The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It
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From the flapper to The Feminine Mystique, a cultural history of single women in the city through the reclaimed life of glamorous guru Marjorie Hillis.
You've met the extra woman: she's sophisticated, she lives comfortably alone, she pursues her passions unabashedly, and—contrary to society's suspicions—she really is happy. Despite multiple waves of feminist revolution, today's single woman is still mired in judgment or, worse, pity. But for a brief, exclamatory period in the late 1930s, she was all the rage. A delicious cocktail of cultural history and literary biography, The Extra Woman transports us to the turbulent and transformative years between suffrage and the sixties, when, thanks to the glamorous grit of one Marjorie Hillis, single women boldly claimed and enjoyed their independence.
Marjorie Hillis, pragmatic daughter of a Brooklyn preacher, was poised for reinvention when she moved to the big city to start a life of her own. Gone were the days of the flirty flapper; ladies of Depression-era New York embraced a new icon: the independent working woman. Hillis was already a success at Vogue when she published a radical self-help book in 1936: Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. With Dorothy Parker–esque wit, she urged spinsters, divorcées, and "old maids" to shed derogatory labels and take control of their lives, and her philosophy became a phenomenon. From the importance of a peignoir to the joy of breakfast in bed (alone), Hillis's tips made single life desirable and chic.
In a style as irresistible as Hillis's own, Joanna Scutts, a leading cultural critic, explores the revolutionary years following the Live-Alone movement, when the status of these "brazen ladies" peaked and then collapsed. Other innovative lifestyle gurus set similar trends that celebrated guiltless female independence and pleasure: Dorothy Draper's interior design smash, Decorating Is Fun! transformed apartments; Irma Rombauer's warm and welcoming recipe book, The Joy of Cooking, reassured the nervous home chef that she, too, was capable of decadent culinary feats. By painting the wider picture, Scutts reveals just how influential Hillis's career was, spanning decades and numerous best sellers. As she refashioned her message with every life experience, Hillis proved that guts, grace, and perseverance would always be in vogue.
With this vibrant examination of a remarkable life and profound feminist philosophy, Joanna Scutts at last reclaims Marjorie Hillis as the original queen of a maligned sisterhood. Channeling Hillis's charm, The Extra Woman is both a brilliant exposé of women who forged their independent paths before the domestic backlash of the 1950s trapped them behind picket fences, and an illuminating excursion into the joys of fashion, mixology, decorating, and other manifestations of shameless self-love.
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Joanna Scutts. (2017). The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. Liveright.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Joanna Scutts. 2017. The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. Liveright.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Joanna Scutts, The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. Liveright, 2017.
MLA Citation (style guide)Joanna Scutts. The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. Liveright, 2017.
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From the flapper to The Feminine Mystique, a cultural history of single women in the city through the reclaimed life of glamorous guru Marjorie Hillis.
You've met the extra woman: she's sophisticated, she lives comfortably alone, she pursues her passions unabashedly, and—contrary to society's suspicions—she really is happy. Despite multiple waves of feminist revolution, today's single woman is still mired in judgment or, worse, pity. But for a brief, exclamatory period in the late 1930s, she was all the rage. A delicious cocktail of cultural history and literary biography, The Extra Woman transports us to the turbulent and transformative years between suffrage and the sixties, when, thanks to the glamorous grit of one Marjorie Hillis, single women boldly claimed and enjoyed their independence.
Marjorie Hillis, pragmatic daughter of a Brooklyn preacher, was poised for reinvention when she moved to the big city to start a life of her own. Gone were the days of the flirty flapper; ladies of Depression-era New York embraced a new icon: the independent working woman. Hillis was already a success at Vogue when she published a radical self-help book in 1936: Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. With Dorothy Parker–esque wit, she urged spinsters, divorcées, and "old maids" to shed derogatory labels and take control of their lives, and her philosophy became a phenomenon. From the importance of a peignoir to the joy of breakfast in bed (alone), Hillis's tips made single life desirable and chic.
In a style as irresistible as Hillis's own, Joanna Scutts, a leading cultural critic, explores the revolutionary years following the Live-Alone movement, when the status of these "brazen ladies" peaked and then collapsed. Other innovative lifestyle gurus set similar trends that celebrated guiltless female independence and pleasure: Dorothy Draper's interior design smash, Decorating Is Fun! transformed apartments; Irma Rombauer's warm and welcoming recipe book, The Joy of Cooking, reassured the nervous home chef that she, too, was capable of decadent culinary feats. By painting the wider picture, Scutts reveals just how influential Hillis's career was, spanning decades and numerous best sellers. As she refashioned her message with every life experience, Hillis proved that guts, grace, and perseverance would always be in vogue.
With this vibrant examination of a remarkable life and profound feminist philosophy, Joanna Scutts at last reclaims Marjorie Hillis as the original queen of a maligned sisterhood. Channeling Hillis's charm, The Extra Woman is both a brilliant exposé of women who forged their independent paths before the domestic backlash of the 1950s trapped them behind picket fences, and an illuminating excursion into the joys of fashion, mixology, decorating, and other manifestations of shameless self-love.
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September 1, 2017
A New-York Historical Society historian examines the impact of 20th-century newspaper columnist and women's self-help guru Marjorie Hillis (1889-1971).Hillis first entered American consciousness with the 1936 publication of her bestselling book, Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. Then single and living and working in Manhattan, she exemplified the glamorous "Live-Aloner." Scutts suggests that Hillis achieved fame during this time because the Depression had opened a space of "possibility and promise" for working women, who saw old certainties about marital security collapse with the economy. Combining the positive-thinking approach espoused by such self-help writers as Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie with a sharp eye for home and personal style, Hillis helped single women see their solitary menages as spaces for "creativity and reinvention." By 1939, she disappeared from the cultural scene into a happy marriage. During the 1940s, women had the opportunity to become an important part of a wartime economy and feel independent as never before. Hillis became a widow in 1949, just as the United States entered a period when the new gender ideal for women emphasized domesticity and subservience to husband and family. Working very much against cultural trends, Hillis published another book, You Can Start All Over, in 1951, which encouraged mature live-aloners to take pride in their accomplishments and to continue engaging with the world through work and other social activities. While the feminist movement of the 1960s challenged the cultural backlash against women, Hillis wrote Keep Going and Like It (1967), which offered retired single women advice on continuing to take pleasure in the world on their own stylish terms. Rich in historical detail, Scutts' book is not just an elegant biography of a neglected protofeminist figure and a vivid exploration of American sociological history; it is also an important homage to a woman's right to choose how to live her life. A sparklingly intelligent and well-researched cultural history.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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September 11, 2017
In her first book, literary critic Scutts unabashedly celebrates the midcentury single working woman using the life and works of Marjorie Hillis, whose 1936 bestseller, Live Alone and Like It, defined a lifestyle and a brief cultural phenomenon. Scutts follows Hillis through the proceeding decades and the publication of several other books, and a interlude of wedded bliss. She soundly situates her subject within the budding self-help industry during the Depression, the wartime shifts for working women, and the ascendancy of the 1950s model of marriage. Throughout, Scutts provides women’s labor statistics and smart analyses and brings them to life with the stories of other advice mavens and lifestyle gurus, including Martha Fishback, the highest-paid female copywriter in advertising in the 1930s, and Irma Rombauer, author of Joy of Cooking, who shaped the opportunities available to women at that time. Like her protagonist, Scutts has a voice that is zesty, dashing, and full of verve (“Her story showed that nonconformity and living alone could still be desirable options—at least if the trappings were sufficiently glamorous and the heroine safely upper class”). Scutts is also sensitive to the impact of class and race on those opportunities, recognizing that Hillis’s glamorous prescriptions worked best for the wealthy and white. Scutts finds in Hillis a feminist pioneer and a forward thinker, even when “the Live-Aloner,” as she calls her, became a figure of nostalgia. Scutts uncovers the life of a little-known feminist hero in this thoroughly enjoyable romp through 20th-century American history.
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November 1, 2017
Before there was a Carrie Bradshaw or a Mary Richards, a Bridget Jones or a Holly Golightly, there was Marjorie Hillis. The daughter of a prominent minister and conservative mother, Hillis was an unlikely spokesperson for the cause of women's independence, but her advice columns and books were beacons of light in an otherwise dismal landscape for women who were single and liked it that way, or at least wanted to. Coining the term live-aloners, Hillis shaped the attitudes and behaviors that would ensure a single woman's success across a vast spectrum of situations, from careers to cocktails, budgets to beaus. Hillis' self-help audience in the 1930s were victims of the Great Depression and fearful of a volatile political landscape. For them, her reassuring voice and encouraging wisdom provided the motivation they needed to survive. Scutts' biography of this Depression-era feminist positions Hillis very much as a woman of her own time, and her thorough scholarship deftly illustrates how Hillis' iconic views continue to make her a woman for all time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
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September 15, 2017
In 1936, Marjorie Hillis published the best-selling Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman, the first self-help manual for single women. In her first book, Scutts examines Hillis's life from her childhood as the daughter of a famed Presbyterian minister in Brooklyn to her journalism career as an editor at Vogue. Scutts also covers a history of single working women, particularly in New York, and other popular self-help and cookbooks that rode on Hillis's wave of popularity. Hillis continued to write other advice books including Orchids on Your Budget, Corn Beef and Caviar, and an unsuccessful narrative poem about the careers of seven women, Work Ends at Nightfall. After she married at age 49, to much joking about giving up her single status, Hillis took a hiatus until after the death of her husband when she penned two advice books: one for newly single women, You Can Start All Over and one for older women, Keep Going and Like It. VERDICT Although readers may be over the fad of single women lit, Scutts offers a compelling look at Hillis, a largely forgotten but important figure.--Kate Stewart, American Folklife Ctr., Washington, DC
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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From the flapper to The Feminine Mystique, a cultural history of single women in the city through the reclaimed life of glamorous guru Marjorie Hillis.
You've met the extra woman: she's sophisticated, she lives comfortably alone, she pursues her passions unabashedly, and—contrary to society's suspicions—she really is happy. Despite multiple waves of feminist revolution, today's single woman is still mired in judgment or, worse, pity. But for a brief, exclamatory period in the late 1930s, she was all the rage. A delicious cocktail of cultural history and literary biography, The Extra Woman transports us to the turbulent and transformative years between suffrage and the sixties, when, thanks to the glamorous grit of one Marjorie Hillis, single women boldly claimed and enjoyed their independence.
Marjorie Hillis, pragmatic daughter of a Brooklyn preacher, was poised for reinvention when she moved to the big city to start a life of her...
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