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Later, wandering her old neighborhood, Margot is stopped by a sight even worse: a “hag” selling pencils on a street corner near the apartment where she once had burned candles and danced with scarves. It’s an archetypal moment in the single narrative: The younger woman sees her future in the older one, in the lonely and forgotten hag selling “pencils she knew no one wanted to buy.” During the mid- and late thirties, protagonists like Margaret-Margot were held up as icons of female disaster. If college and career could make you crazy, the unconventional life was like a suicide. Usually writers posed it as a question: What became of runaway girls, not just the down-and-out but the bohemians, the superannuated flappers, the Margots, who’d set out to see the world without a guidebook? The answer: Either they’d wise up and marry or they’d eventually take a place on the street corner.

Jean Rhys, in her melancholy novels, was a premiere chronicler of the aging adventurer now about to fall apart. The best of her slender oeuvre is After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930). Here we have the problem called Julia, a Londoner long ago self-exiled to Paris, where she’s had her share of exotic experiences. Now she is older and broke. One former lover, noting her shabby clothes, observes, “It was obvious that she had been principally living on the money given to her by various men. Going from one to another had become a habit…she had not saved a penny.” All true. As Julia explains to one of them, “You see, a time comes in your life when, if you have money, you can go one way…. If you have nothing at all…you go another.” And sometimes rather than fight, you take up residence in a fantasy world. “Every day is a new day,” Julia dreamily tells herself. “Every day you are a new person.”

There were millions of single women in 1940—office drones, struggling reporters and nurses, end-of-the-road new women, the homeless, and all those still waving a tattered bohemian flag. But what became of any of them was once again a question put indefinitely on hold.

HOW I WON THE WAR

So much has been written about the experiences of women during World War II that I will not describe in the usual minute detail how they “answered the call to duty,” as invoked by the deep, paternalistic urgings of mid century newsmen—Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Lowell Thomas.

Let’s instead look at it this way: The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single. No one knew if their fiancés, boyfriends, lovers would ever return. As one California woman wrote in her diary in 1942, “All plans changed last week or fell away.” Single meant “available,” but not as prospective brides to men. The War Manpower Commission, supported by the Office of War Information, produced voluminous amounts of working-girl propaganda to fill the void.

Millions of suddenly essential female workers took over male positions such as cabdriver, elevator operator, bus driver, and security guard. In one year, the number of female defense-factory workers increased by 460 percent, a figure that translated into 2.5 million women assigned to the unlikeliest tasks. Instead of making carbon copies or assigning homework, many women now manufactured tank parts, plane frames, engine propellers, parachutes, ships, gas masks, life rafts, ammunition, and artillery. Another two million women continued in or picked up clerical work; the number of newly indoctrinated typists would double before the end of the war. And for the more serious, educated woman, the absence of men presented a guilty holiday. For the first time, many women found positions in symphonies, as chemists, and in some states, as lawyers. Harvard University accepted its first small number of female medical students in 1944.

Suddenly it was glorious and patriotic to be single. Newsreels with titles such as “Glamour Girls of 1943” reported that with “industrial advances” a girl might do “practically anything!” There were no limits to “the types of jobs a woman