Review

General Books

Sandra Adickes sets out in this book "to demonstrate the personal connections – in terms of deep friendship, love, unity of purpose, rivalry, and opposition – among the women activists in New York City during the early part of this century." This remarkable group of activists significantly advanced the causes of female suffrage, higher wages and better working conditions for women, birth control, and greater educational opportunities for girls as well as heightened recognition of women's artistic expression. Readers interested in finding out more about why New York in general, and Greenwich Village in particular, became the focal point for such a brilliant collection of highly motivated and talented women will be disappointed, because apart from an engaging description of the city in 1912 in her first chapter, Adickes devotes little space to analyzing the factors responsible for New York's magnetic attraction and special significance in the first two decades of the twentieth century. But readers looking for a wide-ranging series of dozens of portraits of the many memorable women who were part of this exhilarating period in women's history will find much to admire and ponder in Adickes' book.	1
This book would be an uphill struggle for lower division undergraduates in a survey course but might be appropriate for upper division classes in American women's history, providing students have a good grasp of Progressive-era developments. From a teaching angle, the book's strength is also its weakness, but its presentation of a huge case of fascinating characters with a welter of personal details and intriguing tidbits may cause students to fail to see the forest for the trees. Some chapters consist almost entirely of thumbnail sketches of women as well known as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger but also of many far less familiar but equally interesting women, whose personal odysseys illuminate the range of women's interests and issues and both the thrilling achievements and depressing failures they experienced. But for many undergraduates the sheer number of character sketches and the unrelenting amount of detail will prove overwhelming, and they will likely lose sight of the big picture and complain of boredom with the repetitiveness of the author's approach. The best pedagogical use I can imagine for this book is as a rich source for advanced undergraduates doing research on the themes or characters highlighted by Adickes; assigning it as a text for all students to read would likely prove frustrating to students and teachers alike.	2
For history teachers the book also has some real structural problems, possibly because the author herself is a teacher of literature rather than history. In her consideration of issues like women's suffrage and birth control Adickes' narrative broadens out into a conventional portrait of the respective national campaigns, and the theme of the book – the special role of New York as a center of the women's movement – becomes merely incidental. At other times, Adickes' primary material drives her chapters so that the reader begins to suspect that the availability of her sources unduly governs Adickes' choices of what themes to cover. For instance in a long chapter titled "Arts and Letters" she devotes over twenty pages to synopses of every short story written by women authors that happened to appear in the liberal journal The Masses. While this catalog provides a sense of the range of women's concerns and themes in women's literature, it is far too lengthy, would likely bore students, and fails to prove how significant or representative these particular stories are.	3
Overall, To Be Young Was Very Heaven is memorable for its anecdotal richness, not for its conceptual insights. It does a wonderful job of portraying the diverse vitality of the generation of women who came of age just before the First World War – arguably the most interesting and inspiring cohort of female pioneers in American history. But Adickes does not delve very deeply into the reasons why this cohort happened to flourish in New York City during that particular period, and she runs the risk of bewildering her readers with details that obscure the bigger picture.	4
Northern Kentucky University   Jeffrey Williams

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