Older women in 1950, Marjorie wrote, could look around and find plenty of real-life inspiration in actresses like Irene Dunne and Gloria Swanson, and public figures like the Duchess of Windsor, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Clare Boothe Luce. It’s striking—and a little chilling—that the two politicians she singles out for admiration would shortly find themselves embattled against the encroaching power of Joseph McCarthy. Margaret Chase Smith, the long-serving Republican senator from Maine, had just criticized McCarthy and the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee in a speech in which she passionately defended the right of Americans to voice their opposition to the government without being accused of Communist sympathies, declaring, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.” The last of those horsemen was about to trample Marjorie’s other political heroine, California representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, whose political career would soon be ended by a bruising run for Senate against Richard Nixon, in which he accused her of being “pink right down to her underwear.”4
Nobody could accuse Vogue magazine of Communist sympathies, however, and the rest of Marjorie’s article was an unabashed celebration of older women’s economic power. An older woman didn’t have to be a politician to have an impact on society—as long as she had money, she mattered. Stereotypes about impoverished widows notwithstanding, Marjorie wrote that older women controlled “a startling proportion of the wealth in the country” and that it was for them, not their daughters or nieces, that “the expensive resort hotels refurbish, the cruise ships polish their decks, the restaurateurs concoct new menus, the jewelers assemble diamonds and emeralds, and the furriers buy mink and ermine.” Coming full circle, the mature woman now influenced fashion, rather than having to rely on the few items Vogue deemed appropriate for her. Her independent way of thinking was influencing designers to emphasize subtle, flattering lines and a versatility that allowed her individuality to shine. Her power, ultimately, lay in numbers—there were more older women, more visible in society, than ever before, Marjorie claimed. The world was “teeming with gray-haired wives and widows, looking younger than ever under their becoming well-groomed haloes.”
While she was composing this optimistic assessment of the fortunes of the older woman, sixty-year-old Marjorie was busy upending the life she had settled into as a married woman. Once her late husband was buried and she had made it through the initial, exhausting grieving period, she put both High Lindens and the Brooklyn house up for sale, explaining later her belief that “a house one has shared with a person one cared about is far lonelier than a house one has never shared with anyone at all.”5 Just as she had after losing her parents, when she fled Bronxville for Tudor City, she turned her back on the suburbs and began to hunt for a new apartment in the city. This process took long enough, she told one newspaper, that by the time it was over, she found she was back to “some semblance of normal living.”6
By now a very wealthy widow, Mrs. Roulston no longer needed an economical pad within walking distance of the office. She headed instead to the Upper East Side, to a gracious apartment building on the corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-Third Street, and set about revising the old Live-Alone plan to suit her new circumstances. This meant replacing her married routines with new ones—in particular, she found herself dreading five o’clock, the hour when her husband used to arrive home and the couple shared a predinner cocktail. So she took action, inviting friends over at this time “every night for a while,” until the role of solo hostess had begun to crowd out the memory of domestic intimacy. She also reconsidered who was on the guest list, feeling that she no longer fit in with the couples she had been friends with during her marriage. Instead, she revived older friendships from her Live-Aloner days. The “complete readjustment” to her new life could be a thrill, even if she was now more blunt about its shortcomings: “I don’t mean that it will ever be a life as full as that you had when you were married,” she confessed to an interviewer, “but it can be both stimulating and interesting.”7
By the end of January 1951, just a year and a half after Roulston’s death, Marjorie was ready to share her revised Live-Alone message with a new audience. The cover of her new book You Can Start All Over promised to reveal “how to live alone again and like it,” and was addressed to widows, divorcées, and aging Live-Aloners. Once again drawing on her own experiences, the book’s celebration of independence was tempered now by the knowledge of what it felt like to give it up. Her bereavement allowed Marjorie to write with a new empathy for her readers, and she shared more of her own emotions, more directly than before, dropping the glamorous facade to admit to loneliness, depression, and fear. She admitted that starting over for the third time—after her parents’ deaths, her marriage, and now her widowhood—was harder than ever before. But her old optimistic spirit glimmered through. As the book progressed, its narrator grew noticeably more confident that her new life could prove to be “full of interest and color,” just as it could be for anyone else, “with a little spunk and determination.”8
You Can Start All Over was specifically aimed at those older women Marjorie had recently praised in Vogue, and not at young widows or divorcées raising young children—even though the war and its aftermath had created plenty of both. She acknowledged that a totally fresh start would be difficult and unwise for those women, whose experiences she had never shared, so instead, she wrote for those who weren’t likely to marry again. This approach allowed her to speak with authority, but also to avoid becoming entangled in the widespread divorce panic that had been swirling since the late 1940s. World War II had seen young American couples rushing to the altar in droves before men shipped out for overseas service, and now thousands of those hasty marriages were coming just as hastily unstitched. The skyrocketing divorce rate inspired a rash of moralizing critiques, and much fearful discussion of the possibility that marriage as an institution was in terminal decline. Marjorie referred at the beginning of her book to the “thousands of words” that were “being turned out every week” on the evils of divorce—but she didn’t back away from her conviction that divorce and widowhood were similar experiences requiring similar recovery efforts. (She did acknowledge that a divorcée, unlike a widow, probably didn’t feel that losing a husband was “the most completely devastating loss one can experience.”) It would have been easy to reframe the book to focus exclusively on widows of all ages, and to capitalize on the public sympathy for women who had lost husbands in the war. Yet her pragmatism prevented her. Both widows and divorcées needed time to grieve, after which they owed it to themselves to let go of the past and rediscover themselves—or in the latter’s case, to “really wash that man right out of your hair and send yourself on a new way.”9
Although she continued to champion women’s independence, the older and wiser Marjorie Hillis Roulston sounded more conservative in this new book than ever before. With the experience of marriage behind her, she now declared confidently that a happy marriage ought to be the ultimate goal of a woman’s life—perhaps thinking back on her mother’s advice from forty years ago with more sympathy. The loss of a husband, she wrote, meant the loss of a woman’s “most vital job” and sense of purpose in life. But she had not become pious in her old age. She advised women in mourning to avoid both alcohol and regret—the former because its comforts were short-lived and could backfire embarassingly, and the latter simply because it was a “futile and wasteful emotion.”10
One of the major challenges a widow or divorcée had to face was the scrutiny and judgment of other people, and their expectations of how long it ought to take a woman to “get over” her loss. Marjorie counseled that the best approach was to take this attention with a shrug, accepting that some people would criticize no matter what. “If you show spunk, a very good quality to muster as soon as you can, they will say you are flippant (as they will of this book),” she admitted.11 This was especially true for divorcé
es, who bore the added burden of representing, to some, the larger social decline. Yet displaying too much obvious sadness, for too long, could make you look and feel weak.
Marjorie returned to the no-win question of mourning behavior in the syndicated newspaper column “Everybody’s Etiquette.” For several years from the late 1940s, this column invited experts and celebrities to respond to a wide range of social dilemmas, including actress Barbara Stanwyck on “How Not to Be a Doormat,” and swimming star Esther Williams on what to wear to the beach. Confronted with the question, “How long do you think a widow should follow mourning convention?” Marjorie responded that a widow needed her friends and should feel free to go out and enjoy herself. While it might be in “better taste” to avoid nightclubs and large parties, she deemed movies, plays, and concerts perfectly appropriate, as long as the widow could keep her emotions in check and show interest in subjects other than her own grief. However, she warned that not everyone would be so supportive, and that some people would still negatively judge a widow “unless she remains a figure of sorrow far longer than is wise for her health or kind to those around her.” She added pointedly that those people would criticize her “more sharply than they would a man in the same position.”12
Keeping busy was essential for the newly single Live-Aloner to keep regret and loneliness at bay. Marjorie encouraged her reader to focus her energies on her home, her friends, one consuming interest, and a mixture of hobbies—in that order. And she ought to surround herself with friends who were similarly active, as women with jobs or a larger purpose tended to have “held up” better than the ladies of leisure, who often “have frankly slipped.” For the woman on the lookout for a new activity, Marjorie suggested collecting, politics, finance, photography, genealogy, travel, crafts, or translating books into Braille—some absorbing passion that would engage her brain and distract from her solitude: “We suspect that the first enterprising lady after Eve who lost her mate, or didn’t want one, went in for How to Know the Wild Flowers of her era, or collecting recipes for preparing dinosaur.”13 One unqualified advantage to newfound singleness, after all, was no longer having to pretend to share a husband’s tedious passions for, say, horse shows or classical concerts.
Marjorie was firm in her belief that it was better to find a rewarding hobby than a second husband. Marriage was a long process of adaptation, in her view, and even if it was pleasurable to do it once, she didn’t advise trying to repeat the experiment. “There is no more compensating job in the world when you do it for the right man, but there is a limit to the number of times you can do a complete remodeling job on anything, yourself included.” She admits that young widows might have more energy for such “remodeling,” and that young divorcées could also be optimistic about their romantic prospects—perhaps thinking of her sister Nathalie’s successful second marriage. Nevertheless, she admitted to feeling surprise that the latter would be so hopeful, “on the principle of the burned child dreading the fire.”14
Besides, for mature Live-Aloners, the available men were hardly the prizes they thought they were. Marjorie observed tartly that as their ranks thinned “along with the hair on their heads,” men came to value themselves ever more highly.15 Along with this elevated sense of self-worth, they developed a fear of being “hunted,” which held them back from the honest friendships that she believed women would probably prefer. She warned readers about the men “whose intentions are what used to be called Dishonorable”—who might feel freer to pursue a widowed or divorced woman than someone who had never been married. “Before you were married you had (we assume) what they considered an Asset, though it was also an Obstacle in their eyes,” she coyly explained. “Now, you haven’t it, but its very absence has become an Asset—again, in their eyes. It relieves them of responsibility.”16 It’s tempting to speculate about what kind of encounters might have made the widowed Marjorie Hillis so disparaging of men and their motives, especially given that in her previous books they barely figured at all, except as dinner dates and convenient handymen.
The question of money had always lain at the heart of the Live-Aloner’s independence—and in considering the prospects for an older woman who previously enjoyed a husband’s financial protection, Marjorie pulled no punches. “For sheer and prolonged terror, there are few things that happen in this more-or-less civilized hemisphere that are worse than the experience of a woman who has been well taken care of for years and who suddenly finds herself without enough money to live on.”17 She therefore devoted a considerable chunk of the book to encouraging women to work to support themselves. With a sideswipe at contemporary articles worrying over the fate of “mere chits of 35,” she made it clear that she considered women well over fifty to have plenty to contribute both socially and economically. Listing all the jobs her own friends had taken up, from real estate to advertising to secretarial work, she acknowledged that some had exchanged “glamour” for money, but emphasized that all had held on to their independence. Despite claiming to hate statistics, she referred to the 1947 census to back up her argument, which revealed that four million women ages forty-five to sixty-five were holding jobs.
In addition to money and independence, a job also kept a woman engaged in the world. After her retirement, therefore, she had to work even harder to stay young and keep up with a changing society. While Marjorie allowed her to give up on cutting-edge fashion and sleep in as late as she liked, the retired Live-Aloner had a responsibility not to give up any further. She should take care to maintain her figure, get a modern haircut, and steer clear of “those surplice ‘mama’ dresses.” She ought to read the current bestsellers, keep up with culture, and talk to the grandchildren about their lives (not difficult given that “most normal young people are Complete Egocentrics”).18 To make sure that her home didn’t become “so much as a shade musty” she ought to renovate, Dorothy Draper-style, with fresh paint and creative flair, perhaps sawing an old table in half or turning a vase into a lamp. At all costs, she must avoid moving in with younger relatives, no matter how sensible it might seem—it went against the natural order of things: “The point of view of each generation is completely different from that of the one preceding or following it, and ought to be.”19 There was no sense or pleasure, in Marjorie’s view, in trying to reorder one’s life to fit into someone else’s lifestyle.
The new table lamp or the part-time job were just part of the larger goal of You Can Start All Over, which was to “recapture that feeling that you are a very special person”—in other words, to steal back a little of that egocentricity from the younger generation. Once upon a time, like them, “you believed that no one else in the world was quite like you—and you were right.” A single woman living alone at seventy has just as much right to her place in the world as she had at twenty.
Most reviews of You Can Start All Over were positive, if nostalgic for the original Live Alone, and responded to the sprightliness and sense of the advice. But a review in the Washington Post hinted that the world of the 1950s would prove much colder to the Live-Aloner than the world of fifteen years before, and that there would be “no nightgowns named for her new book (as there were for her first provocative volume).” The reviewer complained: “The net result of this slightly weary persiflage is something less than stimulating,” and added that “somehow it reminds the reader of a woman talking to herself in her mirror; a lone individual living in a relative vacuum.” Complaining that the book hardly mentioned children and grandchildren, the reviewer implied that a woman’s solitude was bleak and narcissistic, that without an extended family, she was cut off from the world, communicating only with herself. Nothing could be further from the picture of confident social usefulness that Marjorie Hillis advocated and embodied, but already the lone female was becoming a figure of fear and scorn.
The same reviewer went on to note, as Marjorie had in Vogue, that older women were living longer than men and controlled a significant portion of the nation’s wealth—but he didn’
t see that as liberating. Instead of encouragement to put on a negligee, mix a cocktail, and curl up with The New Yorker, he argued that women needed “a good solid, factual chapter on the economics of widowhood,” which would cover budgets, investments, insurance, taxes, “and warnings against the pitfalls which on the average defraud a widow of her capital in seven years.” And for good measure, this revised and dreary textbook ought to include “more about health, diet and recreation.” The review’s blend of judgment and condescension anticipated the way that the upcoming decade would treat single women, as pariahs and figures of threat to the all-consuming cult of the nuclear family.20
The Live-Aloner in the Nuclear Bunker
The moment when Marjorie Hillis packed up and sold her two large houses to move back, alone, to Manhattan was perhaps the lowest point for the status of the Live-Aloner in the entire twentieth century. Her simple assertion that “there is a thrill in making a life of your own” would sound more rebellious than ever in the paranoid, fenced-in ’50s.21 During the years of Depression and war, when American society was in flux, and cultural certainties looked much more like contingencies, it had been possible to transform the “extra woman” into a figure of strength and defiance. But she crumbled in the nuclear era, under the relentless assault on gender nonconformity and any ambition that might reach beyond the front door of the home.
Just as Marjorie Hillis returned to the world of advice giving, her indefatigable peer Dorothy Dix left it. In December of 1951 newspapers reported Dix’s death, at age ninety—although she had claimed to be ten years younger. Her syndicated columns—“Of Men and Women” and “Dorothy Dix Says”—appeared right up until the end, so that the advice contained in “I Can Give You No Hope That Your Skirt-Chaser Husband Will Reform” overlapped with her obituaries.22 In fact, the column was in other hands by this point—Dix herself had had to give it up after a stroke two years earlier—but it was only at her death that the syndicate announced this fact, and that they would retire the name, rather than continuing it under other authors, “Dear Abby”-style. With her passing, a link to an older version of advice giving was broken: the style that Marjorie Hillis shared, in which authority was derived from feminine common sense and life experience, rather than scientific theories and experimentation. Nobody would have called Dix a modern woman, but her pragmatic approach gave her insight that would be lost as the 1950s wore on—like her conviction that teenage weddings were unwise, and that men and women really ought to get to know each other before they married. Before long, Americans were marrying younger than ever before, and the “old maid” came to seem not just unfortunate, but pathological.
The Extra Woman Page 21