Jenny Rhodes' father moves into the house of his new girlfriend who has three children; two boys and a girl. Jenny is a beautiful girl, while her stepsister is fat and unattractive. The girls do not get along together and there is jealousy on the part of her stepsister when Jenny steals her boyfriend. Most of the young girls her age avoid her since they fear that they too will lose their boyfriends to her.
Spending most of her time alone, at the age of seventeen and a half starts going to an out of the way bar where she discovers the power of her beauty over men. She is picked up by a married man whose life is unhappy and decides to make her living by being a prostitute.
She decides to abandon that type of life after she has made several good investments and decides to go to school. Events take place and people she meets make her aim for a new life.
Excerpt:
The time was late 1919, and there had been talk of the gaining strength of the abolitionists who were in favor of prohibiting the producing, sale , distribution and the drinking of beer and whiskey. The country was in an uproar but the forces in favor of prohibition were gaining strength by the likes of the religious leaders and people like Neal Dow, known as the Napoleon of Temperance, Bishop James Conner Jr., and the celebrated and controversial Carrie Nation, among others."
After World War I, the entire world was settling in with new movements in Art. Literature, Movies and the easing of restrictions on women. They could now wear dresses at knee length, bobbed their hair and were given the right to vote in many places. The "new" women were called Flappers and the age was the Roaring Twenties. There were new movements in politics in Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain and Turkey among other countries. The world, it seemed was in a flux of new ideas, and an exalted desire to reach out and move away from the past.