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WORK TITLE: The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://joannascutts.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in the United Kingdom.
EDUCATION:King’s College, Cambridge, B.A.; Sussex University, M.A.; Columbia University, Ph.D. (English and comparative literature).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Literary critic. Cultural historian. Co-curated the multimedia interactive installation “Women’s Voices” and the gallery show “Hotbed” for the Center for Women’s History.
MEMBER:National Book Critics’ Circle member.
AWARDS:Inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, New Yorker, and Guardian U.S.
SIDELIGHTS
Joanna Scutts is a New York-based literary critic and cultural historian. Born in the United Kingdom, she received her bachelor’s degree from King’s College, Cambridge, her master’s degree from Sussex University, and her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. Her dissertation focused on modernism and the cultural afterlife of World War I.
Scutts was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society, where she co-curated the multimedia interactive installation “Women’s Voices” and the gallery show “Hotbed” for the Center for Women’s History. She contributes regularly to periodicals, including Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, New Yorker, and Guardian US. Scutts is a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle.
The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It is Scutts’ first book. Marjorie Hillis is arguably best known as the woman who, in 1936, coined the phrase “Live Alone and Like It.” The simple sentence led a generation of women to question a life of codependence on a man, and instead consider the possibility of a future life without a spouse upon whom to rely. In The Extra Woman, Scutts offers the reader a full history of the life, motivation, and impact of the revolutionary woman. Barbara Spindel in Christian Science Monitor described the book as “smart and enjoyable.”
Scutts details Hillis’ upbringing, indicating that her independence-promoting mantras were in part a result of her privilege. Hillis grew up in Manhattan, the daughter of a well-known minister and a conservative mother. As an adult Hillis began working at Vogue magazine as an editor. It was there that she began developing her style as a voice of independence and a new form of feminism.
Scutts relays the significance of the era in which Hillis wrote and thrived. Her book, Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman, came out in the midst of the Great Depression, and her readers were low on hope. Hillis’ reassuring voice and insistence on perseverance and positivity lifted readers’ spirits up, giving them motivation to look beyond their current suffering and strive toward a better future. The book was a landmark in the budding Self-Help industry, a genre that arose in response to the desperation of the Great Depression. The industry provided a voice to guide individuals affected by the financial disaster out of their misery.
Hillis’ book spoke to women of the era. With the war approaching, these women found their traditional roles shifting, resulting in them leaving the house to work manual labor jobs and taking on the role of primary breadwinner of their families. As women survived without men, Hillis’ message of independence from husbands resonated acutely.
Scutts describes Hillis’ life and works after the success of Live Alone and Like It. In 1939, three years after the book came out, Hillis married. Her marriage caused a small scandal, with periodicals suggesting marriage is what Hillis wanted all along. Scutts counters this, arguing that Hillis’ decision to marry typified her feminist attitude: women ought to do what they want. Hillis’ husband died in 1949, and in 1951 she released another book, You Can Start All Over. This book, and her 1967 Keep Going and Like It preached similar ideas of independence and rejecting social pressures as those presented in Live Alone and Like It.
Carol Haggas in Booklist wrote Scutts’ “thorough scholarship deftly illustrates how Hillis’ iconic views continue to make her a woman for all time,” while a contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a sparklingly intelligent and well-researched cultural history.” A contributor to Publishers Review wrote: “Scutts uncovers the life of a little-known feminist hero in this thoroughly enjoyable romp through 20th-century American history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2017, Carol Haggas, review of The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It, p. 5.
California Bookwatch, January, 2018, review of The Extra Woman.
Christian Science Monitor, January 2, 2018, Barbara Spindel, “The Extra Woman is the Smart, Enjoyable Story of the 1930s Maverick Who Embraced Singledom.”
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of The Extra Woman.
Publishers Weekly, September 11, 2017, review of The Extra Woman, p. 55.
Joanna Scutts is a literary critic, cultural historian, and the author of The Extra Woman, the story of the 1930s lifestyle guru Marjorie Hillis and the lives of single women in midcentury America (available here!) Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Guardian US, among many other venues. She was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society, where she co-curated the multimedia interactive installation “Women’s Voices” and the gallery show “Hotbed” for the Center for Women’s History.
Originally from London, she received her BA from King’s College, Cambridge, MA from Sussex University, and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, awarded in 2010 for a dissertation focused on modernism and the cultural afterlife of World War I. Joanna is a member and former board member of the National Book Critics’ Circle and is represented by Kate Johnson of Wolf Literary Agency.
Joanna Scutts is the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society and a contributor to the New Republic, the Guardian, and other publications. She lives in New York.
INTERVIEW: JOANNA SCUTTS
By JOE MELIA, Thursday Mar 8, 2018
Ahead of her appearance at 2018 Bristol Women’s Literature Festival, writer and cultural historian Joanna Scutts tells Bristol 24/7 about her latest book, The Extra Woman, which examines the impact of trailblazing lifestyle guru Marjorie Hillis and how she inspired women from the 1930s onwards to ‘live alone and like it’.
Marjorie Hillis is relatively unknown today. Are you surprised that’s the case considering her influence as a feminist self-help writer during her lifetime?
Marjorie Hillis insisted in her books that women could be happy and fulfilled with a career, friends, and a home and community they loved, even if they never married or had children. She thought it was every woman’s responsibility to create the life she really wanted. When she became famous, during the late 1930s, American society was changing rapidly, and many women were going out to work, delaying marriage, and tasting independence for the first time. The turbulence of the Depression and then of World War II made readers more receptive to new ideas about how to live, including the idea that women needed to work to support themselves and their families. After the war, there was a powerful resurgence of the idea that women’s highest purpose was childbearing and housekeeping. In that climate, nobody wanted to hear that there might be another way for women to be happy.
If Hillis’ first book, Live Alone and Like It, was published now do you think it would be a bestseller?
I’d like to think so: much of the advice about asserting yourself and making your own choices is timeless, and Hillis’s writing is wonderfully witty and smart (the book is available now, in a lovely new edition from Virago.) She certainly speaks from a position of considerable social privilege, and she didn’t acknowledge the extent to which race and class limited women’s choices, or how difficult it could be for them to succeed professionally in a working world dominated by men. Despite these blind spots, though, readers of all backgrounds loved the book, perhaps because she made it sound so simple to “choose the life you want, and then make it for yourself.”
How radical was the publication of Live Alone and Like It and Hillis’ subsequent books when they were published?
I think it was their success that really made them radical—Live Alone sold more than 100,000 copies in the first three months of publication. The publishers had to scramble to catch up to the fact that a book they thought of as a fun little curiosity was becoming a social movement before their eyes. The “Live-Aloner” was the name Hillis gave to the characters in her books and to her readers, so they didn’t have to be defined by what they lacked (a husband) but by the choice they made—to build an independent life. Although the books were written in this lighthearted, entertaining way, that insistence on independence, no matter how old you were or what your situation was, gave them a radical backbone.
You say in the book “exercising the right to live your life as you choose is still a political act”. Do you think much has changed in attitudes towards women’s lifestyle choices since Live Alone and Like It came out in 1936?
I’d say it varies a lot by age and location – it’s much easier, or at least much less unusual, to be a single woman if you’re young and you live in a city, and that was true in the 1930s as much as today. But it’s still hard for a woman to declare that she has made her choice to live alone, and not have people assume it’s a fallback option, or denial, or just what she’s doing until she meets someone. We still have very limited ways of talking about happiness, fulfillment, and a good life outside of the model of the nuclear family. One really powerful effect of Marjorie Hillis’s fame was to make single women visible in the culture in a way that they’d never really been before, at least not in a way that was aspirational rather than pitiable. I hope that by reminding people of her work and her life, I can do my part to empower and celebrate modern Live-Aloners.
What do you think of the aims and ambitions of Bristol Women’s Literature Festival?
I’m so honoured to be a part of it—nothing compares to the energy of a festival audience, and the timing couldn’t be better for raising women’s voices and hearing their stories. It’s a fantastic range of subjects too, from reading and writing Young Adult books to exploring the legacy of the Suffragettes, so I can’t wait to hear the conversations that come out of it.
The Extra Woman
California Bookwatch. (Jan. 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Extra Woman
Joanna Scutts
Liveright Publishing
c/o W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
9781631492730 $27.95 www.wwnorton.com
The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It comes from a literary critic who examines the life and times of the woman who, in 1936, coined the phrase 'Live Alone and Like It', inspiring generations of women to strive for independence rather than codependence. Women who know relatively little about Hillis aside from her quote will find this a lively survey of how she fled her conservative family roots to Manhattan, became an editor at Vogue Magazine, and build her career in self-help, adopting a feminist perspective long before feminism was politically active. The Extra Woman should be in any women's history or biography holding as a powerful testimony of how one woman promoted women's independence before all others.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Extra Woman." California Bookwatch, Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526996910/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=00590e81. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526996910
The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It
Carol Haggas
Booklist. 114.5 (Nov. 1, 2017): p5.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.
By Joanna Scutts.
Nov. 2017.320p. Norton/Liveright, $27.95 (97816314927301.306.8.
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. --Carol Haggas
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Haggas, Carol. "The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2017, p. 5. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515382854/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=50507f80. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515382854
The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It
Publishers Weekly. 264.37 (Sept. 11, 2017): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It
Joanna Scutts. Liveright, $27.95 (320p)
ISBN 978-1-63149-273-0
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. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It." Publishers Weekly, 11 Sept. 2017, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505634932/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5ac0add3. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505634932
Scutts, Joanna: THE EXTRA WOMAN
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Scutts, Joanna THE EXTRA WOMAN Liveright/Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 11, 14 ISBN: 978-1-63149-273-0
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Scutts, Joanna: THE EXTRA WOMAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192100/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8441cd8d. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192100
'The Extra Woman' is the smart, enjoyable story of the 1930s maverick who embraced singledom
Barbara Spindel
The Christian Science Monitor. (Jan. 2, 2018): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Barbara Spindel
In 1936, an editor at Vogue wrote a book in which she put forth the radical notion that women need not be married in order to partake of the joys of eating, drinking, and entertaining at home. "Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman" became a bestseller and its author, Marjorie Hillis, became a well-known lifestyle guru and syndicated columnist who went on to write six more books of advice for single women.
Hillis is largely forgotten today, but historian Joanna Scutts aims to change that with her smart and enjoyable first book, The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. The years between feminism's first wave, which culminated in 1920 with the success of the campaign for suffrage, and its second, nearly five decades later, are often thought of as a dormant period in the struggle for women's rights, particularly with the postwar pressure on women to retreat to the suburbs and embrace domesticity. But Scutts elegantly argues that Hillis was a trailblazer during this period, calling her sharp, witty writing "a beacon of social change and a precursor to the feminist revolutions of the 1960s and '70s. 'Live Alone and Like It,' along with its many sequels and imitators, helped to make single women visible and their way of life viable, free of the sympathy and scandal it had attracted in the past."
In "Live Alone and Like It" and subsequent books, Hillis extolled the virtues of living and working - and playing - in cities, which have long been havens for single women. Hillis took a notably modern approach to dating and relationships, declaring that "a Woman's Honor is no longer mentioned with bated breath and protected by her father, her brother and the community. It is now her own affair." With pithy tips on how to dress, what to cook, and how to decorate, Hillis made the single life seem enviable and chic. "The woman who always looks at night as though she were expecting a suitor is likely to have several," she advised. Her perspective was vastly different from that of other self-help books for women; Scutts quotes a 1940s gem that urged unmarried women that "if there is anything around in trousers who is not an absolute jerk, latch onto him now."
Of course all that glamour and interior decorating didn't come cheap, and Scutts makes clear that Hillis was writing from a place of race and class privilege, addressing readers she imagined could, like herself, easily afford their own Manhattan bachelorette pads and nights out on the town. Hillis's own privilege was compounded when, at age 49, she married a wealthy widower, sparking what Scutts calls a "minor sociological scandal" as newspapers gleefully interpreted the wedding as Hillis's admission that she'd been hoping to land a husband all along.
Scutts, on the other hand, sees Hillis's late, happy, and brief marriage (her husband died 10 years after they wed) as affirmation of the lifestyle guru's broader point that women must be free to make independent choices. Hillis refused to consent to marriage, in Scutts's words, "out of social pressure and simple fear." Scutts continues, "Seen in this light, her wedding did not repudiate, but reinforced her quietly radical rethinking of what happiness could look like for women, and how it might be achieved."
By the end of Hillis's "quietly radical" life, American women were beginning to get noisy in their demands for their legal and political rights. Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," credited with helping to kick off feminism's second wave, was published in 1963, and the National Organization for Women was founded three years later. The following year, in 1967, the widow Marjorie Hillis published her final book, "Keep Going and Like It," which was addressed to older live-aloners and breezily instructed them "how to be as glamorous in December as you were in May." While that message seems hopelessly out of step with the upheavals that were roiling American culture, Scutts's affectionate portrait of Hillis helps draw a line from her subject's cheerful independence to the choices we enjoy today.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Spindel, Barbara. "'The Extra Woman' is the smart, enjoyable story of the 1930s maverick who embraced singledom." Christian Science Monitor, 2 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521153052/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=58793897. Accessed 19 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A521153052