In 1930, Marjorie Hillis stood in front of a large, empty house in suburban New York. It was the home where she had lived with her family. But her parents were dead, and her sister had recently remarried. She was all alone. Hillis had just returned from Venezuela, where she’d had an epiphany. Though her brother and his children lived nearby, she refused to be “an old maid aunt,” haunting the periphery of the family. She was in her mid-thirties, a successful editor at Vogue, a former flapper who frequented the best cocktail bars in Manhattan. Instead, she would pack up everything she owned and head directly to the city. The idea of a woman moving on her own wasn’t really that shocking anymore. Tens of thousands of women were doing it. Her move was radical because she planned to live alone and have a blast doing it.

During the Depression, marriage rates plummeted and thousands of women of all ages worked and lived alone, some by choice, others by necessity. It was an age when a single woman, especially one who was no longer young, was the object of pity, if not outright scorn. Newspapers from the time read, “They are all left-over ladies, biologically, racially, and in the end, personally.”

In 1936, at the age of 47, Hillis published her bestselling self-help book, How to Live Alone and Like It. The book rebranded the single lady as powerful, chic, and savvy. Living alone had benefits, she claimed, “Even going to bed alone can be alluring. There are many times, in fact, when it’s by far the most alluring way to go.” These women were not spinsters, she said, but “Live-Aloners.” America was ready for her message. The book went through six editions in its first year.

Marjorie Hillis, 1889–1971. (New York Public Library)

How to Live Alone and Like It offered mostly practical tips, such as how to entertain male friends, and how to get rid of them when they stayed too long. “There is little danger that you will have to call the elevator man or open the window and scream,” she writes. “It may happen, but don’t get your hopes up. You have to be pretty fascinating.” For loneliness, she recommended “a glass of sherry and an extra special dinner charmingly served,” and hobbies, such as collecting antiques and growing gardenias.

Should a single lady find herself afraid of the dark and convinced that a burglar is breaking in, Hillis writes, “The trick is to turn over and think furiously about something else, like your new dress or what you’d say if the good looking man who took you to the theatre proposed.” She goes on, “If this sounds a little dreary, think of the things that you, all alone, don’t have to do … You don’t have to get up in the night to fix someone else’s hot water bottle, or lie awake listening to snores. You probably have your bathroom all to yourself, which is unquestionably one of Life’s Great Blessings.”

On the important topic of the propriety of wearing one’s pajamas in front of a gentleman caller, she writes, “Assuming that she knows one pajama from another, it is entirely permissible. There are however, sleeping pajamas, beach pajamas, lounging pajamas, and hostess pajamas.”

Hillis’s writing conjures the sense of womanhood on the brink of major change. On the topic of whether a woman living alone can have a love affair, Hillis saw arguments for both sides and seemed incapable of answering the question. She was trying to fit modern life into old world social mores, and occasionally, she couldn’t. The single woman was a “Live-Aloner,” a more flattering term, but she was also an “extra woman,” meaning dispensable, a wrench thrown in otherwise perfect table seating. The world wasn’t entirely ready for the single lady.

As Joanna Scutts explains in her forthcoming book on Hillis, The Extra Woman, Hillis did not learn female independence from her mother. In 1911, Hillis’s mother had published “The American Woman and Her Home,” an advice manual on the importance of marriage. The book demonized divorce and railed against a “new kind of woman very much in evidence in the city,” a “self-centered” type. Fulfillment and happiness came through family life, she said. Despite or perhaps in reaction to Hillis’s mother’s best efforts, when she died one of her daughters was a “spinster,” the other a divorcée.

Instead Hillis learned self-reliance the hard way. As an adult, Hillis watched as one by one, the women who were closest to her were dragged down by men. In 1915, her father embroiled the family in a highly publicized financial scandal. Her sister, who was, according to Scutts, a “picture-perfect debutante,” was trapped in a bad marriage until she got divorced.

In 1939, Hillis shocked her readers once again by marrying a grocery store magnate. Her married life, at least to outsiders, appears in contrast entirely drab. Gone were her glamorous flapper days and crowded readings and appearances at department stores. “At the moment I can barely remember that I once led such a life,” she told a reporter. “What does she do all day — now that she has given up her writing, and speaking, and public appearances?” the reporter wondered. “Oh, I plan the meals … and I fix the flowers,” she responded. Scutts writes, “Whatever else it may have done for her, marriage effectively silenced Marjorie Hillis.” Not long after they were married, her husband reported that Hillis would be writing “no more books.”