To Be Young Was Very Heaven: Women in New York Before the First World War - Hardcover

Adickes, Sandra E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312162499 ISBN 13: 9780312162498

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Synopsis

In the years before World War I, New York City's Greenwich Village was a place of great artistic and political ferment. Political causes attracted throngs of supporters. Artistic movements filled cafes and restaurants with boisterous conversation. And for the first time, women began to seize power and shape the landscape of the time: Margaret Sanger began her crusade for birth control; Mabel Dodge hosted salons for the avant-garde; Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Workers Movement; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn helped to organize the Workers of the World. The list of women who played integral roles in American life and letters then is endless, and Sandra Adickes captures them all while evoking the now-lost paradise that New York offered to women at the turn of the century.

About this title

Review:

Was there ever a time in America that could be described as the golden age of women? Certainly each era has had its perils, but To Be Young Was Very Heaven persuasively argues that the decade before World War I held promise and realization for many women artists and crusaders in New York. Fights for birth control, the vote, the labor movement, parity in wages, and simple respect were in full swing. Sandra Adickes combines lively quotes with a wealth of sometimes overearnest background research as she sketches powerhouses like Marie Jenney Howe, a suffragist and founder of the women's club Heterodoxy, from which early inklings of feminism emerged; settlement worker Jane Addams; socialist feminist lawyer Crystal Eastman; international labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She adeptly captures the contradictions of that time and place, too, when such women rocked the social barricades but the mayor of New York could congratulate public education for its role in turning every girl into a useful housekeeper who knows how to "sing a little, dance a little ... and at the same time knows how to cook to make her husband good-natured." --Francesca Coltrera

From the Publisher:

"...its heart is in the right place and it succeeds in illuminating a chapter in history." -The New York Times Book Review

"Sandra Adickess book bears more resemblance to an epic movie...with a rich cast of fiery romantic idealists." -The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0312162499
• ISBN 13: 9780312162498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304