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Lottie Whalen, "Radicals & Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern" (Reaktion, 2023)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Welcome to New Books in Women's History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Jane Semeka, professor of history at Brookdale Community College. Today we'll be discussing a new book by Lottie Whelan called Radicals and the Women who Made New York Modern, published by Reaction Books, an imprint of University of Chicago Press. Lottie Whelan is a writer, researcher and curator. She completed her PhD at Queen Mary University of London and is the co founder of Decorating Dissidents, an interdisciplinary arts project that focuses on feminist history, craft and textiles, and avant garde art. Lottie, welcome to the show.
- [01:51]
C
Oh, thank you, Jane. It's great to be here.
- [01:53]
B
What first sparked your interest in the women of New York's early 20th century avant garde?
- [01:58]
C
So I think it began really with my PhD. So my thesis focused on the modernist poet Mina Loy. And I was thinking about how her art and design work fit with the experimental poetry that she was much more sort of well known and celebrated for in her lifetime. And then even later as she became rediscovered, it was as a poet, but not really so much as an artist and a designer. So I wanted to look at Hallows. Aspects of her work fit together and maybe why we attributed more weight to certain styles of work that she was doing than Others. But Loi had a wonderful life story. So much that you could say. And thankfully, we are starting to sort of rediscover her life. There's been some really great recent biographies of her work, so that's great. But, yeah, from my perspective, Loy had two really different experiences in New York that I think tell bigger stories about women's role and how they played a role in the city's cultural life. So in 1910, the late 1910s, sorry, she arrived there from Florence in Italy, and there was this huge buzz about her arrival. She was talked about in the press. Shortly after she arrived, there was a feature on her that described her as this ultimate modern woman, wrote shocking new verse poetry. But she was also incredibly chic and beautiful. And she was connected to avant garde movements in Europe. And Loy immediately sort of became at the center of things. She was friends with Marcel Duchamp and his patrons, Louise and Walter Arensberg, and she was a regular at their salon until that group broke up at the end of the First World War, really, when a lot of people from the salon group and the kind of wider Greenwich Village circles moved to par and of course, then became part of that 1920s, like, left bank, lost generation scene. And then Lloyd moved back to New York just before World War II. But this time it was very different. In the years, the intervening years, she'd struggled, really, to find success in either as a writer, as an artist, or a businesswoman, personally. She'd had the deaths of her great love, Arthur Craven, her only son. She'd struggled to raise her two daughters alone. And she was getting older as well. She was kind of into her 50s by this point. So when she moves back to New York, she's living in a boarding house around the Bowery. She's in utter poverty. And it was actually a really rich time for her creatively because she did write some amazing poetry and she made some art that was inspired by life on the Lower east side. But she really faded into obscurity for quite a long time after that. So I started to think about what happened to the other women that Lloyd knew in 1910s, New York, you know, and what happened to them, and why had there been this huge change in such a short space of time from kind of women leading the cultural scene to then the rise of a really masculine dominated movement, the kind of abstract expressionism of the 1940s and bigger social changes.
- [05:15]
B
Do you feel like this is sort of an understudied area of history?
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C
I think so. I think. I mean, as I say, there's loy. Other figures have kind of, you know, there's been an emergence of interest in them, a resurgence. But I still feel like that scene is. People don't know so much about it. The fact that, you know, it was really led by women, this kind of. On so many different fronts. You know, galleries, people like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the contribution they made that are still lasting to this day with the institutions like the Whitney and like moma, you know, the fact that these were founded by women, I don't think gets enough recognition.
- [05:55]
B
Right. I agree. I feel like even, you know, if you just talk about American history, you know, talk about the Gilded Age and then you jump to the First World War, but there is sort of a gap in the focus. And then I think people do enjoy looking at the 20s and the kind of culture of the 20s. But this area is really fascinating. And as a professor of women's history, I would say that my students really enjoy learning about this area in this time period and bohemian life. I think it really resonates with students. I think they really find it cool to think, you know.
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C
Yeah. Fun and kind of so much going on.
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B
Yeah, I think they can relate to it as well. So, you know, do you have. Do you want to talk a little bit about the themes of your book?
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C
Yeah. So I think at the heart of the book is it's a story about a group of women who shaped modern culture at this really febrile moment in early 20th century New York. It mainly focuses on artists and writers who were creating daring work, kind of radical work that broke boundaries in terms of social convention, gender rules, and art itself. What art could be, who could make art. But I also wanted to show that that work was kind of in dialogue with or really inseparable from what was going on politically. So we also meet activists like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger to show that the issues like the campaign for reproductive rights fed into the art and literature that was being created and the atmosphere of that time. Because I think sometimes we view them quite separately. We maybe don't look at the connections between the two and. And really how they developed in dialogue with each other at that time. And the sort of spaces in the city are really important too. So hopefully I take the reader on a journey through salons and galleries and cafes because they were so vital to what was happening. And I think what I really hope comes across is the importance of community. So it's not a case of sort of picking certain women to champion as, like, these great artists or particularly Significant on their own. But it's more about showing how relationships developed and how those relationships provided a kind of bigger creative spark. So we might think about a patron like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney giving other artists financial support and space to work, or hosts like the Arensbergs or the Stettheimer sisters, who opened up their homes to nurture this kind of vibrant, silent culture. And the city itself is character really, I think, and what it represented at this moment, because that was, I think New York seemed to offer something fresh and new. While war was raging in Europe, there was something different going on in New York. There was sort of sense of freedom and possibility. And Greenwich Village in particular, which became known as the smock colony by the press, or slightly satirically, but thanks to the artists and activists, women were living and working there. And they became known for wearing these loose fitting smock with bobbed hair and the sandals. And that was part of the new lifestyle that women were embracing.
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B
Man, can you talk a little bit more about fashion and how you mentioned that it's philosophical, it's political. And I really love to talk about the fashion of the era with my students because it really shows that real break, it's very visual break between the Victorians and the late 19th century, the way women dressed in the. With the corsets and things, to this much more loose fitting, short hair. It's like an act of rebellion to cut your hair.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think at this time, fashion really emerged. The site where creativity and politics merged. And it was a way of signaling, as you say, you're kind of showing off that you were modern, that you were different and that you were embracing something new. So in the book I talk about these brilliant, witty essays that Louise Norton, who was a writer and a translator as part of the Greenwich Village scene, she wrote these essays for her little magazine, Rogue, in a series she called Philosophic Fashions, and she wrote it as Dame Rogue. So they were quite tongue in cheek and witty, but really ahead of their time in the way that they're sort of treating fashion as a serious business and showing how politics and fashion are entwined. I don't think we see anything like that really until much later in the century, that kind of way of writing about fashion. And a good example is the way she talks about efforts to revive the corset. She calls that a tactic to keep women out of the polls and out of politics. Because in her words, she asks, can the mind be enfranchised when the body is enslaved? So I think, yeah, that sort of sets out the stakes, how high the stakes were for women and the way that they felt they needed bodily freedom to be kind of active participants in life, which was really, really true because you see the emergence also of kind of sport and dancing and all these kind of public activities that women wanted to get out and do. And of course, they couldn't have done them if they were dressed up in corsets and kind of fancy hairstyles and everything. So there are a lot of connections between how you live and how you dress, which I think we take for granted now. But I think they were just beginning to be understood during those times.
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B
And I kept imagining what the conversations must have been like with these women and their elder mothers, aunts, the other old women who grew up in an earlier time. And you know what that must have been like to reject the conventions of the earlier generation.
- [11:50]
C
Yeah, Well, I think Beatrice Word as well, one of the artists and part of duchamp's scene, she really kind of. She really went through it with her mother. And if you look at her diaries, there's constant, constant references to arguing with her mother and big scenes because, you know, her mother wanted her to live this life. She was from a privileged family, so her mother wanted her to live like this society life and marry well. And the fact that she was rejecting that just caused a lot of. A lot of problems. And I think for, you know, within their own psyche as well, I think these women really had to battle with those ideas, and it was a real struggle for them to break free from them.
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B
Yeah. And I love the story about Gertrude Vanderbilt and the portrait that she is.
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C
You know, and her husband says, no, not in my house.
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B
Right.
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C
Yeah. But hangs it in her studio.
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B
Yeah. But she plays with her identity. And I mean, you really could probably, you know, having. I have an interest in Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney myself, so I, you know, I thought a lot about her wearing her hair and kind of a certain androgyny that she embraced.
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C
Yeah. And I think, you know, even somebody like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, she was from huge privilege, but it was still a risk. And it was still. She had a lot of pressure on her. So to do that and to embrace those kind of lifestyles and the fashions was shocking and really frowned upon. So, you know, a lot of these women had. There was a lot of. A Lot of stake for them to sort of choose these lifestyles, you know.
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B
And this is the 1910s, and, you know, women in the United States really didn't wear slacks widely for 50 years after that.
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C
Yeah, that's Right, Yeah, yeah, I think. I think it was. It was truly shocking to do that.
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B
So how do you think these women redefine modernity? You know, because that's in your title, Women who Made New York Modern. Can you talk a little bit about that?
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C
Yeah, I can. I mean, I think of in so many ways, though, I think it's hard to sort of sum up, I suppose. But, you know, the women I think in this book cover a broad spectrum from political activists to these sort of decadent party going women. But all of them, in their own way, are reimagining what modern life was or what it could look like, defying conventions and as we sort of mentioned, going against the lives that their families hoped they would have or that their mothers had lived. So we might think of writers like Mina Loy and Baroness Elsa von Freito Laurenhoven, who are writing experimental poetry that is describing really intimate bodily experiences from a woman's point of view. So things like lust and orgasm and birth and abortion, which would just have been, you know, totally unthinkable things to write about, but they were sort of just. It was central to their work or again, in very different spheres. So kind of women funding the arts, like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, you know, she was allowing people space to redefine art, giving. Giving them support as they did that. And then, you know, through art and activism, a lot of these women are questioning gender roles, they're questioning marriage and motherhood. So in Greenwich Village, you have the debating group Heterodoxy. And this was a really mixed bunch of women, a lot of different ages and kind of different political points of view. But they would all get together to meet at Polly's Anarchist Cafe in the Village, and they discuss issues like workers rights, civil rights, socialism, anarchism and heterodoxy Member Crystal Eastman, who's kind of became known for writing essays on subjects that feel sadly, I suppose, but they feel so relevant now. So there's things like how can we raise feminist sons, reproductive rights, all these kind of issues that we're still sort of grappling with. So again, just setting out sort of a new path for how you can live in a modern way. And there's a quote I use in the beginning of the book, which is from Chris Kraus, but I think it sort of sums up that sort of, you know, how life, just living life is kind of political and different and modern for these women, which is the sheer fact of women talking being paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self destructive, but above all else, public is the most revolutionary thing in the world, you know, so I think that was their modern revolution, really. Just getting out there and living their own lives.
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B
Right. To be experimental and to embrace anything. Right.
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C
Yeah. Yes.
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B
Rules for art, you know, no rules for anything. Yeah. And. And House. And it's interesting, even among the avant garde, how some people reject, you know, you. Oh, you went too far. Not like that. We want you to be revolutionary and experimental, but not like that.
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C
Exactly.
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B
Yeah.
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C
I. I think, can never get away from them.
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B
Yeah. You know, so. And you mentioned the rogue magazine before. So let's talk a little bit about, like, the research journey and some of the things you looked at and anything that you want to talk about. Any surprises, the obstacles to finding these stories of, you know, obviously women who. I guess for most of them, their papers have not been saved. I mean, I know that Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney does have some. Some. Right. And so some women had diaries that were not. Didn't land in the dumpster.
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C
Yes. Yeah, that's. Yeah. I mean, well, yeah, I think there's lots of both surprises and obstacles. I think we think about surprises, probably the way that the books start around the scandal of Duchamp's legendary Fountain, which, you know, his upturned urinal that is now such a part of our visual culture. You know, everybody. You don't really have to know anything about art to know that. But actually, when we look back to its creation, it created such an uproar at the time, and the exhibition it was created for, that it never was exhibited and it was lost. So it didn't exist as a physical artwork until replicas were authorized decades later. And this means that a lot of its meaning and the legacy comes from a special issue of the Blind man magazine, which is a little, little magazine created by the Arensberg circle. And they. Well, there was a picture of Fountain, but there were also essays by Beatrice Wood and Louise Norton, which really sort of shaped how Fountain was understood and received. You know, it kind of tied into those ideas of challenging art. What is art, anyway? Kind of those big ideas. So I was kind of. Kind of intrigued by the way that all of that has been forgotten, you know, that we just focus on Duchamp and the Fountain. But actually, these women who were part of that story and really central to it were just sort of forgotten about. And actually, interestingly, it's Louise Norton's address and telephone number that is listed on the submission ticket that was submitted with Fountain under the infamous pseudonym R. Mutt. So, again, that really ties her to that process. And shows that she was central to what was going on. But, you know, we don't even. People wouldn't even remember their name, know their names at all, I think now.
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B
Right. So that's why historians and writers and researchers have to kind of center them.
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C
In a new way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And it was also a real joy to discover photographer Jessie Tarbucks Beals, who was someone that's new to me, and she has this incredible archive of photographs which Show Life in 1910's Greenwich Village. I think they really. We can really step back in time through those images. They're so evocative and kind of see the shops and the studios and the cafes where this kind of activism and creativity flourished, you know, and these images, so many of these women, we wouldn't know who they were if not for these photographs. And actually the photographs themselves were nearly lost because Beales, like so many of these women, she kind of died in poverty. And it was only because of a friend saving her archive that allowed us to see these today. Which I suppose brings me to the obstacles because, you know, so much what was going on at the time, it was kind of ephemeral. So parties, magazines, shops, it's really hard to put together kind of picture of life because a lot of that was lost. So it was a lot of following little leads in the hope of finding something relevant in archives. But yeah, I think, as you've also mentioned, Jane, that when you're researching women's history or the history of marginalized groups, it's that lack of records and gaps in biographies and careers that just a real barrier, you know, especially women as artists. It's hard to survive as an artist if you're a woman. A lot of them died in obscurity. And so for many years, all that we have left is some of a footnote or a photograph that puts them with someone. Mom celebrated a typically male figure. So much is just lost. Right.
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B
You know, we talked earlier about this idea of, you know, how before our interview began, we were talking about whether New York was it, quote, inhospitable for environment for women artists. And, you know, I was thought that it would be interesting, you know, that there are men in this book that are important parts of the story. It's not just, you know, it's not a solely a woman's story. So I wanted to kind of give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about the men in the book and the way that they shape the story of these women.
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C
Yeah, I think, I mean, Marcel Duchamp is probably the. One of the most important men in the book. And he plays a very interesting role, probably quite contradictory role, I would say. You could certainly say at the beginning of the story, really, with that scene in the Arensberg salon. He's, you know, he's. He's, you know, he's getting involved with a lot of the women and there's a lot going on. You know, Beatrice Wood in particular is a very young woman who, I think. I mean, I think she's very much, you know, she's a willing participant, but he's kind of seducing these younger women and really reveling in that. Which ties into this sort of broader element where for all the talk of free love, you know, women are not really at the forefront of that. It's all on men's terms. But I think when the story moves on, Duchamp plays a really interesting role in the fact that he's actually a really good friend to some of the women in this book later in their careers, when times have moved on and people have lost interest. So he organizes exhibitions, exhibitions of Florine Stettheimer's work just after she died. He also organises exhibitions for Mina Loi and for Beatrice Wood, sort of towards the mid century. And he's a champion of them. So I think that's really interesting. Shows kind of two sides of the story there that maybe in the 1910s, that scene, he's not such a positive figure, but then he is championing women in a way that we might not expect.
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B
It's complicated.
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C
Right, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then probably another. Another man that kind of looms large over the book is Anthony Comstock. He was an anti vice crusader. He was part of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. And he was engaged in pursuing a lot of different people in the village, like Margaret Sanger, probably most famously Emma Goldman, but also a figure called Guido Bruno, who was kind of publisher and the unofficial mayor of Greenwich Village, what we call himself. But he published certain texts that Comstock decided were obscene. So, yeah, he's a kind of bete noir, really, for a lot of these figures, you know.
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B
And maybe could you talk a little bit about the story of when Beatrice Wood decides that she's going to share the magazines?
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C
Yes. Yeah. So again, a kind of conflict with her family. So the blind man magazine that we were just talking about for the Fountain special issue, Wood was kind of quite enthusiastic about having her name attached to it as the editor, whereas Marcel Duchamp and Henri Pierre Rocher who were the other two co editors. They did not want their names attached to it because they weren't American citizens. So they were fearful that they could get deported, possibly if there was a scandal. But Wood was kind of determined, I think, with that sort of naivety that. Or feigned naivety that she liked to sort of put on. And then I think before there was a chance to get it sent out, her father found a stack of copies that got delivered to their house, and a big scene ensued, and he refused to allow her to be part of this. I think in her version of the story, which is some, you know, taken with a pinch of salt, maybe it wasn't. She decided not to go ahead with it, not because of her father, but because she was worried that other people had contributed funds, like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, that there would be some blowback for them. That's why she decided not to go ahead. But.
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B
And risk of arrest, you know, risk of arrest was real.
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C
Yeah.
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B
They were breaking the law according to Comstock Law. You know, although she's, you know, she's, you know, she's got a lot of attitude and says going to jail might just be a new experience.
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C
That's right, yeah.
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B
You know, now I'll have the experience of going to jail.
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C
All right, exactly.
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B
You just imagine her. Her poor Victorian parents.
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C
Well, probably finish them off.
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B
So there's so many fantastic stories in each chapter of this book and, you know, it's very hard for me to even pick which ones I want to talk about because there are so many. But the Baroness Elsa von Freitag Loringhoven is a real interesting person that I thought maybe. Could you talk a little bit about her presence in your.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Oh, my gosh. Well, where do you begin with the Baroness? You know, what an absolute. I think the phrase of head of one's time is thrown around. But she really was, I don't know, ahead of her time, maybe ahead of our time, I think, you know, she was such a. Such a character. So Baroness was a poet and she wrote, I think, as we mentioned earlier, alongside Mina Loy, she was really blazing a trail for this kind of uninhibited bodily poetry that was about sex and desire. And she also made art from found objects. She was slightly ahead of Duchamp there in the fact that she was picking up rubbish that she found on the streets and repurposing it into art. I'd say maybe one of her greatest creations was just herself. She was, you Know, she really maybe pioneered kind of this kind of performance art. She lived art. She made costumes from junk that she'd find on their walks across New York. So have like a bra made from tin cans or jewelry made from curtain rings. I think once she had a canary and a little cage as a necklace and she cropped her hair and painted her head purple. She was arrested for wearing a man's suit in public. So she was really this kind of spectacle on the street. The street was her gallery in a way. And also I suppose as we've mentioned earlier, she wasn't an American citizen, she'd come from Europe. So it was, you know, taking a great personal risk really to do this, to live like this. But yeah, a real breaker of taboos and avant garde in a way that sort of intimidated even in the most sort of experimental, daring artists in her circle, men in particular were so threatened by her. She had this voracious sexuality that they couldn't handle. She was very vocal about having desire, interest in Duchamp and also the poet William Carlos Williams and they just couldn't handle that. Williams I think wrote some quite nasty poetry and some quite nasty things about her because he was so disgusted. There's also an anecdote where the poet Wallace Stevens, he won't set foot in that part of Manhattan in case, in case he bumps into her because he's so terrified of her. But I think what's interesting is know that they were frightened of her because she wasn't this young, wide eyed ingenue. You know, she was bold, she was sexual, she fleshy, she was middle aged, you know, as well. And I think she, she saw herself as, as like their equal or maybe even they're better. So they were, they were so intimidated by that and it tested, it tested their kind of commitment to an avant garde life and really found it wanting.
- [29:36]
B
I suppose I just wanted more about her. You know, she's one of the people in the book that I read about and I said, oh, I would read a whole book about this woman because.
- [29:47]
C
Yeah, well, I would. I mean, Irene Gammell's got a really wonderful biography of her which I fully recommend.
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B
Oh, I'm gonna have to look that up because I just think that I found some of these people in the, in this book just tantalizingly sting. And so if you could live in this era, New York's Greenwich Village, who would you want to hang out with?
- [30:12]
C
That's a great question. So many to choose from. I think Clara Tice has got to be up there, you know, she was sort of became the ultimate it girl at the time. Well, as I mentioned earlier, but her art was censored by Anthony Comstock. But actually, it had the opposite effect of just making her this real star, you know, so she was in the press constantly after that. And she cut a wonderful figure with her. She had the bobbed hair and short skirts and she owned a huge Irish wolfhound that she'd walk. Walk the streets with. So I think she'd be. She'd be great. She was at all, you know, at all the best parties, knew everybody there was to know. So I feel like she. She would take you on a good night out, take you down from Dust.
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B
The Dawn, the Blind Man's Ball that you talk a lot about and.
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C
Oh, wow. Yeah.
- [31:00]
B
You know, that is like a bacchanal of.
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C
That's right. Yeah. Although, I mean, I think every week there was some. There was a kind of extravagant costume party. It was just part of the social scene that people got dressed up and got up to all sorts of things. But, yeah, when you took the Blind Man's Ball, that was infamous for everybody going back to the Arensberg salon and sort of piling into bed together and eating all the Arensberg's food and drinking all their champagne and kind of getting up to all sorts. So that was a big night.
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B
Yeah. So it sounds like it was a really fun time to be a part of.
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C
Yeah, I think so. Definitely. Although, as we said, you know, it's not without. It wasn't without risk. It wasn't without kind of misogyny and certain things that made life outside of that circle difficult as well as Comstock. I think you mentioned there was a lot of double standards from the men in the creative circles.
- [31:58]
B
And, you know, can you talk a little bit about the. The lesbian community, too? I mean, we didn't get to really delve into that too much. But I love to talk about the bohemian life in the Cities and how there's a real lesbian community that.
- [32:19]
C
Yeah.
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B
Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [32:21]
C
Yeah. I mean, it was this kind of queer community. It was really important in the Village. So a lot of members of heterodoxy were women who were openly living with other women, were adopting children as couples and just living openly. But obviously, as I said, the spectre of someone like Comstock who is kind of hovering over them. So they're still kind of in a bubble, I suppose. Greenwich Village had a lot of gay and lesbian bars, so there's kind of Eve's Hangout there was the Mad Hatter, which was run by Jimmy Criswell and her partner, Matilda Spencer. So a real vibrant culture. But again, the sort of dark, on the negative side of that is there was criticism coming from the men in the kind of creative circles who found women like they found the baroness elsewhere, threatening. They also found queer women threatening because it wasn't sort of serving their needs, you know, they weren't serving things, their needs of free love. They wanted free love that benefited them, not that would benefit women for themselves. So there's that to face. And also, I mean, if we look to the story of Eve's Hangout, which was ran by a woman called Evelyn Kachayeva, who's a Polish Jewish feminist, that was raided in the early 20s by the vice squad, and it was shut down and Evelyn was deported, and eventually she ended up at Auschwitz, where she was murdered. So, you know, as I said, as we've sort of mentioned, some really high stakes and some wasn't all a good time. You know, there was really serious consequences for some of these people as well, especially if you weren't protected by kind of citizenship or if you didn't have wealth, you know, all those things that helped others stay safe.
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B
Yeah, and we know the story of Emma Goldman as well, you know.
- [34:16]
C
Yeah, of course.
- [34:17]
B
Your fate, too.
- [34:18]
C
Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, so I think we've got to remember that kind of those. Some people had more license to do what they wanted than others, depending on various factors.
- [34:30]
B
So are you working on anything new?
- [34:34]
C
Yeah, I mean, obviously I kind of said this is such a rich scene. There's so much. There was so much I couldn't include. And I'd love to go back to all. I mean, all of these women, really. I am writing an essay on Margaret Zorach at the minute, who. She's more of a minor figure, I'd say, in Radicals and Rogues, but she's a villager. And in the essay, I'm looking at the way she sort of merges creative life and domestic life. So the home she made with her husband William, also an artist, it was a space where they raised their children, but they also made art and the two merged. And she also made it incredible textile art, which I think really deserves more recognition even now. But that was a response to domesticity and bring up children. So, yeah, I'd love to explore her work in a bit more detail and look at that kind of merging of family life and creativity. And also Beatrice Wood, you know, she. What a character, what a life. I'M really fascinated by sort of games she plays with the reader and with memory in the autobiography she wrote towards the end of her life. I think it speaks to some quite contemporary questions about how we construct and present ourselves and our lives. So I'd really like to revisit that specifically one day.
- [35:52]
B
No, that's great. We look forward to reading that next. I want to thank you, Lottie, for joining me today. It's been so fun to discuss your book, Radicals and Rogues, the Women who Made New York Modern, published by Reaction Books, an imprint of University of Chicago Press. Until next time on new books in women's history, this is Jane Semeka. Keep reading.