the village was home to folk singers such as Bob Dylan and future members of the Byrds and Mamas and Papas, as well as Jimi Hendrix. This book focuses on Greenwich Village during the first two decades of the 2oth century when writers, artists and philosophers dared to talk about women's rights, birth control and social injustice. An interesting book about a subject that is not often covered.
June 3, 2023
3.5 stars
Friendly and thoughtful writing style, thoroughly footnoted, brought together a lot of disparate threads. Overall struck a good balance between sympathetic readings of the people involved based on their aims, and dispassionate consideration of their larger context... wandered away from that into judginess around sex a few times, not necessarily where i would have expected, which was a bit odd? But it wasn't the author's usual approach to sexual matters by any means.
Friendly and thoughtful writing style, thoroughly footnoted, brought together a lot of disparate threads. Overall struck a good balance between sympathetic readings of the people involved based on their aims, and dispassionate consideration of their larger context... wandered away from that into judginess around sex a few times, not necessarily where i would have expected, which was a bit odd? But it wasn't the author's usual approach to sexual matters by any means.
January 17, 2020
Very thorough and well-written, but for some reason I didn't find it compelling. This book chronicles one of my favorite eras and locales, but it made for very dry reading. I feel bad writing this, because it was so impressively researched. :(
September 18, 2016
Magisterial.
Christine Stansell argues that a number of modern ideas developed in Bohemian New York during the first decades of the twentieth century and then passed out to the culture at large--before the Bohemia itself withered, another victim of World War II. In its scope and command of material, it is impressive. The book has an underlying logic to its organization--one that is even old-fashioned and rooted in the academic--but it is disguised enough that it reads well. This is not narrative non-fiction--too analytic for that--but for those interested in historical writing, it is well done.
The only caveats I have are both relatively common. There is the wearying insistence that New York was unique, all other Bohemias merely regional--New York alone would cultivate modern culture. By now we know, I think, that New York is not unique, that regional cultures persist, and modernism too pluralistic to be reduced to one set of ideas. But this insistence--repeated insistence--can be ignored with no harm to the overall argument. So can the other crotchet: that this particular moment was the single keystone in the development of modern ideas, all others paling before it. One can admire the skill with which Stansell uncovers and presents her story without acceding to the contention that this si the only story that really counts.
And there is a great deal of skill. She initially pays attention to the assemblage of New York's bohemia, out of the wreckage of European Bohemia, and, especially, the one in Chicago, as well as developments in American culture. German Jews of a progressive, even anarchistic, bent, came to America fleeing the stultifying culture there. She points out that they confronted anti-Semitism in America, too, but to a much lesser extent. A generation before they would become important to the entertainment industries, these immigrants helped reinvigorate American publishing--which remained very conservative--and challenge censorship laws. From Chicago came a number of writers and wits who had been central to that city's renaissance.
(Indeed, at a few crucial points, Stansell glances away from New York, because the evidence she needs is richer elsewhere, and so she spends time at other places--Davenport, Iowa; Chicago; Taos. These enliven the book and give it depth--they contribute to her story telling and show a limber scholar at work. But they also point out that other Bohemian enclaves were important in their own right.)
Also important was the so-called New Woman. Stansell is especially fascinated by this stereotype. Indeed, if any figure is central to the story from beginning to end, it is the New Woman, who could be a German Jew like Emma Goldman, or an American. Stansell is sensitive to the new liberties, but also to the constraints. This comes out best in her description of the marriage of Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce, Boyce eventually overwhelmed by what were still considered womanly duties, and Hapgood presenting his forbearance of her frustrations as some kind of feminist credential for him. (One thinks also of the later career of Caresse Crosby.) Stansell is also sensitive to those who did not fit into the type, such as the editor Margaret Anderson, and those who resisted the idea of the New Woman altogether, such as Ezra Pound.
Stansell lays out the way the ideas that were common to Bohemia attracted cross-culture acceptance--opposition to censorship, birth control, woman's suffrage--and spread to the wider world. She also notes the way modernist forms of writing and sensibilities spread. Bohemia is never about itself--it is always about the relationship with the Bourgeois world. And Stansell notes that, examining the attraction and repulsion between the two.
World War I represented something of a conservative moment, the patriotism and battle with Germany a bulwark against socialism, free speech, and so-called German ideals. Like all Bohemias, this one broke and scattered, so that by the time a new one was being formed in the 1920s, the starts of the earlier generation were already forgotten people. But the ideas persisted.
Christine Stansell argues that a number of modern ideas developed in Bohemian New York during the first decades of the twentieth century and then passed out to the culture at large--before the Bohemia itself withered, another victim of World War II. In its scope and command of material, it is impressive. The book has an underlying logic to its organization--one that is even old-fashioned and rooted in the academic--but it is disguised enough that it reads well. This is not narrative non-fiction--too analytic for that--but for those interested in historical writing, it is well done.
The only caveats I have are both relatively common. There is the wearying insistence that New York was unique, all other Bohemias merely regional--New York alone would cultivate modern culture. By now we know, I think, that New York is not unique, that regional cultures persist, and modernism too pluralistic to be reduced to one set of ideas. But this insistence--repeated insistence--can be ignored with no harm to the overall argument. So can the other crotchet: that this particular moment was the single keystone in the development of modern ideas, all others paling before it. One can admire the skill with which Stansell uncovers and presents her story without acceding to the contention that this si the only story that really counts.
And there is a great deal of skill. She initially pays attention to the assemblage of New York's bohemia, out of the wreckage of European Bohemia, and, especially, the one in Chicago, as well as developments in American culture. German Jews of a progressive, even anarchistic, bent, came to America fleeing the stultifying culture there. She points out that they confronted anti-Semitism in America, too, but to a much lesser extent. A generation before they would become important to the entertainment industries, these immigrants helped reinvigorate American publishing--which remained very conservative--and challenge censorship laws. From Chicago came a number of writers and wits who had been central to that city's renaissance.
(Indeed, at a few crucial points, Stansell glances away from New York, because the evidence she needs is richer elsewhere, and so she spends time at other places--Davenport, Iowa; Chicago; Taos. These enliven the book and give it depth--they contribute to her story telling and show a limber scholar at work. But they also point out that other Bohemian enclaves were important in their own right.)
Also important was the so-called New Woman. Stansell is especially fascinated by this stereotype. Indeed, if any figure is central to the story from beginning to end, it is the New Woman, who could be a German Jew like Emma Goldman, or an American. Stansell is sensitive to the new liberties, but also to the constraints. This comes out best in her description of the marriage of Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce, Boyce eventually overwhelmed by what were still considered womanly duties, and Hapgood presenting his forbearance of her frustrations as some kind of feminist credential for him. (One thinks also of the later career of Caresse Crosby.) Stansell is also sensitive to those who did not fit into the type, such as the editor Margaret Anderson, and those who resisted the idea of the New Woman altogether, such as Ezra Pound.
Stansell lays out the way the ideas that were common to Bohemia attracted cross-culture acceptance--opposition to censorship, birth control, woman's suffrage--and spread to the wider world. She also notes the way modernist forms of writing and sensibilities spread. Bohemia is never about itself--it is always about the relationship with the Bourgeois world. And Stansell notes that, examining the attraction and repulsion between the two.
World War I represented something of a conservative moment, the patriotism and battle with Germany a bulwark against socialism, free speech, and so-called German ideals. Like all Bohemias, this one broke and scattered, so that by the time a new one was being formed in the 1920s, the starts of the earlier generation were already forgotten people. But the ideas persisted.
January 24, 2013
Focused on turn of the century New York City, Christine Stansell’s work, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century offers insight into the creation of bohemian culture and the area known today as Greenwich Village. Stansell’s work is foremost a character study. Focusing on thematic organization Stansell is able to highlight key players of the Bohemian movement in a relatively narrow time period. Her work is not a mere chronological study of downtown New York, but rather a rich and lively study of the roots of Bohemian culture in the city. She proposes that her work “is about the men and women who ushered in the day of transformation in American, the people who embraced the ‘modern’ and the ‘new’” (Stansell, 1). She uses New York City as her case study and unveils how the city outdid its competitors, Chicago for example, in the teen years to become the absolute beacon of progress and modernity. This fresh New York culture was expressed in a variety of literary, cultural, and artistic forms.
She explains this cultural movement and historical shift through a study of those primarily involved in the Bohemian movement in New York City, including memorable and well-known characters such as Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and Hutchins Hapgood. An interesting twist on a traditional historical narrative, this work narrows in on these characters in a rather biographical way. Their stories are woven into themes that Stansell deems vital the foundation of Bohemia. These include conversation, writing and sexual freedom. Stansell stresses the rich variety of the characters involved in the movement her work focuses on. She describes immigrants, and the transformation of the American Jew on the Lower East Side, as well as New Women, a new sexualized free woman who could cast off the chains of Victorian womanhood and engage in free speech and free love, and even New Men, masculine prototypes keen on adventure and supportive of labor and woman’s progress. This cast of characters led by dynamic leaders found their place in Bohemia in cafes and salons in which they could freely discuss their beliefs.
Stansell provides a rich sketch of turn of the century Bohemia, concluding with its dramatic shift and virtual demise during World War I. However, she does allude to possible paradoxes and contradictions that weakened the resolve of the movement and its solidarity even before the pro-Nationalism and anti-Socialists waves crashed over New York and Ellis Island during World War I. Her work raises questions about internal divide that allowed external strife to so easily shift the course of the movement. Tension in the movement lies notably beneath Stansell’s descriptions. It is problematic that Stansell does not go into greater detail of these dichotomies.
Two notable examples of this are the tensions between a radical labor focused Socialist movement, and between men and women practicing new forms of free love. Beneath the vivid character sketches, and the dramatic flow through cultural expression in art, conversation, sex, and writing that Stansell focuses her narrative on shines the difficulties in creating radical culture in the wake of strict Victorian social mores. She alludes to rifts between immigrant anarchists and bohemian visionaries over violence, sexual questions, and labor focus, but this is not the focus of the work. This division made it difficult for bohemians with an anarchist past, such as Emma Goldman, as both groups would end up having some degree of criticism to assign to her. She also looks at the difficulties faced by women expressing new cultural norms of free love. While men were able to move traditional Victorian masculine affairs into a new light deemed as noble in pursuit of equality, women were still left with little agency and often victims of an inability to express their difficulties in a rapidly changing sexual world.
She explains this cultural movement and historical shift through a study of those primarily involved in the Bohemian movement in New York City, including memorable and well-known characters such as Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and Hutchins Hapgood. An interesting twist on a traditional historical narrative, this work narrows in on these characters in a rather biographical way. Their stories are woven into themes that Stansell deems vital the foundation of Bohemia. These include conversation, writing and sexual freedom. Stansell stresses the rich variety of the characters involved in the movement her work focuses on. She describes immigrants, and the transformation of the American Jew on the Lower East Side, as well as New Women, a new sexualized free woman who could cast off the chains of Victorian womanhood and engage in free speech and free love, and even New Men, masculine prototypes keen on adventure and supportive of labor and woman’s progress. This cast of characters led by dynamic leaders found their place in Bohemia in cafes and salons in which they could freely discuss their beliefs.
Stansell provides a rich sketch of turn of the century Bohemia, concluding with its dramatic shift and virtual demise during World War I. However, she does allude to possible paradoxes and contradictions that weakened the resolve of the movement and its solidarity even before the pro-Nationalism and anti-Socialists waves crashed over New York and Ellis Island during World War I. Her work raises questions about internal divide that allowed external strife to so easily shift the course of the movement. Tension in the movement lies notably beneath Stansell’s descriptions. It is problematic that Stansell does not go into greater detail of these dichotomies.
Two notable examples of this are the tensions between a radical labor focused Socialist movement, and between men and women practicing new forms of free love. Beneath the vivid character sketches, and the dramatic flow through cultural expression in art, conversation, sex, and writing that Stansell focuses her narrative on shines the difficulties in creating radical culture in the wake of strict Victorian social mores. She alludes to rifts between immigrant anarchists and bohemian visionaries over violence, sexual questions, and labor focus, but this is not the focus of the work. This division made it difficult for bohemians with an anarchist past, such as Emma Goldman, as both groups would end up having some degree of criticism to assign to her. She also looks at the difficulties faced by women expressing new cultural norms of free love. While men were able to move traditional Victorian masculine affairs into a new light deemed as noble in pursuit of equality, women were still left with little agency and often victims of an inability to express their difficulties in a rapidly changing sexual world.
December 24, 2018
New Yorkers already think they’re at the center of the universe- why write books arguing for it? I’m being facetious, there’s more to Stansell’s books on the Edwardian counterculture in the Village than that. But even as she nods to New Yorker self-importance, she still basically grants it’s right. We’re not stuck with Victorianism anymore because of the mixture of libertines, political radicals, and artists who glommed themselves together in Greenwich Village between 1890 and 1920, is the basic thesis. They got together, broke various rules pertaining to art, expression, and relationships — across gender, class (sort of), nationality, but not generally race lines — and broadcast the results to the rest of the country and world. Change followed.
I don’t know… this book seems well-researched. Stansell is part of a wave of accomplished American social historians who came around in the 70s and 80s who know their way around the archives. You can learn a lot about stuff New Yorkers said to and about each other. But look- I’ve read a lot of histories pertaining to the 1960s counterculture, as someone not notably interested in it qua itself but for other reasons. And the thing you get from there is that it was less the actual activities the hippies did that were so unique — their parents were on various drugs (pills and booze), slept around, used to listen to unapproved music (jazz), etc. — but more… well, it’s hard to say. Some people figure it out better than others, but most just go on and on about Ken Kesey as though there’s something intrinsically interesting about the man. And whatever the equivalent of that analytic something is for the 1910s bohemians of the Village, Stansell doesn’t really say it. It’s just assumed that they are as they presented themselves, the diametric opposite of a standard order that Stansell also doesn’t really define or interrogate.
I like to defend old-school social history. It did a lot of good things in terms of bringing to light the lived experience of everyday people, and at its best used that to create larger, more systemic pictures. But the cultural turn had its uses, namely, it shook up people’s assumptions about the immutability of social structures. This leads to some issues (it took the new cultural historians a while to really think seriously about capitalism) but it also means challenging ground assumptions. Like that we all just know what the norms are and how people relate to them, and that the function of “norm-upholder” and “norm-violator” just sort of wander through history perennially, unattached to any cultural or social structures because they ARE structures. But they’re not. They’re dependent too.
I’m making this book sound awful. It isn’t. Artistic resistance is something of a cringe topic for me- I first came to political awareness at the height of the power of adbusters-style culture-jamming nonsense, so that stuff plucks some bad chords for me, especially seeing genuine radicals like Emma Goldman get wrapped up in it. But if you want to know about this stuff, Stansell isn’t bad. But for someone more interested in the broader significance, it’s about as useful as yet another recitation of the deeds of Timothy Leary. I guess I do it to myself by picking these books, but hey… I don’t see anyone else here writing reviews, do you? ***
I don’t know… this book seems well-researched. Stansell is part of a wave of accomplished American social historians who came around in the 70s and 80s who know their way around the archives. You can learn a lot about stuff New Yorkers said to and about each other. But look- I’ve read a lot of histories pertaining to the 1960s counterculture, as someone not notably interested in it qua itself but for other reasons. And the thing you get from there is that it was less the actual activities the hippies did that were so unique — their parents were on various drugs (pills and booze), slept around, used to listen to unapproved music (jazz), etc. — but more… well, it’s hard to say. Some people figure it out better than others, but most just go on and on about Ken Kesey as though there’s something intrinsically interesting about the man. And whatever the equivalent of that analytic something is for the 1910s bohemians of the Village, Stansell doesn’t really say it. It’s just assumed that they are as they presented themselves, the diametric opposite of a standard order that Stansell also doesn’t really define or interrogate.
I like to defend old-school social history. It did a lot of good things in terms of bringing to light the lived experience of everyday people, and at its best used that to create larger, more systemic pictures. But the cultural turn had its uses, namely, it shook up people’s assumptions about the immutability of social structures. This leads to some issues (it took the new cultural historians a while to really think seriously about capitalism) but it also means challenging ground assumptions. Like that we all just know what the norms are and how people relate to them, and that the function of “norm-upholder” and “norm-violator” just sort of wander through history perennially, unattached to any cultural or social structures because they ARE structures. But they’re not. They’re dependent too.
I’m making this book sound awful. It isn’t. Artistic resistance is something of a cringe topic for me- I first came to political awareness at the height of the power of adbusters-style culture-jamming nonsense, so that stuff plucks some bad chords for me, especially seeing genuine radicals like Emma Goldman get wrapped up in it. But if you want to know about this stuff, Stansell isn’t bad. But for someone more interested in the broader significance, it’s about as useful as yet another recitation of the deeds of Timothy Leary. I guess I do it to myself by picking these books, but hey… I don’t see anyone else here writing reviews, do you? ***
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June 13, 2010Stansell presents a long, biographically-driven story of the "intelligentsia" of the Left wing lifestyle politics-- the Bohemians who would become Greenwich Villagers over time--the people who were movers and shakers behind the idealization of New Woman discussions before the New Woman of the 1920s became widely popular. This was a world of free love (open marriages, marriages of non-cohabitation, and others cohabitating and not marriage) and of IWW advocacy, and generally of disobedience before the Protestant/Victorian sexual and political standards of what is and is not appropriate to talk about (politically and sexually). She calls these people the "moderns," since they ushered in a new set of discussions about sexuality (birth control, reproductive control) and politics of the Left/ critique of capitalism and government.
This is the world of Hutchins Hapgood, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and others who went back and forth between seeing themselves as the marginalized and seeing themselves as in alliance with the marginalized/ working on their behalf.
The book is not thesis driven--much more biographical/ story driven. Sections of it can be assigned as light reading for undergraduates (one chapter at a time, perhaps biographically), but not the whole thing.
This is the world of Hutchins Hapgood, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and others who went back and forth between seeing themselves as the marginalized and seeing themselves as in alliance with the marginalized/ working on their behalf.
The book is not thesis driven--much more biographical/ story driven. Sections of it can be assigned as light reading for undergraduates (one chapter at a time, perhaps biographically), but not the whole thing.
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July 11, 2012The backstory to the movie Reds, which I saw as a teenager and which I'm sure played a significant role in my becoming a historian. Not as engrossing as the movie, and I found the organization rather clunky and a little repetitive in places, but generally interesting. I especially appreciated the subtheme of performance: the major players all engaged in some form of self-dramatization, either through writing or talking (conversation, speeches, dramatic performances).
I do have to admit, though, that in spite of photographs showing otherwise, to me, Jack Reed is always going to look like Warren Beatty and Louise Bryant is always going to look like Diane Keaton.
I do have to admit, though, that in spite of photographs showing otherwise, to me, Jack Reed is always going to look like Warren Beatty and Louise Bryant is always going to look like Diane Keaton.
February 20, 2013
Stansell explores the world of New York Bohemia at the turn of the 20th century – a multicultural world of intellectuals, immigrants, Wobblies, women, artist, and anarchists. Heavily influenced by European literature, politically engaged New York bohemians devoted to free speech and free love, as well as the creation of a new modern culture. Not surprisingly considering Stansell’s work on urban women and sexuality, the book focuses of the socio-sexual liberation of women. It was ok; I enjoyed learning about some of the individual women - such as Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman - but overall, not as good as Stansell's City of Women.
December 23, 2008
See, there were these folks in Greenwich Village who had great parties and lots of great uncomplicated (or so they thought) sex, and they might have changed the world, but then WWI happened. My parents went to their parties, and all I got was this lousy book.
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January 13, 20195/6/06
December 14, 2008
Okay. Although an interesting portrait of Greenwich Village.
October 10, 2009
Who knew Davenport, Iowa had an imprtant and big boho culture? I liked this book a lot, especially the parts on Randolph Bourne.
December 14, 2012
Makes me miss being a historian.
Want to read
June 19, 2015As mentioned by Kate Bolick.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews