America in the 1950s was a place of Eisenhower, the Korean Conflict, McCarthy, and Sputnik. Women found themselves trapped into a mold of Donna Reed and June Cleaver, marginalized by the hyper-masculinity of the age. Mystery fiction had become a male bastion as well, promoting hardboiled private eye novels and spy fiction. It would be another three decades before groups to promote equality between the sexes in mystery fiction appeared. Yet during that post-World War II era, seven women … [Read more...] about Atomic Renaissance: American Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s by Jeffrey Marks