Marjorie Hillis’ surprise bestseller Live Alone and Like It was a sensation when it was published in 1936. Determined to shift the narrative around singleness and encourage women to make active choices about their lives, Hillis used the insights gained in her decades as an editor for Vogue to empower single women to enjoy their single years instead of viewing them as an embarrassment. Her innovative ideas about relationships, female empowerment, friendship and career are still relevant today, and her witty, irresistible writing made her books mandatory reads for everyone in the 30s, men and women, married and single alike. Discover how one woman’s common-sense ideas about what singleness could look like took a country by storm, and how history’s changing narrative turned her story into something she never could have expected. Olivia interviews guest Joanna Scutts, author of The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. Joanna Scutts is a literary critic, cultural historian, and the author of The Extra Woman, the story of the 1930s lifestyle guru Marjorie Hillis and the lives of single women in midcentury America. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Guardian US, among many other venues. She was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society, and holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Music for this episode provided by Vintage Vocal Quartet, Daniel Henderson and His Big Band, and the New Hot 5. Want to help us “make history”? Become a Patron or Donate here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices