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They meet for lunch. Ann, at one point, turns to Joan, the ex-con, and says, “It’s you I really envy—your independence and your courage…I accepted the first man who wanted to marry me—I thought it meant comfort and security.” The two friends stare at Ann in disbelief. She goes on: “Oh, I suppose I should be the happiest woman in the world—a beautiful home, successful husband, and nice youngster. But somehow the things that make other people happy leave me cold. I guess something must have been left out of my makeup.”

As if on cue, they light their Chesterfields—three to one match. According to superstition, one says, the last to get her cigarette in there and lit will suffer a horrible fate. In this case, no big surprise, that’s Ann Dvorak. Whatever it was “left out of [her] makeup” kicks in like a drug.

She flees her home, taking the child with her onto a cruise. Then, leaving him alone in her stateroom, she wanders the ballrooms looking for men. She picks out a scary sort, a gangster with a round face and tight striped suit, and off they go at port, leaving the boy on the ship. (The father eventually rescues him.) Inexplicably, then, she cuts off all contact with her family and begins a life of petty crime. One day months later the husband runs into the girlfriends, Bette and Joan, and decides to make a new life with them—that they will be the “three.” He marries Joan and hires steno girl Bette as the little boy’s governess.

Another day months later Ann shows up outside the house, her thuggish boyfriend looming behind. Annoyed, he pushes the ragged-looking Ann toward a smart-looking woman approaching in furs. Ann looks up to see Joan, her replacement, home from shopping. She asks after the boy, then gets to the point. She needs money. Joan gives her a little, and Ann is gone, back to her gangster. She gives him the money; he shoves her. “Hey!” he shouts, “ain’t that dame married to your husband?”

Throughout these years, single women were objects of suspicion. Perhaps they worked when men did not. Perhaps broke and alone, they hitchhiked from place to place—as unwomanly a thing as a knife fight. In mass-movie fantasy, some grew into self-contained man-eating monsters.

But most real women, like most men, were just frustrated. They had been forced to take an unexpected detour from what they once would have called “the normal things.” And this tangent had lasted so long that the once-upon-a-time state known as Normal now seemed exotic. Especially for the young among them—all those who had grown up without dance crazes and arguments about flappers and smoking. Asked what she remembered about these years of “massive economic dislocation” (as common a phrase as “Jazz Age”), Bess the bookkeeper said, “I wanted panty hose. I wanted a room that had fewer than four sisters and a cousin in it. I wanted to get married—well, forget that. Forget the room while we’re at it. Panty hose.”

THE SWING OF THINGS

The original new women, now in their fifties, had organized their networks and pushed hard for their causes—aid to indigent families with children, civil rights, minimum-wage laws, nationally sponsored health care—and they had a stalwart ally in Eleanor Roosevelt. Several of the circle headed New Deal agencies, and as a unified block they spoke out about the unspoken everything, from the harassment of unwed mothers to the instant need for antilynching legislation. Now they looked toward Europe.

Genevieve Parkhurst asked in a 1935 issue of Harper’s: “Are the women of America going to realize the destiny marked out for them when they began their long march toward emancipation? Or are they, like the women of Germany, to stand accused of having betrayed themselves?”

The American Women’s Association called upon all American women to fight fascism, which dictated that women stay in their homes and reproduce for the glory of the Fatherland.

I imagine average American women hearing this and blinking up into the light, confused, exhausted, and mumbling something like “panty hose.” As historian