Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - New York’s First Celebrity Single Girl (Hint: It’s Not Carrie Bradshaw)

Episode Date: December 29, 2017

Before the TV series Girls or Sex and the City, Marjorie Hillis was America’s favorite bachelorette. But she wasn’t fretting about finding ‘the one.’ She was teaching women how to stand on their own two feet and enjoy their independence — and this was in the 1930s.    An editor at Vogue, Marjorie enjoyed living by herself, living by her own rules, and she wrote several guidebooks, including How to Live Alone and Like It, for women joining the workforce during the Depression.    Present-day author Joanna Scutts joins me on the Postcard Academy podcast to discuss her new book on Marjorie titled The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. We explore Marjorie’s unlikely rise to celebrated guru to the single girl; New York life in the 1930s and 40s; why Marjorie’s advice is more relevant than ever; and why even President Roosevelt was photographed reading her book.   Enter to win a copy of Joanna’s book on Marjorie before January 10, 2018, by going to postcardacademy.co/extra-woman   If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and forward this show to a friend. If you’re feeling especially kind, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This helps people discover the show. 🤗   Instagram, Twitter, Facebook  Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to the Postcard Academy. I'm your host, Sarah Micatel. In the 1930s, the daughter of a Brooklyn preacher became America's favorite bachelorette. Marjorie Hillis wasn't fueling an obsession with finding a man. She was teaching women how to live alone and like it, and she wrote a book with that same name. An editor at Vogue, Marjorie enjoyed living by herself, living by her own rules, and she wanted to offer a guidebook to other women who were joining the workforce for the first time during the Depression. Today, present day, author Joanna Scouts joins me on the show to discuss her new book on Marjorie, titled The Extra Woman, How Marjorie Hillis led a generation of women to live alone and like it. We explore Marjorie's unlikely rise to celebrated guru to the single girl, New York life in the 1930s and 40s and why the 50s were so insane, why Marjorie's advice is more relevant than ever and why even President Roosevelt was photographed reading her book. I had such a great time speaking to Joanna about Marjorie Hillis. I learned so much about history and happiness and I really hope you take away as much as I did from this interview.

Now on to my conversation with Joanna. Welcome, Joanna. Thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you so much for inviting me. So tell us where are you from and where are you living now? So I'm originally from London. I grew up in southeast London in a like a small part, small sort of suburb and live there until I graduated college in London a couple more years, and then I moved to New York when I was

in my early 20s for a PhD in literature, which I studied at Columbia University, which is in the upper part of Manhattan. And then since for about the past six years, I've been living just over the river in Queens. So your new book is out, The Extra Woman, How Marjorie Hillis led a generation of women to live alone and like it. How did you first come across Marjorie's work? It was a total fluke, a gift, a literal gift. I got from a friend actually when I was back in London, an old friend from home who gave me this book at a very vulnerable time in my life. I was coming to the end of my PhD program and not sure what I was going to be able to do for work, whether I was going to be able to stay in New York. And actually my father had just passed away very suddenly. And my friend knows

my family and she's an old friend. And she came over to visit me and my mother. And she had two bottles of Prosecco in her bag and the copy of this book. And we were, you know, she just thought it was something, it was funny. It was this sort of curiosity that she had come across, found a copy online. and she's like, I think you'll enjoy this. And at first I thought it was kind of a, the title is, the full title is, live alone and like it, a guide for the extra woman, which at the time I was single and I had, you know, and we were grieving and this was kind of like, oh my goodness, this is, this is kind of tough love, I thought.

And but actually it turned out to be just a wonderful tonic. It was so funny and so smart. and really just really spoke to me. And I just kept coming back to it and wanting to know more about the author. And there was basically no information anywhere about her online. So I just kind of started digging and mostly as a side project, mostly as procrastination for my dissertation. And then, you know, it kind of grew from there. I just always felt like there was something here that I wanted to do.

There was a story here that I wanted to tell. So you've described Marjorie Hill. as the first mainstream American writer to concern herself with the happiness of single women. Tell us more about her. So she was in her late 40s when she wrote this book. She had been an editor at Vogue magazine for many years. And Vogue in the teens and 20s in New York was a fit. It still is this to some extent, but it definitely spoke to a kind of high society.

It wasn't especially cutting edge and, and sort of modern, it was quite, spoke to a fairly kind of traditional, wealthy readership. But she had learned a lot of lessons there about writing and about how, what kinds of things women wanted. She considered her job to be, you know, a wonderful challenge, and she loved it. And she lived alone, and she was very happy. And I think she felt like there was a gap in the market that she wasn't alone. And she had, you know, she clearly was familiar with all of the ways in which society

stigmatized and sort of rejected and ignored single women. And she was determined to change that. So what was, what was like a woman's place in the world during murdery's time? What was going on in the 1930s? So in the United States, this was the Depression. She had been, so everyone in the country had been struggling in their different ways since the Wall Street crash of 1929. Marjorie personally had been struggling. She lost both her parents right around that same time. So she had become someone who had to stand

on her own two feet. But actually, for single women, especially, the depression was not necessarily all a bad story. A lot of young women, a lot of single women, went out to work for the first time, out of necessity for the most part. A lot of people delayed marriage because it was expensive to get married, married and set up home together. And men especially were struggling to find work. This was a time when jobs for men and jobs for women

were very different. They were, you know, you had separate sections of the newspapers for those different jobs. The jobs that were open to women were still hiring. Lots of offices needed women to do their filing. and take dictation and do all the kinds of sort of white-collar grunt work that, and those positions were open to women. So it was a time of great possibility for a lot of people.

A lot of women found themselves independent in a way that they hadn't been or hadn't expected to be. So where did she live in New York? She lived in a little development that's still here called Tudor City. It was quite new then. It was built in the late 20s, and it's these. a fabulous kind of collection of, of tower blocks that all sort of designed to look very,

kind of like Tudor England buildings. They've all got names that sort of evoked that. And it was this development where they had a lot of parks and gardens within the development. And it was kind of trying to keep, as cities always kind of have this challenge of what do you do about, you know, you can cater very well to sort of young, single, maybe newly married couples, but once they start having children, how do you, do they have to all just move out to the suburbs or how do you kind of create that space?

So Tudor City was an attempt to kind of keep it a sort of family-friendly environment, but it was certainly very friendly to single people, to single women. It's in Midtown, so it's also very close by to all of the theatres, and she loved the theatres so she could go out to a show on Broadway and then be home. and, you know, tucked up by midnight. And what was some of her advice to add a little bit of glamour to being at home, whether you're rich or poor? She was a great believer in treating your evenings at home alone as a treat and not a failing

or not a something just to be got through. She really emphasized things like taking care of the way you looked, using an evening at home to take a long bath and cover yourself in all kinds of, you know, whatever lotions and perfumes you had either been given or had bought for yourself. She was a big believer in elegant loungeware, I suppose we would call it now. Negliges was something that she, which I think was more a kind of robe at that time, not the sort of skimpy negligee that we might think of when we hear that word now. but you had to have a summerweight one and a winter weight one at the very least.

You also had to have, she was a big believer in a garment called a bed jacket, which I think is also a pre-central heating kind of thing, but the idea of if you sit up in bed to read or you sit up in bed to have breakfast in bed, which was one of her great delights, she was a great believer in that breakfast in bed, you would need some kind of little jacket. or wrap to keep your shoulders warm. So a lot of, she really emphasized investing in the clothes that you wear around the house by yourself should also be, should be beautiful, should be something that makes you feel good,

shouldn't just be, you know, your crappy old t-shirts and your ratty sweatpants, but something that you wouldn't feel embarrassed if somebody showed up unexpectedly at your doorstep. So she wrote several books. Can you give me some specifics on what made you fall in love with them? Yeah, so she followed up, Live Alone and Like It, with a book about that's called Orchids on Your Budget, which is all about trying to spend wisely and to sort of to make sure that you keep your, you know, you can have your single lady glamorous lifestyle without breaking the bank. One of the things that I think sticks with me from that book is, you know, she talks a lot

about your wardrobe and what you should wear and how to how to shop for clothes and how to care for clothes. And really she emphasizes kind of against all of the training, I suppose, of Vogue magazine, which is like, don't go shopping without knowing exactly what you're looking for. And knowing what you're looking for means knowing what you already have, knowing what you need and not being just sort of seduced by whatever is the label. latest fashion. And she says, you know, there are things you can compromise on and things you can't. So she says, you know, you need to spend money on shoes, you know, you need good pair of

shoes. But you can get, you know, an evening wrap or a sort of, you know, the decorative accessories for an evening out. Those things can be as cheap as you like. You don't have to spend a lot of money on those, but, you know, get a good pair of shoes, take care of them. which is definitely something that New Yorkers learn early on is the streets aren't very kind to your shoes, so you have to take care of them. So a lot of her tips are more practical than they sound. So I quite enjoy, enjoy those sorts of things, you know, trying to resist temptation and just by what you really need and what you really love and take care of it. That's something that resonates with me, for sure. What was her advice on men? Her advice on men is pretty, it's pretty well in keeping with the rest of

her advice, which is really just to say, you know, you have to make your own decision. You have to be sure that this is what you want. She writes that, so her chapter on men is, men and sex really is called, will you or won't you, which is a great title. And it means she's not here to tell you that it's okay or not okay to have a relationship, have an affair, as she calls it. She says it's up to you. It's not your family's business. It's not her business.

It's really your business. She does say that she thinks that it's not wise to enter into an affair before you're 30. She thinks that you should be, you should really be mature and you should know yourself, know the consequences, know the risks. and, you know, if you really still want to do it, then go for it. But I think she sees maturity as an important part of that decision. Ahead of her time.

When you're 30, you can do what you're like. You know who you are and you can, you know, you know what makes you happy. And really that's the ideal. And so Marjorie was speaking to this new audience of single ladies out on their own for the first time. But her mother had actually written a book with opposing views years earlier. Could you tell me a little bit more about Marjorie's family? Sure. Yes, so she, working at Vogue Magazine was not an obvious career path for Marjorie Hillis.

She was the daughter of a very prominent in his time, Brooklyn preacher. So she grew up in Brooklyn Heights, which is a sort of wealthy enclave right along the river over in Brooklyn. They arrived there at the very beginning of the 20th century. Marjorie was 10. And her family, and this was our time, Brooklyn was sort of booming as an independent city and had just become part of New York City. So instead of moving to Brooklyn, they suddenly find themselves moving to New York City and they're part of the city that's a brand new, you know, brand new era in the 20th century. And her father really was a community leader. He was someone who really believed that his job was not just sort of spiritual guidance.

but all kinds of moral and intellectual guidance. Like he believed in education. He really wanted to help his congregation become better people in all sorts of ways. His principles and sort of represent the kind of moral leadership, the ideal family unit that he was trying to sort of encourage his congregation to model. And so, yeah, so she and her mother,

so her mother wrote this book. It's very interesting. It's a kind of conservative guide. It's called The American Woman and Her Home. And she talks about how women's truest source of happiness is a husband and children. Divorce is the worst possible social evil. And women really are responsible for keeping the home together, keeping the family together. And that's going to make them happy. And I find it really interesting that there's, you see this sometimes with a lot of women who have become these anti-feminist voices or these sort of very conservative voices where they're not really living their principles because Annie Hillis, Marjorie's mother, was certainly a homemaker, but she wasn't, she was certainly also a public figure as the wife of her prominent husband, and she was clearly a writer as well. So she had a professional and a sort of public identity, even as she said.

telling women that to be happy they really need to not do that and do the opposite. It's so interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it like that. So how did Marjorie go from being a preacher's daughter to a celebrated bachelorette? Well, it was a long time coming. I think part of it, she went to work at Vogue. Vogue in its early days made a lot of its money as, you know, they sold patterns for women to, so you could emulate these fabulous fashions in its pages, not by buying them at a store, but by sewing them yourself at home. So Vogue's pattern cutting department was really its bread and butter. And a lot of women were hired to write captions for illustrations in that

and do that kind of very sort of writing, but not a particular, it wasn't a glamorous job, you know, in the same way that we might, you know, getting hired at Vogue magazine now is a different kind of, different kind of job and aspirational. different kind of way. And so she stayed there and she found she had a talent for it and sort of rose through the ranks. And I think, you know, I think that the road to being a happy bachelorette was a long one. You know, she, and I think it took, it took the, took losing both her parents. It took a number of different life experiences to get her to the point where she realized what made her happy was living by herself and living by her own rules.

And that's really what she decided she wanted to share with the world. Yeah. And was, was she living with her parents before they died? So she was, her father was, she had been living by herself and she ended up going back to live in the sort of family home after her father retired because he was quite sick. And so she was helping out at home. The other interesting strand of the story is that her younger sister, who was about 10 years younger than her and a very much more kind of traditional, had a very much more traditional path,

married young, had a baby, but then got divorced. So she was divorced in living back at home with her mother and Marjorie for a time. So there was this interesting interlude where, you know, after their father passed away and it's just the three women with the little granddaughter, and it's just kind of an interesting moment that this, you know, this woman, Marjorie's mother, who'd written about how the ultimate happiness for women is husband and children, and here she is with one daughter single and one daughter divorced and with a young child.

And then I read that her sister ended up getting remarried and they moved to Pennsylvania. And so Marjorie had this choice. okay, I can go and just be the sister who continues to take care of everyone, or I can go live my life in New York City. Exactly. Why was her book, Live Alone and Like It's Such a Success? You know, it's interesting. I think there's a lot of reasons for it. One is just that it's so pleasurable to read.

It was such a, it's very fun and snappy. It's short, it's beautifully illustrated by another, by this wonderful female illustrator. at Condé Nast, who is herself a really interesting person. Her name's C.P. Pinellas. And she's kind of been forgotten too, but she deserves. She's making a bit of a comeback. So it was a lovely object. You know, it was a nice thing to buy and to give as a gift.

But it also, I think, really spoke to not only to single women. I think it spoke to a lot of single men. The publishers report hearing from booksellers that a surprising number of men have been buying it. They really didn't think any men would pick it out. But men got something out of it too. And so did people in relationships. So did married women. It certainly, because really its ultimate message is I think she sums it up best in a line that goes,

you have to decide what kind of a life you want and then make it for yourself. You know, very simple, but really that's the message. And I think President Roosevelt was photographed reading this as well. He was, yes. She considered Eleanor Roosevelt to be the ultimate Live-Alona, which is her name for this independent woman. And obviously, Eleanor Roosevelt was not single at the time. She's someone she really looked up to,

a common with a lot of women in the 30s. The first lady was a huge role model. And yes, apparently, whether it was her copy that he borrowed or whether it was his own copy, FDR was photographed that summer when it was a big hit, reading it on his yacht. And who was the extra woman? I think that the extra woman is sort of the name for what society has always considered single women to be, to be somehow they don't fit into the arc. They don't go two by two. It's they mess up the numbers at the dinner party and they're, they're a problem because of that. So she's sort of speaking to the older version of that.

And I took the title really to kind of, I think it's a very striking phrase. I think it's surprising how many, you know, how much we still think of single women. You know, there's still this sort of assumption that they're somehow kind of on the edge. You're a little bit different. You're a little bit challenging to convention. And I like that little echo in the extra woman as well. And eventually Marjorie did get married. What was the public's reaction to this?

She did indeed. Not long after she became really famous as the Leverlona, you know, the ideal live alone. So she married in 1949 and she married a man who was older than she was. sorry, 1939, married who was older than she was, and already had children, grown children of his own. And she really tried to protest that she had never been against marriage. She just really didn't think you should marry because everyone told you you had to. But the public wasn't really, or at least the newspapers were not ready to hear that.

And they had great fun at her expense. They poked a lot of fun at her as kind of, oh, she didn't really like it after. She was maybe just playing hard to get. But I think why it's still, her message still resonates is that she was, she wasn't doing this all when she was 25. She was almost 50 when she married. So I really do think marrying, in a way, marrying at that age for the first time, she really was doing it because she really wanted to.

And she just really liked this guy. That's the message that really resonated with me. She wasn't saying single life is better. than any other lifestyle and this is what you should do. She was advocating that women of any age should be able to determine their own life. And that's just what really drew me to her into your book. Yeah, thank you. That's absolutely what I get from it too.

It's about you deserve to put yourself and your happiness first. And she really, another thing that I love is that she really believed that pleasureable, that pleasure and happiness were connected, which sounds very obvious. I think we're very, you still have kind of puritanical reservations about pleasure. We talk far more about guilty pleasures than we do about just actual pleasure. And I think that she thought that, you know, going to bed early with a good book and eating breakfast in bed and going to the theater and going, you know, and enjoying and sort of choosing your, furnishing your apartment in the way that really made you happy. She believed that material things could bring a real pleasure and that there was a real happiness. And I think that still feels revolutionary.

We talk about these things always as though they're kind of filling a hole in, you know, they're never going to fill the hole in your life. And she said, you know what? Maybe they can. And there was quite an active marketing campaign tied to the publication of her book, right? Yes. She was in every year. She went around department stores.

This was a time when there were department stores. local newspapers in every town and they were thriving. Well, they were hanging on. The stores at least were hanging on through the Depression. But one thing that they really seized on was this is a new market for them. They're saying, oh, right, we can sell to single women. We don't have to wait till women are wives and mothers before they'll become loyal customers. So they, they arranged displays of, you know, elegant and elegant neglis and cocktail shakers and all kinds of stylish single lady accoutrements. And they put stacks of the book next to them. They pulled quotations from the book, blew them up and made posters out of them. And it was this kind of idea of the

live alone lifestyle was something that could be branded and sold in a way that, in a way that I think is still sort of in keeping with its message. I mean, we're skeptical about that. It sounds very, it sounds sort of exploitative, but actually I think, I think it was refreshing. I think a lot of single women were suddenly, you know, it was gratifying to suddenly be considered a viable part of a consumer society. You actually have a role to play and your money's as good as a married women's. Yeah, so the 1930s, it seemed like everything was on the up and up. And then after World War II, more women were working. They were in college. They could get divorced. They had access to birth control. And then what happened in the 1950s? Where did this backlash come from to the

progress that we were making since Marjorie's time? That's such a good question. I think it's a And it's a big question. I think a lot of people are still a little baffled by it. If you read sort of magazines and self-help and the sort of cultural, popular culture of the time, people really believe that they had scientific evidence for why women should be married early and having babies. Freudian psychology, even though Freud was no longer around and his ideas were pretty outdated. It was somehow kind of seized upon after World War II to kind of justify a lot of this rush to domesticity. And, you know, Freud believed that there was fundamental psychological differences between men and women and that women's fundamental nature

was to have heterosexual relationships, to have children, and that if they denied that or repressed it, they would be miserable. And so that played into a lot of other conservative beliefs, and it met with the post-war prosperity for the United States, for white Americans after the war. Even without a college degree, men could get really high-paying work, and there was abundant work available, and women just weren't going to be able to make that kind of money

on their own. So for a white woman after World War II, her best chance that really a secure and, you know, kind of rich existence was to marry a man and settle down. And even if she herself was well educated and ambitious, a lot of professional jobs that carried status and kind of were creatively or intellectually fulfilling, a lot of those jobs were no longer really open to women. They had been, sort of in women were always in a minority, but in the 50s, their share of those kinds of fulfilling professional jobs really plummeted too. So it was a combination of factors. It was kind of this, you know, some were economic, some were political and and some were sort of cultural. And this, but it was a perfect storm, really. And it really was a period that a lot of women

experienced as a kind of shrinking of opportunity. I talk a lot in the book about Betty Friedan's feminine mystique, which came out in the early 60s. And famously was a kind of touch paper for the feminist, the second way feminist movement. But what a lot of that book does is look back at the previous 15 years and say, what the hell happened? You know, she graduated college in 1942, I believe. So she and her cohort from a women's college, you know, and she's saying, we grew up with, They grew up in the era of the Leverlona. They were teenagers, you know, when Marjorie Hillis was a household name,

and they saw this kind of possibilities for women as independent professionals. And then by the time they graduated college, and after the war, it's sort of like, where did that all go? And how come we're all suddenly trapped at home and we're not able to be a part of the world anymore? So it was baffling to her, and I think it was experience. as a very disorienting time for a lot of women. Yeah, I think that's definitely the most striking thing for me about this book is today people talk about the 1950s as if that's the way things always were.

And some people are saying we should go back to those times. And life was not that way for really most of history. That's such an important point. And it's such a, you know, we have so many, you know, it's such a powerful kind of political claim that, you know, this was the golden age of a traditional America and there are so many people who want to send us back there. And, you know, I think it's important to say this was never traditional. This is never normal. This is, this was a strange aberration of a period and, you know, and not a great one. So it's a really, yeah, that's definitely

something I'd love to, I'd love for people to take away from the book. Yes, so thank you for bringing out, like, important people in our history who have faded a bit. And you also mentioned Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl. How would you compare that to two Marjorie's books? Yeah, it's so funny to look at them next to each other. So sex and the single girl came out also in 1963, I think, or 62, right around the same time as the feminine mystique. And they're both kind of seen as like early salvos in this, you know, in this new feminist awakening of the 60s and 70s, which really doesn't really get going until quite a bit later in the 60s. But there's a lot in that.

But that book, I was just amazed by how full of men it is. It's amazing that that, you know, it's called Sex and the Single Girl and the Sex part is important. But it's just like imagining this world where you have to be. completely obsessed with men. And it's so depressing to me. I find it, it's very lively and funny and fun to read, but it makes you, you know, it's constantly talking about, you know, you have to make a list of every man in your life, every possible man, and make sure you're spending as much time as you can in the company of men. And, you know, if your workplace doesn't have any, you know, viable, you know, romantic partners in it, you know, you need to change your job and

go work somewhere else and, you know, it's exhausting. It's nothing really about being happy and fulfilled as a single person. This is so oppressive. And live alone and like it, there's, there's no men in that book at all, really. It's kind of occasionally they'll show up as kind of the happy ending to a story or they'll show up as, you know, they'll install some shelves for you if you ask them or, you know, there's a few things that they're good for and useful for, but, you know, Sex and the Single Girl is really, where are they, where are they hiding? How do you land them? How do you bring them in?

Wow. And there's been so many, there's been so many books similar to this since then in the last few decades. And just the more that you talk, the more I think, God, yeah, live alone and like it. It was so revolutionary. And thank you for bringing it back into the public discourse. Yeah, it was, it's been a joy. And I'm so glad that it's, you know, that more people will learn about Marjorie.

and kind of hear her lesson. You have to decide what kind of life you want and then make it for yourself. Thank you Marjorie Hillis and Joanna for these wise words to reflect upon as we head into 2018. In the next episode, you'll hear part two of my conversation with Joanna.

We discuss some of the best places to eat and sightsy in New York City, both in the 1930s and today. Subscribe to the Postcard Academy so you don't miss it. I'm also raffling off a copy of Joanna's book the Extra Woman on January 10th, 2018. So if you hear this show before then, you can enter by visiting postcardacademy.co slash extra woman. If you like today's episode, please share it with a friend

and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email me at Sarah at postcardacademy.com or find me on Instagram at Postcard Academy. That's all for now. Thank you for listening and have a beautiful week wherever you are. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation cheat sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarah micotel.com slash blank no more.