Customer Reviews

All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930

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What a group of women they were, nonpareils all. They tossed aside convention to illuminate a period marked by freedom of expression, a disregard for racial barriers, and amazing creativity. The Victorian Ea was on its way out, and they were high kicking it aside. The years 1913 - 1930 in New York City were described as a period of "Going Public with one's animal nature." This was especially true in Greenwich Village and Harlem where white bohemians joined Black Americans in a celebration of jazz and the blues.
Consider just a few in Andrea Barnet's remarkable cast of characters: Bessie Smith, Isadora Duncan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Sanger, Gertrude Stein, and that's only a sampling.

Each chapter focuses on a different woman - her life, her pals, and her contributions to this electric change. Mina Loy was an artist and poet. British born she lived in Florence with her husband and two children, ages 9 and 7. When her husband ran off with his mistress Loy determined that she must chart her own course and, in order to do this, she must go to New York City. Leaving her children behind with their Italian nurse she set sail. Tall and extremely attractive she was an eye-catching beauty whose poetry would be widely published.

Edna St, Vincent Millay, a young Maine poet already published in her mid twenties, set tongues wagging with her celebration of the Armistice in 1918 - she and two fellows rode back and forth all night on the Staten Island ferry, chasing along beaches the trio drank jug wine until dawn. At that time Millay returned to her cold water flat and sat down to furiously pound out more poetry.

Who could forget Bessie Smith, all six feet and 200+ pounds of her? "The funk is flyin'" was one of her favorite phrases and she happily ate at a generously laden kitchen table, washing down her food with homemade liquor.

With more than 50 unforgettable photographs and an exciting, comprehensive text Barnet has painted a colorful portrait of the Harlem Renaissance and the women who made it happen. Equal parts history and biography, "All-Night Party" is not to be missed.

- Gail Cooke

Well written and very easy to read, this book is a very good introduction to the pioneers of 'feminism' (I dread using that word, a better phrase would be women who chose to define themselves, who chose to live their lives the way they wanted to). But in some ways the author's reach exceeded her grasp, the reader is given only fragments, brief snapshots of wildly different women that are only tenuously connected by their sex. Mina Loy and Bessie Smith were as radically different from each other as they were from most woman of their times, they didn't so much live in their times as they rose above it. The author just doesn't give enough depth or insight into their lives that I can see any connection.
Again this is a very readable book and there are golden tidbits here..Jane Heap is a revelation and the treatment of her life and relationship is excellent. I guess you can't really hold against the author if at the end you say to yourself "I wish there had been more!"

What a thrill to read about such openly free women being themselves and creating fabulous literature and music to keep us going through the years. These women are my heros! Brilliant! Bravo for the ladies. I have purchased this book for all of my special women friends.

This is a fascinating book, but the title is misleading. "All Night Party" suggests a sexy, scandalous tell-all book about the Twenties -- full of long-legged blonde flappers dancing on table tops and swigging from flasks, and gangsters piling up loot, and sexy black jazz men blowing their trumpets all night long.

In reality, most of the women Barnet writes about were lesbians who disliked men, and parties, and had little interaction with the wilder, sillier, more entertaining aspects of Prohibition. Many of these women "acted out" and abused drugs and alcohol, but you don't get a sense of pleasure or reckless abandon, more a sad case of personal demons destroying talent from within.

Barnet never resolves the contradiction here. A Twenties girl might bob her hair, swig liquor from a flask, dance on table tops -- and still fall into a proper marriage with a boy from her own class. Pleasure and excitement don't always lead to rebellion and non-conformity. By the same token, a lesbian artist might live alone in a gloomy flat and paint beautiful paintings, but not get any pleasure out of her solitary life. Pleasure is not political, and rebels are not always happy in their rebellion. Barnet tends to confuse the issue and sentimentalize both the flappers and the feminists, as if the two were one in the same.

In reality, the same girls who danced on table tops in the Twenties were often the ones most likely to express bigoted and reactionary views in later life. Case in point, Margaret Mitchell, a Southern girl who went to Smith college. She lived the Flapper lifestyle to the fullest, by her own admission, and went on to write GONE WITH THE WIND -- full of prurient sexual titillation, to be sure, but also a virtual dictionary of racial hatred and lies. Nothing vicious little southerner Peggy Mitchell learned at Yankee Smith College prevented her from becoming a passsionate cheerleader for the Ku Klux Klan. Privilege and education are not a vaccination against hate. But this is one reality modern feminists are desperate not to recognize, because most of them still come from fancy white girl "finishing schools" like Smith and Barnard.

By the same token, Barnet keeps insisting that parties and clubs in Greenwich Village and Harlem were "interacial" in the Twenties. Maybe so, but she doesn't explore the problem fully. Certainly one can imagine a pretty blonde flapper eyeing a black trumpet player in Harlem with innocent admiration. But if the two of them got together, wouldn't the reaction of the black women of the time be one of rage and humiliation? Barnet remains discreetly silent on this issue. By the same token, a rich young college man could easily manage an affair with a high-yellow gal at the Cotton Club -- but his wife would certainly turn out to be a blue-eyed blonde. So what was the All Night Party really worth? Who was really celebrating, and why?

Originally, the manuscript mustn't have found a U.S./U.K. publisher, as is made obvious by the fact that it first appeared in German translation. Consequently, it wormed its way back stateside and Algonquin Books took mercy on it. The book is a cut-and-paste, Readers-Digest-Condensed-Books version of the solid biographies available for each and every woman treated here. The author has not added a shred of original research or insight. Bessie Smith's connection with Harlem was tenuous. She played, and recorded in, New York a few times, but never lived there. A much better choice would have been Mamie Smith - but that would have required research, see? The Queen of Greenwich Village, for instance, was a woman known as Romany Marie. Again, the author would have had to do her homework. And neither Bessie Smith nor Ethel Waters are anything to do with Bohemia. Thus, the reader is tricked by both the book's title and subtitle, as well as by a lazy author.