Like other moral panics before and since, the sex crime hysteria of 1937 had far more to do with fantasy than reality. The monster that haunted the American imagination—the maddened sex-beast preying on women and children—was the incarnation of widespread anxieties generated by the social conditions of the Great Depression: fears about family dissolution; the threat of social anarchy; the impotent fury of vast numbers of men, suddenly deprived of their traditional roles as breadwinners. It was no accident that the panic would come to a very abrupt end.[72]
