On their own
Every generation has its single-gal icon: tantalizing train-wreck Hannah (Lena Dunham) on “Girls”; glamorously aspirational Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) on “Sex and the City”; full-on sweetheart Mary (Mary Tyler Moore, on her eponymous show). Styles change, as does the velocity of sex (or lack thereof ), but the single woman by any name remains a lightening rod. Ambitious and romantic, fizzy and fab and vulnerable, she is the woman you want to be (or meet) and at the same time, not. Is she enviable (she can, theoretically, do whatever the hell she wants, with whomever she wants) or piteous (because, you know, wouldn’t she rather be ... settled?). To the happily or otherwise coupled, her independence can be seen as threatening, even selfish. She can’t really be happy, can she?
Long before Hannah let it all hang out (and had a baby), before Carrie strutted on stilettos (and married Mr. Big), before Mary turned the world on with her smile (and stayed both childless and single), an accidental badass named Marjorie Hillis was empowering Depression-era women.
The well-raised daughter of a prominent pastor and a strictly traditional mother, Hillis was a longtime editor at Vogue. In 1936, she was in her 40s — well past her expiration date in the traditional marriage market — when her manifesto, “Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman,” shot up the charts. A call to live fashionably, spiritedly and joyfully while solo (cocktails, negligees and gentlemen visitors included), Hillis’ witty blockbuster came with department store tie-ins nationwide. Her deeper contribution was the refusal of labels like spinster (pathetic) and bachelor girl (patronizing) in favor of the unapologetic “Live-Aloner.” At some point, she wrote — possibly between husbands — a woman was likely to be single, yet she needn’t be invisible, lost or socially inconvenient.
By the 21st century, “Live Alone and Like It” was all but dead and buried, unlike “The Joy of Cooking,” which was published the same year. But the lovely thing about books is that they come back to life, and when they do, their bite is often welcome. “Live Alone” fell into the hands of Hillis’ eventual biographer, Joanna Scutts, after the death of the latter’s father, when a friend came to the family’s London home bearing Prosecco and “a burnt orange hardcover book with stiff, lightly foxed pages.” At the time, Scutts was single, broke, on the verge of earning a doctorate, and soon to turn 30. For a moment, she writes, the words “Live Alone and Like It” “stung like a slap, as lonely and unmoored as I felt. But as the three of us (Scutts, her widowed mother, and the friend) drank the wine we began to turn the pages, taking turns reading snippets aloud, from chapters called things like ‘A Lady and Her Liquor’ and ‘Pleasures of a Single Bed.’ ... Despite my proud skepticism toward anything that could be labeled self-help, I found myself devouring the whole book, and taking its lessons quietly to heart.”
Soon Scutts dived into all seven Hillis titles, on such topics as money management (Orchids on Your Budget) and aging (You Can Start All Over). Some advice was — to put it kindly — quaint, such as the need for four styles of bed-jacket. And a woman struggling to make rent would not be buying orchids on her budget. But Hillis’ underlying philosophy struck Scutts as “almost painfully relevant to modern single women like me who were balancing the fantasy of independence with the fear of being alone.”
Hillis herself married in 1939, to the glee of her detractors, and stopped writing until she was widowed 10 years later. But in “The Extra Woman” Scutts deftly broadens her scope, using Hillis’ life as a lens through which to view both the burgeoning American self-help movement (hello, Dale Carnegie) and the evolution of attitudes toward single working women. Of particular interest is her observation that the Depression had an upside, freeing some women from traditional roles, as tectonic plates of the culture shifted; she also contends the enforced domesticity of the 1950s, when World War II’s Rosie the Riveter was pushed back into the kitchen, was not inevitable but was instead a return to a “normal” that had never existed. Zipping forward, she illuminates Hillis’ immediate successors, ranging from Helen Gurley Brown to Betty Friedan, as Second Generation feminism took hold.
Occasionally, Scutts’ stated bias against most self-help (aside from Hillis’) leads her to conflate shallow nostrums with practices such as mindfulness, as if both were distractions from pressing social and economic problems. That’s a small quibble, however, in a book that is both absorbing and, in the best way, unsettling. The Live Aloner’s fight to be accepted in her full humanity is a battle her great-granddaughters (or great-grandnieces) are still waging.
Dawn Raffel’s next book, :The Strange Case of Dr. Couney,” will be published next summer. Email: books@sfchronicle.com