If you must be stuck overnight at JFK airport as I recently was, it helps to have a fascinating book. Mine was a gift from Nadine Strossen, champion of free expression, who had just found me a copy of a 1986 curiosity: Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy.

Women studies scholar Judith Schwarz began this book in 1976 after coming upon a 1920 tribute album of notes, photos and drawings entitled “Heterodoxy to Marie.” From 1912 to 1940, under the banner of “the Heterodoxy club,” Marie Jenney Howe brought together extraordinary women of diverse outlooks for off-the-record dialogues on matters of the day: suffrage, communism, militarism, infant mortality, psychology, free love.

Gathering in Greenwich Village, the “Heterodites” included “Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, anarchists, liberals and radicals of all opinions.” They “possessed minds startlingly free of prejudice…. All could talk; all could argue; all could listen.” Some were Irish, some Jewish, one African-American, some straight, others lesbian.

These lawyers, journalists, stockbrokers, physicians, educators, psychologists and radio commentators agreed on little. What made them a singular tribe was their presumption that women should be as free as men in thoughts, questions and expressions.

They paid for their radicalism. “Before long,” Schwarz reports, “the entire group would be followed to meetings by government agents, some of the women would be accused of spying and being traitors to the United States, and Howe would be arrested in front of her apartment building. Several other Heterodoxy members would be beaten in front of the White House, imprisoned for daring to question President Woodrow Wilson’s anti-suffrage policies, force-fed and brutally manhandled by prison guards, and psychologically tortured for daring to silently hold banners proclaiming women’s right to vote.”

Reading this in the 2 a.m. silence of JFK, I found myself wondering anew what we heterodox women often ask each other: Why is the Heterodox Academy still mostly made up of men? Are women too busy taking care of their locales to attend to the global? Have only a few of our female contemporaries suffered unreasonably for their radicalism? And yet (to me) we always feel right on the eve.