Radical poet Lola Ridge’s landmark presentation, “Women and Creative Will,” given on February 25, 1919, was the first of five lectures by poets from the Speakers Bureau of the modernist magazine, Others. Although poet and chess master Alfred Kreymborg claimed to have thought up the Bureau, it could well have been Ridge’s idea since her friend, anarchist Emma Goldman, had been doing such tours for decades. Other historians said it was conceived by William Saphier, funded by salonniere Margery Currey and directed by writer and lawyer Mitchell Dawson, but Ridge certainly helped organize the tour from the New York end.

“Respectable, high-minded persons are given to classifying writers of vers libre with dog stealers, ticket scalpers, wife deserters, and the Bolshevikii” begins “Miss Ridge to the Rescue,” the newspaper announcement of Ridge’s talk as the first of the series. The poets delivered their speeches up the elegant glass-doored elevator, past the panels of dark wood and pre-Raphaelite murals into the drama school of the Anna Morgan Studios in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building, the epicenter of Chicago’s bohemian art scene.



Chicago was hot, at least in terms of poetry. The Jackson Park Art Colony of writers at the time—Pulitzer Prize-winner Carl Sandburg, Harriet Monroe, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, Ben Hecht and soon-to-be New Yorker Margaret Anderson—circled around critic Floyd Dell who had moved with his wife into the old concession stands of the Columbian Exposition.

In anxious preparation before her engagement in Chicago, Ridge kept changing the title of the speech on individualism, a lecture that might have mentioned Nietzsche, Stirner, and Ibsen, the triumvirate that stressed independence and self-reliance over social expectations. Or she could have taken a less political stance to the subject. According to contemporary anarchist Murray Bookchin, “individualist anarchism remained largely a bohemian lifestyle, most conspicuous in its demands for sexual freedom and enamored of innovations in art, behavior, and clothing.” Right before her arrival, Ridge decided on giving the speech, “Woman and Creative Will.”

“They say there never has been, there is not, and there never will be a really great woman artist,” Ridge begins her speech, 52 years before Linda Nochlin asked, “Why have there been no great women artists?” and ten years before Virginia Woolf published “A Room of One’s Own.”