Howe was hard put to explain what she meant by “real” friendliness, and Scutts herself, a cultural historian, sounds halfway mystical when she describes friendship as “something organic, unspoken, a connection that doesn’t require work or analysis.” She does better when she writes, “Together, the women of Heterodoxy pushed each other toward a new way of living. Everything from the way they dressed to the company they kept and the causes they championed was self-consciously new.” Most especially it was through the causes they championed that Heterodoxy friendships flourished.
They were, in the words of Mabel Dodge, “women who did things—and did them openly,” the operative word here being “openly.” They were each trying to live as men lived, which, preeminently, meant that every woman must make her own living. This issue of economic independence was immensely binding. On its shared ground, “an actress and a child psychologist, a textile artist, a labor organizer, and a satirical poet could meet and make friends.” The preoccupation alone separated the Heterodoxy from almost any other kind of women’s club one could name, which at the time were routinely focused on food, fashion, domestic concerns, tips on how to be happy, and certainly not intellectual exchange. This worked its members into a “tight-knit” group that helped each member to sustain her involvement in the cause close to her heart.
Another major cause for many in the club was the alleviation of the wretchedness endured by women factory workers, partly because of the Heterodites’ “own complicated yearnings to be self-supporting through their labor” but mainly out of sympathetic horror at the conditions in which these women lived and worked. Inez Milholland, a dedicated feminist (although often noted more for her beauty than her intellect), for one, could never get over the irony of the anti-suffrage argument that women’s place was in the home when “nine million of them were out at work in mills and factories.”
The same issue repeatedly threw her great pal and sister Heterodite, Crystal Eastman, into despair. Two weeks after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, Eastman gave a speech at the American Academy of Social and Political Science in which she said that when we know that a disaster has occurred because the law of the state has permitted the absence of safety measures, “what we want is to put somebody in jail,” but “when the dead bodies of girls are found piled up against locked doors leading to the exits after a factory fire…what we want is to start a revolution.” Together, Milholland and Eastman worked passionately over the years for suffrage, worker legislation, and what we now call civil rights. Ultimately, Eastman cofounded the ACLU.