The so-called “Roaring Twenties” opened with American women getting the right to vote and went on to produce that enduring icon of female freedom, the flapper, who tossed her bobbed hair and kicked up her heels, beads flying. But when it came to serious women's fiction, the decade, according to literary historians, left us with little to celebrate. Critics have argued both that the era failed to nurture women's literary talents and that the academic establishment grew increasingly dismissive of women's writing after World War I. “In the 1920s, American women writers were demoted and degraded by a nation taking pride in its military victory,” Elaine Showalter concludes in her sweeping history of American women's writing. “In the years following the armistice, women writers were gradually but systematically eliminated from the canon of American literature as it was anthologized, studied, and taught” (A Jury of her Peers, 294). Certainly Showalter is right to observe that most women novelists of the 1920s suffered from critical neglect. Yet that neglect – as distinguished critics like Showalter have repeatedly demonstrated – is not proof positive of the insignificance of those novelists. In fact, the 1920s was a decade of intense professional success and intellectual achievement, not only for literary stars like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, but also for a whole range of women novelists, including Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Edna Ferber, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Ellen Glasgow, Fannie Hurst, Nella Larsen, Julia Peterkin, and Anzia Yezierska.