{"id":118048,"date":"2017-11-27T09:00:46","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T14:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118048"},"modified":"2017-11-27T09:59:46","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T14:59:46","slug":"original-single-lady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/27\/original-single-lady\/","title":{"rendered":"The Original Single Lady"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On Saturday, August 1, 1936, the woman who was poised to become the Depression-era guru of the smart single girl was alone in her midtown Manhattan apartment,\u00a0preparing to celebrate the release, and the early glowing reviews, of her first book. The following day, the New York Times <\/em>would sound a note that would soon become familiar, calling it \u201camusing, sensible, worldly wise and very practical\u201d\u2014not gushing words, perhaps, but perfectly suited to both the book and its author, a plain, good-humored magazine editor in her midforties, who would soon be America\u2019s most famous \u201cbachelor girl.\u201d But this description won\u2019t quite do, still less the sour-sounding \u201cspinster.\u201d The best word for who and what she was is the one she coined herself: \u201cLive-Aloner.\u201d It explains her by the choices she made, not the husband she happened to lack. It was a status that depended on equal parts knowledge, pluck, willpower, and self-indulgence\u2014all of which she would\u00a0share with readers in her book: the bluntly titled, wildly popular self-help manual\u00a0Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For a celebratory occasion like this Saturday night, a single lady needed rituals. First came a long soak in the bathtub, and with it the habitual prayer of thanks that she wasn\u2019t at that moment being jostled onto a train at Grand Central Station by commuters bound for the suburbs. After the bath came whatever lotions and perfumes she most loved, whether they were gifts from admirers or treats she\u2019d bought herself. Then, wrapped in a summer-weight negligee (single women ought to own at least two, to be changed with the seasons), she might pour a glass of sherry or shake up a cocktail from the small stash of liquor she kept on a pantry shelf\u2014something her teetotal parents would never have done, but which was now not only acceptable but a marker of a single woman\u2019s sophistication. With glass in hand, she could apply her makeup\u2014another formerly scandalous practice, now perfectly commonplace\u2014and choose what to wear for her evening out.<\/p>\n

Marjorie Hillis had never been a beauty, especially not in the wide-eyed, china-doll style that was popular when she was growing up in the first decades of the twentieth century. But by the age of forty-five she had grown into her height and strong features, and knew how to command a room. Working for more than twenty years on the staff of Vogue <\/em>magazine, rising from caption writer to associate editor, had taught her how to dress and set her dark hair in flattering and fashionable finger waves. Although she could afford to shop at the best department stores in town, with money she both earned and inherited, she was no spendthrift. Instead, she invested thoughtfully in well-made clothes, making sure they coordinated with what she already owned, and taking care of them diligently so they would last. This philosophy had implications far beyond her wardrobe. Happiness, she believed, lay in making one\u2019s own careful choices about everything from what to wear, to where and how to live. And now, in a slim little greenish-gold jewel of a book, she was going to share those lessons of glamorous independence with single women everywhere.<\/p>\n

The shiny cover of Live Alone and Like It <\/em>was deliberately enticing and slyly misleading. It depicted a series of bellhops in matching red uniforms marching to the Live-Aloner\u2019s door, bearing flowers, gifts, and invitations, suggesting that the ultimate goal of her solitary lifestyle was romantic attention from men\u2014and plenty of it. In his introduction to the book, the irreverent Vanity Fair <\/em>editor Frank Crowninshield played up this idea, suggesting that the truly successful Live-Aloner was just playing hard to get. Like medieval nuns, he wrote, self-reliant single ladies \u201cwould soon find suitors playing the guitar under their windows … placing ladders against the walls, sending them amulets by the Mother Superior.\u201d But Marjorie Hillis\u2019s model of the Live-Aloner was far more proactive than this cloistered sister. She made her own choices, mixed her own cocktails, and enjoyed the company of men without feeling any desperation to land one for life. She might spend her evenings in thrall to the adventures of Scarlett O\u2019Hara in Gone with the Wind<\/em>, another brand-new best seller in 1936, but she had no intention of behaving like the swooning heroine of romantic fiction.<\/p>\n

Live Alone and Like It <\/em>announced in its first sentence that it was \u201cno brief in favor of living alone.\u201d Marjorie was not here to argue that a solo state was preferable to any other arrangement, but rather that it was quite likely, \u201ceven if only now and then between husbands.\u201d A woman could be plunged by death or divorce, as much as by choice, into what the book called \u201csolitary refinement,\u201d and in these circumstances the challenge\u2014and the necessity\u2014of learning to make the best of it was more important than ever. Although marketers and reviewers preferred to focus on the lighter, sexier model of the Live-Aloner, a stylish young woman having too much fun to settle for marriage just yet, the author herself never lost sight of those who were single against their will, nor of how quickly the sands could shift under a person\u2019s feet. Conventional wisdom still held that marriage meant security\u2014but then again, people had believed the same thing about the stock market before the crash.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1930s, the Depression had dragged on for so long that its conditions had begun to look like the new normal. FDR\u2019s government tried everything it could to jump-start the economy, but although the New Deal had plenty of individual success stories, the mood of the country as a whole proved harder to shift. Into this sputtering recovery came a crowd of self-appointed sages and a library of self-help books, which brought their readers psychological comfort, even if their formulas for success were questionable at best. The immediate best seller among these was Dale Carnegie\u2019s How to Win Friends and Influence People<\/em>, published in 1936 and like most of its peers, addressed primarily to white-collar men\u2014 aspiring salesmen, struggling clerks, and middle managers\u2014to whom the books promised to divulge the secrets of the conquering corporate heroes, millionaires, executives, and captains of industry. In a relentless fantasia of optimism that refused to acknowledge the power of the economy at large, these books encouraged men to look inward in order to generate success for themselves\u2014and couldn\u2019t help but cruelly imply that those who failed had only themselves, not circumstance, to blame. Few addressed themselves directly to a female reader, and fewer still to those who lacked the husband and family that were supposed to make her happy.<\/p>\n

Marjorie Hillis, too, believed in the power of positive thinking, but she also demanded that her reader face the reality of her circumstances. The path from \u201cextra woman\u201d to \u201cLive-Aloner\u201d took guts, and it began with throwing off the disparaging nicknames and grudging charity that single women were used to enduring. It meant rejecting the drummed-in lesson of a lifetime, that a woman\u2019s true purpose was self-sacrifice to the happiness of others. In this new independent light, Marjorie promised, the Live-Aloner could base the major decisions of her life on her own needs and desires\u2014living where she wanted to, not wherever was most convenient for her relatives. Her book is full of anonymous case studies of women who leave behind suffocating hometowns and husbands for a fresh start, and it\u2019s easy to imagine the thrill that these stories of freedom must have offered to readers. It could never be as easy as the book made it sound, to start a life over alone, but Marjorie wrote with such confidence and passion about the value of independence that it was obvious she was speaking from experience. She knew what it was to feel domestically trapped, and she knew what it took to break free.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joanna Scutts\u00a0is the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women\u2019s History at the New-York Historical Society and a contributor to the\u00a0<\/em>New Republic, the\u00a0<\/em>Guardian, and other publications. She lives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It\u00a0by Joanna Scutts. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Joanna Scutts.\u00a0Published with permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  On Saturday, August 1, 1936, the woman who was poised to become the Depression-era guru of the smart single girl was alone in her midtown Manhattan apartment,\u00a0preparing to celebrate the release, and the early glowing reviews, of her first book. 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