From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women 1920-1940 (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States , Vol 8)

The Roaring Twenties are remembered as years of prosperity and frivolity that ended abruptly with the Great Depression of the 1930s. But for women there was continuity to these years, as their ability to effect change in political, cultural, and economic arenas began to gain strength. These new women listened to radio, starred in movies, and reigned as consumers. They could legally vote on the same basis as men everywhere in the U.S. They wore clothes that scandalized their grandparents but were far more comfortable than anything their mothers ever wore. In Eleanor Roosevelt, they found a model recognized internationally as a leading influence on American policy. But not all women shared equally in this emancipation. Black women, Jewish women, Native American women, poor women, immigrant women--they found many of the newly opened doors slammed shut for them. Even in the prosperous days of the flapper, some women faced a daily battle for survival. Meet educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, tennis champion Helen Wills, Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Fauset, blues singers Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, Olympic medalist Babe Didrikson, lawyers, psychologists, labor leaders, farmworkers, housewives, and the host of women who shaped these decades.