Book Review

Do not be misled by this book's title; this is not a book you have already read. Christine Stansell's bohemian New York includes familiar figures known from earlier studies of Greenwich Village but generally is peopled and animated by a far greater diversity of voices. Women activists, in particular, alongside immigrant anarchists and Jewish writers, have larger than customary roles in this wide-ranging account of the country's first moderns. Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Anderson, Louise Bryant, and Neith Boyce play center stage alongside the usual leads: Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Alexander Berkman, John Reed, Randolph Bourne, and Hutchins Hapgood. Not only women but women's issues—suffrage, birth control, sexual equality, and self-determination—come to the foreground in Stansell's study, as do vivid descriptions of new female types: New Women, the Gibson girl, the bachelor girl, female rebels, and Village feminists.

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Stansell's moderns are intellectuals, writers, playwrights, and artists, born into a Victorian world they grow up detesting and determined to reform. The author, steeped in the Princeton anthro-historical tradition of Clifford Geertz, Robert Darnton, and Natalie Zemon Davis, organizes their rebellions into broad patterns of thought and everyday life. She subsumes individual actions to principles the figures held in common. This gives her book not only a freshness of approach but an epic grandeur; one reads not about men and women with colorful life-styles and cocky idealisms, but about a sweeping set of social changes and reforms that killed off Victorian stuffiness and ushered in the modern age.

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