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Author

Joanna Scutts

Joanna Scutts is the author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism and The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.

All Articles
October 18, 2022
Joanna Scutts
How World War I Crushed the American Left
Adam Hochschild’s new book documents a period of thriving radical groups and their devastating suppression.
June 20, 2022
MagazineJoanna Scutts
The End of the Art-Baby Problem
In the lives of women from Alice Neel to Ursula Le Guin, motherhood was entwined with a quest to make art.
January 13, 2020
Joanna Scutts
How Crystal Eastman Fought for Equality
Eastman was a women’s suffragist, labor reformer, and founder of the ACLU, but her work never quite took center stage.
April 26, 2019
Joanna Scutts
The Art of Unruliness
Saidiya Hartman’s book evokes the longings of black women once labeled “wayward.”
December 19, 2018
Joanna Scutts
How to Survive Howard Hughes’s Hollywood
Karina Longworth’s book ‘Seduction’ dismantles the story of a playboy.
September 14, 2018
Joanna Scutts
Britain’s Boarding School Problem
How the country’s elite institutions have shaped colonialism, Brexit, and today’s global super-rich
May 10, 2018
Joanna Scutts
Viv Albertine’s Punk Memories
“To Throw Away Unopened” is a memoir of family, freedom, and rebellion.
April 20, 2018
Joanna Scutts
The Fight Women Won
Militant suffragettes’ most important tactic was to turn women’s bodies—supposedly passive, pliant, and protected—into a battleground. 
March 6, 2018
Joanna Scutts
Wallis Simpson Was No Bold Forerunner
As a British royal wedding approaches, a new biography of the Duchess of Windsor shows a life of fury and prejudice.
June 13, 2016
Joanna Scutts
Genius and the Masculine Mania of Publishing
In A. Scott Berg’s book, and in the new film, the worn-out trope of the male literary genius gets one more day in the sun.
May 27, 2016
Joanna Scutts
The Depression Era’s Magic Bullet For Weight Loss
The most effective diet pill of the twentieth century helped thousands of people lose weight—by boiling them from the inside.
April 13, 2016
Joanna Scutts
A Publishing House of Her Own
Blanche Knopf built the reputation of the legendary publisher, but her name was left off the masthead.

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