We need a positive vision of a better world and the roads leading to it. So let’s imagine we are future historians living in a peaceful, egalitarian, democratic society on a damaged, but stabilized, planet in the year 2117.

Drawing upon the potentials of film noir’s formula of restlessness, dread, and discontent within social corruption, women novelists wrote of threats to the domestic sphere and American society emerging as the global hegemon. Women writers explored crime and violence resulting from the racism and class exploitation while some male authors began writing of more complicated women.