The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women To Live Alone and Like It

In 1936, Marjorie Hillis published the best-selling Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman, the first self-help manual for single women. In her first book, Scutts examines Hillis's life from her childhood as the daughter of a famed Presbyterian minister in Brooklyn to her journalism career as an editor at Vogue. Scutts also covers a history of single working women, particularly in New York, and other popular self-help and cookbooks that rode on Hillis's wave of popularity. Hillis continued to write other advice books including Orchids on Your Budget, Corn Beef and Caviar, and an unsuccessful narrative poem about the careers of seven women, Work Ends at Nightfall. After she married at age 49, to much joking about giving up her single status, Hillis took a hiatus until after the death of her husband when she penned two advice books: one for newly single women, You Can Start All Over and one for older women, Keep Going and Like It.