How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It
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.