Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth-Century America by Sherry L. Smith

Abstract

203 Reviews could continue to make money through touring , especially when traveling to towns located geographically close to one another. Theater owners also fought financial decline by offering gimmicks to get people in the door — raffles, door prizes, and other enticements sought to keep audiences returning to the theater. From San Francisco Eastward illustrates the many ways theater responded to and created society in that city and the region as a whole. Eichin’s study of gender, space, economics, and Irish immigration and ethnic identity are especially engaging and will provide readers with additional ways to understand and challenge extant narratives. Native peoples and performance are discussed briefly, as are Chinese and Japanese immigrant experiences, but African American performers are analyzed with more complexity. This study would make a useful addition to research or courses in theater history, urbanization, Irish immigration, social and geographic mobility, and women in the American West. Laurie Arnold Gonzaga University BOHEMIANS WEST: FREE LOVE, FAMILY, AND RADICALS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA by Sherry L. Smith Heydey, Berkeley, California, 2020. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 408 pages. $28.00 cloth. Sherry L. Smith’s beautifully written and thoroughly captivating new study, Bohemians West, focuses on the long-term romantic and free-love affair between soldier, lawyer, supporter-ofprogressive -causes, and poet Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944) and women’s rights activist and writer Sara Bard Field (1882–1974). Wood is well-known in the history of the Pacific Northwest and Portland. Bard is less so; however , her national fame at the time of their lives eclipsed that of Wood’s. The other “bohemians” in the volume are those whose lives intersect with theirs. They include the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, who introduced Wood and Field in Portland in the autumn of 1910, and Sara’s sister and journalist Mary Field, who was Darrow’s lover for many years while he was married to another. Many other period radicals, both nationally and regionally known, play roles here, too. They include Emma Goldman, Alice Paul, Lincoln Steffens, Jack Reed, Louise Bryant , Margaret Sanger, Marie Equi, Max Eastman, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Other personages from the era also make appearances, indicating here the remarkable lives that Field and Wood lived and that Smith tells. These include Chief Joseph, Oliver O. Howard, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Abigail Scott Duniway, Woodrow Wilson, and members of the Roosevelt family. Smith expertly weaves all these characters into the larger events that they were a part of — westward expansion, labor conflicts, World War I, reform, politics, and social oppression. Given some of those involved, including the main figures, Smith also necessarily deals with the more personal and sensitive topics of free love and romance, birth control and abortion, and marriage and divorce. The focus of the volume is of course on the intimate relationship between Wood and Field from their meeting in 1910 until the former’s death in 1944. Smith arranges that story into twenty chapters and follows a chronological trajectory. She provides two background chapters on the early lives of the protagonists before their meeting, including information on their first marriages and parenthood. Wood was thirty years Field’s senior and was already a practitioner of free-love and an advocate of anarchism by the time they met. Younger and less experienced, Field was more conventional and socially limited. Her husband was Albert Erghott, a Baptist minister. After a brief mission in Burma, the two moved to Portland from the Midwest in 1910 when Erghott earned a ministerial position in a local church. Field, a woman of considerable imagination and ambition, longed for more than what being a minister’s wife and a mother afforded. Only months after their first encounter, Field and Woods embarked on 204 OHQ vol. 122, no. 2 their tumultuous relationship — one that would forever change their lives, and their families’ futures, and would impact national events as it intersected with them. Much of the story Smith tells occupies the next sixteen or so years of Wood’s and Field’s lives. They were principally apart during that time and pursued their own interests as much as each other. Only after the realities of their individual lives and obligations...