In 1919, Katharine Anthony wrote her friend and patron Ethel Sturges Dummer that are many forms of social injustice that cry out for adjustment, but there is no form for which actually less is said and done than for cause of feminism. And, she continued, the things that need to be said and done primarily need women to say and do them.I Anthony, an early social welfare worker, suffragist, and writer, proudly identified as a feminist all her adult life, publishing last of her feminist biographies in her early eighties. Yet from late 1920s on, Anthony's strong feminist stance and approach gradually moderated, reflecting her public response to growing conservative climate, decline of a unified women's movement, and social and political devaluation of women and women's relationships. Like many of her fellow activists in Greenwich Village in those years of disillusionment and political backlash, Anthony shifted her interests from political and social reform toward new, inner-directed investigations of psyche. Yet Anthony's compromises during a time when both her politics and her personal life would be labeled deviant must also be seen within context of her struggle with financial insecurity, particularly after her lover's death left her with responsibility for two small children. What did this moderation mean to Anthony and her circle of once active Greenwich Village suffragists and political rebels? And what did it mean-professionally and personally-for Anthony, a lesbian and an unaffiliated, free-lance scholar without personal or professional patriarchal connections? Now, in media-characterized postfeminist 1980s, we may learn from Anthony, her time, and her choices, as we too face an unfriendly, reactionary political climate, a renewed focus on heterosexuality and pronatalism, and a public preoccupation with New Age spirituality and individual, as opposed to political, change. One of second generation of college-educated, middleclass New Women, Anthony arrived in New York City in 1908, just over thirty years old, anxious to escape her assigned role as dutiful, unmarried daughter and excited at prospect of following up on her urge to write.2 As a child in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Anthony had buried herself in books, becoming first girl from Fort Smith to win a scholarship to George Peabody Normal School in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1901, despite parental opposition, she traveled to Germany to study, accompanied by her first lover, a fellow teacher, described lovingly in her travel notebook as irresistible one. O her return, Anthony enrolled in summer sessions at innovative University of Chicago (earning a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1905). There she was exposed to theories of Veblen, Dewey, and other social philosophers of Progressive Era, as well as to female psychologists and sociologists engaged in questioning and even rejecting traditional role assigned to women. Anthony then took a position at Wellesley College, where she taught rhetoric and composition from 1907 to 1908, and was further influenced by social welfare activist Edith Abbott, with whom she shared lodgings. A year later, turning from career in academia to which she had seemed destined, Anthony moved to New York, a city still reeling from effects of Panic of 1907, which had closed factories and businesses, putting thousands of people out of work. As she threw herself into suffrage politics and social welfare work, theories that Anthony had studied on cause and prevention of poverty and class and sex inequities became realities. She began writing reports and doing research for newly formed, socially conscious Russell Sage Foundation and by 1916 was submitting articles on strikes and