The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It [Hardcover]

From the flapper to Scutts should feel proud that she did what she set out to do: return Hillis to her rightful place in the pantheon of women who made it possible for the rest of us to enjoy that freedom. Recovering the spirit of daring that defined the Live-Alone heyday can remind us that a different story is always possible, Scutts writes, and might just inspire us anew, to resist and rebel against convention, and to fight to create the life we really want. Heres hoping every reader has the chance to do just that. Smart and enjoyable. . . Scutts's affectionate portrait of Hillis helps draw a line from her subjects cheerful independence to the choices we enjoy today. In 1936, a Vogue editor named Marjorie Hillis published Both absorbing and, in the best way, unsettling. The Live-Aloners fight to be accepted in her full humanity is a battle her great-granddaughters (or great-grandnieces) are still waging. It has long been my belief that the greatest advice book ever published is Marjorie Hilliss 1936 tract In Before there was a Carrie Bradshaw or a Mary Richards, a Bridget Jones or a Holly Golightly, there was Marjorie Hillis. . . . 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. The fascinating and formidable Marjorie Hillis has at last found her rightful biographer, champion, and exegete in Joanna Scutts. This is a beautifully written, insightful, and wise account of the life and work of an important but heretofore largely unremembered writer, wit, and proto-feminist. Long before Girls, Carrie Bradshaw, and Mary Tyler Moore, Marjorie Hillis inspired women to live more independently as Live-Aloners, and she deserves more recognition than she gets. Joanna Scutts account of Hillis and the cultural transformations she made possible is as witty, forthright, and elegant as its subjelÏ