The Extra Woman Read online

  During the 1920s, while Marjorie Hillis was an editor at Vogue, the young and reckless flapper had become an icon of feminine freedom, roaming the city in a sparkly dress and dancing drunk on bootleg booze. She cut a flamboyant figure but presented no real cultural threat—eventually, it was assumed, she would sober up and get hitched (or, like the quintessential flapper Zelda Fitzgerald, get hitched and go right on with the party). But when the Depression hit at the end of the jazz decade, it revealed to all but the luckiest women that depending on a man for economic security was precarious. Marriage rates plunged as couples waited for better times to set up home together, and far more women than in earlier generations got a taste of life as a de facto “extra woman.” For some, that taste of a different life was tantalizing. No longer a flighty girl or a doddering widow, the single woman was now a worker and a citizen, mature and independent, and could be perfectly happy, Marjorie Hillis declared, with her lot.

  The Depression era that produced Live Alone and Like It was a boom period for self-help. Marjorie’s peers included success gurus like Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill, who did their best to shore up the tottering American dream by arguing that success was a matter of will, coming to those who wanted it most and worked for it hardest. Wealthy industrialists and robber barons were elevated to the status of national sages, just as today, tech entrepreneurs and second-generation billionaires exhort ordinary workers to love what they do, work even harder, roll with the financial punches, and embrace the unpredictability of the market. It’s a distinctly American response to economic catastrophe: in place of political revolution, personal renovation. Don’t change the system, change yourself.

  Marjorie Hillis shared these male gurus’ belief in the power of positive thinking and self-reliance, but she recognized that for women, success was more complex: It’s harder to scramble up the corporate ladder when half the rungs are missing. Single women in the Depression were among the lowest-paid of all workers, but they had more freedom than their married sisters, who were barred from many professions during the worst of the economic crisis; a 1936 Gallup poll showed that 82 percent of Americans thought wives should not be allowed to work if their husbands had jobs.3 In their boarding houses, rented rooms, and tiny apartments, self-reliant Live-Aloners could close the door against the world for the first time in their lives, and discovered that perhaps they might like it after all. In her second book, Orchids on Your Budget, Marjorie spoke directly to these breadwinning women, advising them on how to manage their money, save, and enjoy a few carefully chosen indulgences—one of which might even be a charming, artistic, but hopelessly unemployable husband. The book echoed a larger cultural theme, voiced by no less a figure than First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, that women’s household budgeting skills were a key part of the battle to help the nation at large balance its books. In President Roosevelt’s cabinet, the indomitable Frances Perkins (the sole breadwinner for her own troubled family) was the architect of the New Deal’s protections for workers. Her fight to offer material support to families recognized that professional success did not guarantee long-term stability, especially for underpaid women.

  Few working women during the Depression had the budget to go out on the town very often, so the home became a site of simple pleasures. Cheap, vicarious entertainments, like radio, magazines, and mass-market paperbacks went from novelties to necessities in this domestic decade. Women were encouraged to make a virtue of this necessity by decorating and entertaining with flair. Marjorie’s third outing, Corned Beef and Caviar: For the Live-Aloner, included the single woman in those pursuits, with a compendium of advice, menus, and dishes that a single hostess could pull off—whether or not her goal was, as one chapter put it, “Getting the Man with the Meal.” If she were bold enough, she might take inspiration from the era’s most famous interior designer, the patrician divorcée Dorothy Draper, who urged Americans to flood their homes with acid-bright chintz, bold stripes, and jet-black lacquer. Or, less outlandishly, she could learn to cook with Irma Rombauer, the gutsy St. Louis widow whose cookbook The Joy of Cooking appeared from Marjorie Hillis’s publisher in 1936, quickly becoming a permanent classic. The repeal of Prohibition, at the end of grim and gloomy 1933, meant that respectable women could stock their own liquor cabinets and throw their own parties.

  But when the Live-Aloner did treat herself to a night out, the place to be was still New York, emerging from its scruffy speakeasy past into the height of café-society glamour. Those who could afford to put on their fur and diamonds and take taxis to nightclubs did so in a city that was an uneasy mix of high style and hard times. Poverty was particularly acute in Harlem, where unemployment rates hit almost 50 percent, and the neighborhood’s vibrant artistic and political Renaissance staggered under the impact. The architecture, technology, and daily life of the city were documented in a decade-long project by photographer Berenice Abbott, culminating in her 1939 book Changing New York. Publicly single, Abbott was a lesbian who lived with her female partner in a quiet arrangement that was common and becoming increasingly necessary as the era’s public morals tightened; her story is a reminder of the variety of intimate arrangements that could slip under the Live-Alone veil and that cultural visibility for nonconformist women was still a fraught negotiation.

  New York’s stuttering recovery culminated in the 1939 World’s Fair, attended by forty million people over eighteen months, and dubbed “The World of Tomorrow.” Marjorie Hillis seized her opportunity to direct the Live-Aloner to a solo adventure in her book New York, Fair or No Fair, reassuring her out-of-town readers that the city was perfectly safe, and advising them on reputable restaurants and hotels. She did warn that if they wanted to visit the most famous, glamorous nightclubs, they’d have to find a date, as most were hostile to women alone. Luckily, she was able to point them to an entrepreneurial service called the Guide Escort Agency, which would rent out a well-educated, underemployed young man for the evening. Or so she thought—unfortunately, by the time the book was published, the city had closed down the service out of fears of immorality. It was a worrying sign that the Live-Aloner’s brief, devil-may-care heyday was coming to an end.

  In the early summer of 1939, with the fair still in full swing, newspapers reported with gleeful schadenfreude that Marjorie Hillis, the nation’s spinster-in-chief, was getting married after all. Alongside photographs of the slim, elegant forty-nine-year-old bride in a figure-skimming satin gown, ran the triumphant story: the Live-Alone guru had capitulated to the inevitable, betrayed her readers, and exposed her signature philosophy for a fraud. After trying for a while to argue her side—that she never said the single life was better than marriage—Marjorie gave up, and contentedly retreated into life with her husband Thomas Roulston, a dapper, wealthy widower ten years her senior. At his Long Island country estate, she maintained a silence that seemed to indicate that she had indeed abandoned her Live-Aloners.

  The war that had been a distant threat during the late 1930s would soon overshadow everything else in American Life. As the munitions industry ramped up and soldiers shipped out overseas, women’s still-controversial work outside the home was reframed as a patriotic duty, symbolized by Rosie the Riveter, the laborer with the rolled-up sleeves and bandanna who appeared in a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1943. This fictionalized ideal of the female war worker was patriotic, sturdy but feminine, uncomplaining, young—and above all, temporary. The reality of women’s war work was much more complex, and despite postwar pressure to return to the home, the spirit of self-reliance and adventure that working instilled could last a lifetime. One of the real-life models for the symbolic Rosie, for example, a widowed Kentucky factory worker named Rose Will Monroe, who built B-52 bombers during the war, went on to found her own construction company, and finally earned her pilot’s license at the age of fifty.4

  The real shock for white, middle-class American women was not war work but the reaction against it in peacetime. Historians w
ould later argue that the marriage and baby boom of the postwar years, which encouraged girls to find husbands when they were barely out of high school, was not really a return to “normal” life but a cultural and demographic blip. The pressure, nonetheless, was real. Self-help books of the late 1940s painted singleness as an unfortunate state to be hurried through as quickly as possible; one 1949 book, with the Live-Alone-echoing title How to Be Happy While Single, turned out to contain quite different advice: “If there is anything around in trousers who is not an absolute jerk, latch onto him now.” 5 But there were dissenting voices: 1949 also saw the first publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s seismic work of feminist theory, The Second Sex, translated into English (poorly, many argued) and made available in the United States four years later. Beginning as a philosophical treatise questioning what, exactly, a woman was—a biological or sociological creation?—it went on to offer a capacious history of womanhood from ancient Greece to the twentieth century, de Beauvoir argued for the importance of reproductive freedom and participation in economic life as necessary conditions for any progress for the “second sex.” Her phrase, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” became famous as a way of distinguishing between “sex” and “gender,” and revealing the importance of culture in shaping a woman’s life.6

  In defiance of de Beauvoir, however, mainstream self-help writing, advice columns, and marriage counseling throughout the 1950s promoted the idea that getting and staying married were a woman’s highest purpose—a message that had formed the backbone of the advice book Marjorie Hillis’s own mother had published way back in 1911: The American Woman and Her Home. Marjorie herself would feel the full, crushing weight of this marriage-obsessed culture when her husband of just a decade died suddenly in 1949, leaving her alone once more. Her response to personal tragedy and an increasingly suffocating culture for single women was to pack up her country home, move back to the city, and pick up her Live-Alone theme once more. Her 1951 book You Can Start All Over was tempered by grief and the awareness that facing life as a middle-aged widow was a much tougher and lonelier proposition than starting out as an eager, eligible twentysomething. But even young Live-Aloners were menaced on all sides in the 1950s. Life was one of many magazines to report during the decade on the tragic psychological damage the “career woman” was likely to suffer by placing “masculine” ambition over “feminine” domesticity.7

  In Hollywood, much had changed since Marjorie Hillis’s heyday, when snappy, fast-talking dames like Irene Dunne and Katharine Hepburn went toe-to-toe with leading men in comedies that celebrated independent-minded women. In the late 1940s and ’50s, in film noir and in weepy “women’s pictures,” female characters suffered anguish and violence as they struggled to conform to the rigid rules of gender, race, and class. The ideal starlet was no longer built of angles and sass, but of kittenish softness—Joan Crawford gave way to Marilyn Monroe. It was hard to find a single woman on screen in the 1950s who rejected conventional femininity but was also happy and admirable—with one towering exception. Auntie Mame, heroine of the novel, Broadway play, and movie of the same name, was based on writer Patrick Dennis’s own freethinking aunt, and portrayed with unforgettable panache by Rosalind Russell, a mature throwback to the screwball era, who gleefully proclaimed that, “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!” Though she was embraced and beloved by 1950s audiences, Mame was an old-school Live-Aloner at heart, a holdover from the Roaring Twenties and the independent-minded 1930s. By the time the film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1959, nostalgia for the Live-Alone era was beginning to take hold. It would become one of a swirl of forces driving the nascent women’s-liberation movement.

  The 1960s had barely begun before independent women—or rather, “single girls”—were everywhere. Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmopolitan magazine was their new guru, and their new bible, her 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl. Although she shared an emphasis on financial independence and the importance of a well-decorated home of one’s own with Marjorie Hillis, Gurley Brown was far franker about sex and how women could turn it to their advantage (her 1965 sequel was Sex and the Office). Having married the film producer David Brown in 1959, Gurley Brown herself wasn’t the embodiment of single chic—that role fell to the wide-eyed Marlo Thomas, producer and star of the 1966 sitcom That Girl. Sick of the endless wife and daughter roles she was offered, Thomas herself pitched the show to a skeptical NBC executive by asking him, “Ever think about doing a show where the woman is somebody?” and slapping down a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.8 But although the resulting show focused on the showbiz aspirations of Thomas’s Ann and the various jobs she had to take to support herself, it also paired her with a steady, dependable boyfriend for the run of the show.

  Newspapers hungrily reported on the adventures of single girls, striking an admiring tone much different from the head-shaking pity of ten years before. Yet their new cultural prominence was shadowed by violence. In 1963, two young roommates were stabbed to death in their Upper East Side apartment in a crime dubbed the “Career Girls Murders,” as though the victims’ jobs as a teacher and magazine researcher were somehow contributing factors in their gruesome deaths. The following year Queens bartender Kitty Genovese was sexually assaulted and murdered outside her home after a late shift, and the New York Times reported that thirty-eight people had witnessed the attack and failed to intervene. What the paper called “The Sickness of Apathy” soon became known as the “bystander effect,” and entered the public imagination as evidence that women alone were especially vulnerable in the big, impersonal city—even though the reporting of the actions of Genovese’s neighbors was later shown to be wildly inaccurate.9

  In this fearful and sexualized climate, Marjorie Hillis looked like a refined relic. The closest she had ever come to admitting that single life might be risky was her tongue-in-cheek advice in Live Alone, about what to do if a male guest won’t leave. “There is little danger that you will have to call the elevator man or open the window and scream. It may happen, but don’t get your hopes up. You have to be pretty fascinating.” In 1967, her final book, Keep Going and Like It, depicted the author on its back cover as a white-haired dowager from a different era, in a flowing silk skirt and with a humorous twinkle in her eye—an elegant figure who had nothing obvious to contribute to the world of Vietnam War protests and civil-rights battles. Her individualistic approach to happiness now looked like a privilege open only to a lucky few. Women across America were beginning to realize that what they needed was radical, collective change.

  Yet the Live-Aloner cast a long shadow. Feminist writers and icons like Mary McCarthy and Betty Friedan had come of age during the 1930s and knew that life for single women had once looked both satisfying and thrilling—as it did to the Vassar girls in McCarthy’s sexually frank 1963 novel The Group, set during the years of Marjorie Hillis’s heyday. Friedan, meanwhile, lamented in The Feminine Mystique, her landmark account of women’s domestic repression, that women’s rights and expectations of happiness and independence had rolled back decisively since the Live-Alone era.

  The Extra Woman tells the story of a particular type of woman, the glamorous Live-Aloner, during a period of rapid social change. Class and race unavoidably shaped her experiences, as living alone and supporting oneself was, by and large, a privilege of the wealthy and white. Yet the Live-Alone spirit had an impact far beyond the women who could afford to emulate Marjorie Hillis directly. She offered a new vision of happiness and success at a moment in history when Americans were obsessed with finding, and defining, both.

  We look back to the midcentury era now for its style, but our connection is stronger than the shape of a sofa or the drape of a dress. In the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash, as the Depression years stretched out, Americans became increasingly concerned with how to make the best of the new reality. Self-appointed gurus peddled philosophies of positive thinking, self-reliance, and the appreciatio
n of small pleasures in an effort to reassure people that their happiness wasn’t pegged to the fluctuating stock market. Others promised to help readers outsmart the market altogether, by focusing so determinedly on their own success that they could will it into being. Today it’s possible to detect a similar yearning in the popularity of books, apps, and articles that tell us to purge ourselves of physical and mental baggage, slow down and simplify our lives, and train our minds toward gratitude and optimism. In both eras of economic crisis and slow, uneven recovery, against a drumbeat of terrifying global news, the proliferation of self-help can be linked to the failures of government and the economy to provide ordinary people with material and spiritual security. But such periods of social turmoil can also generate a spirit of creativity and daring, out of the sense that nothing will be the same again.

  It may be impossible to read and write about the late 1930s without the crushing awareness that a war was rapidly approaching that would unleash murderous destruction on a still barely comprehensible scale, and would profoundly alter the politics and the social values of the countries that survived it. In the United States, the aftermath of World War II saw a rapid and uncompromising clampdown on women’s professional opportunities, and an even more insidious choking-off of possibilities for independence and unconventional living. Although this narrative arc, from war to stultifying peace to social revolution, looks inevitable from our historical distance, it is really anything but. Recovering the spirit of daring that defined the Live-Alone heyday can remind us that a different story is always possible, and might just inspire us anew, to resist and rebel against convention, and to fight to create the life we really want.