The Extra Woman

by Joanna Scutts

  33. Marjorie Hillis, “How Many Martinis?” Boston Globe, December 1, 1936.

  34. Lois Long, “That Was New York—And Those Were Tables for Two,” The New Yorker, February 17, 1940.

  35. The complex history of the Hays Code has been explored in a number of venues. A good overview can be found in Leonard L. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).

  36. Brooklyn girl born plain Mary Jane, who became a vaudeville actress, playwright, and Broadway star. When she made it to Hollywood in 1933, West was just shy of her fortieth birthday (not that she shared the fact) and her swagger and sense of humor, in a body she was proud to flaunt, made her irresistible to audiences. Her 1933 movies, She Done Him Wrong and She’s No Angel—both costarring Cary Grant—were defiant smash hits for Paramount, and even their titles seemed intended to poke Hays like a sleeping bear. Mae West’s heroines were intelligent schemers: single women who eyed men as prizes, patsies, and easy to manipulate with the most obvious feminine charms.

  37. Hillis, “How Many Martinis?”

  38. Virginia Elliott, Quiet Drinking (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1933), 3.

  39. Ibid., 97.

  40. Hillis, Live Alone, 108.

  41. Alma Whitaker, Bacchus Behave! (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1933), 2.

  42. Ibid., 110.

  CHAPTER 5: WORK ENDS AT NIGHTFALL

  1. Reader report by “Betsy,” Bobbs-Merrill Archive.

  2. “Miss Hillis and Seven Women,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1938.

  3. “Turns with a Bookworm,” New York Herald Tribune, September 18, 1938.

  4. Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression 1920–1941, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 391.

  5. Marjorie Hillis, Work Ends at Nightfall (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938), 23.

  6. Ibid., 45.

  7. Hillis, You Can Start All Over, x.

  8. Hillis, Work Ends, 28.

  9. Patricia Lindsay, “Beauty and You: Successful Author Convinced That Careful Grooming Is Essential to Careerists,” Baltimore Sun, October 25, 1938.

  10. Hillis, Work Ends, 68.

  11. Ibid., 87.

  12. Ibid., 27.

  13. Ibid., 25.

  14. Reader report by “Betsy,” Bobbs-Merrill Archive.

  15. Hillis, Work Ends, 50.

  16. Ibid., 49.

  17. Hillis, You Can Start All Over, ix.

  18. For a fuller discussion of this history and its impact on women, see Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (New York: Feminist Press, 1981) and Out to Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  19. Hillis, Orchids on Your Budget, 70–73.

  20. Ibid., 69.

  21. Bregg, “Lives Alone and Likes It,” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, October 31, 1936.

  22. Eleanor Roosevelt, “What Ten Million Women Want,” Home Magazine 5 (March 1932), 19. Via The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/documents/articles/whattenmillionwomenwant.cfm.

  23. A much fuller picture of Perkins’s life and career may be found in Kirstin Downey’s thorough biography The Woman behind the New Deal (New York: Anchor Books, 2009).

  24. The classic discussion of the Lucy Stone League may be found in Una Stannard, Mrs. Man (San Francisco, CA: Germain Books, 1977), 188–218.

  25. See, for example, Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Her first chapter, “The Unliberated 1960s,” is a reminder of how restricted women’s legal identities were for much of the twentieth century.

  26. Clifton Fademan, “Books: Kit Morley and His Philadelphians,” The New Yorker, October 28, 1939, 77.

  27. Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1939), 43.

  28. Ibid., 189.

  29. Ibid., 270.

  30. Ibid., 261.

  31. Ibid., 284.

  32. Ibid., 141.

  33. Ibid., 307.

  34. Ibid., 65.

  35. Ibid., 299.

  36. Ibid., 303.

  37. Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 4.

  38. Ibid., 334.

  CHAPTER 6: MAD ABOUT NEW YORK

  1. Ibid., 191.

  2. Reader’s report, n.d., Bobbs-Merrill archive.

  3. Marjorie Hillis, New York, Fair or No Fair: A Guide for the Woman Vacationist (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939), 11.

  4. Ibid., 112.

  5. Ibid., 199.

  6. Ibid., 32.

  7. “Women: Junior League,” Time, October 29, 1928.

  8. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Harper Collins, 2013. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. First published 1963), 4.

  9. Morley, Kitty Foyle, 243.

  10. Hillis, New York, Fair or No Fair, 23

  11. Ibid., 72

  12. Paul Freedman, Ten Restaurants that Changed America (New York: Live-right, 2016), 91.

  13. Hillis, New York, Fair or No Fair, 41.

  14. Ibid., 16.

  15. Ibid., 152.

  16. Ibid., 141.

  17. “World’s Fair Ceremony Hails Anne O’Hare McCormick as Woman of 1939,” New York Herald Tribune, June 6, 1939.

  18. Hillis, New York, Fair or No Fair, 59.

  19. Ibid., 75.

  20. Ibid., 77.

  21. Ibid., 136.

  22. “Liquor Flows Here at Its Usual Tempo,” New York Herald Tribune, December 6, 1933.

  23. “City Hails ’34 in Legal Sips, Raises Glass to ‘New Deal,’ ” Baltimore Sun, January 1, 1934.

  24. For more on Nils T. Granlund and the new nightlife of the 1930s, see Burton W. Peretti, Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 113–16.

  25. The publicity-loving Peckham published two books about his exploits, from which these details are taken: Gentlemen in Waiting (1940) and the less restrained Gentlemen for Rent (1955).

  26. Hillis, New York, Fair or No Fair, 96–97.

  27. “Ted Peckham Faces Trial on Escort Bureau,” New York Herald Tribune, May 4, 1939.

  28. Jessie Redmon Fauset, “Some Notes on Color,” The World Tomorrow, March 1922, 76–77, in Janet Witalec, The Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion, vol. II (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 365–67.

  29. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 245.

  30. For more on A’lelia Walker’s parties and her role in Harlem society, see David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979; Oxford University Press paperback edition, 1989), 165–70.

  31. The complexities of white artistic patronage of the Harlem Renaissance are explored in detail in Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (New York: Harper, 2013). The role of the Knopf publishing house, and Blanche Knopf in particular, is detailed in Laura Claridge’s biography The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).

  32. Hillis, New York, Fair or No Fair, 114.

  33. Ethelene Whitmire, “Andrews, Regina” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-01927.html.

  34. Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public-Affairs, 2003), 80

  CHAPTER 7: ROSIE AND MRS. ROULSTON

  1. Robert Hughes, “High Lindens,” Huntington History. https://huntingtonhistory.com/2011/03/02/high-lindens.

  2. “Thomas H. Roulston Rites Will Be Held Tomorrow,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 19, 1949.

  3. “Trend: Goodby to All That,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 6, 1939. This style of writing was roundly mocked in The Philadelphia Story, the plot of which turns on a magazine’s efforts to get access to a society wedding. />
  4. “Marjorie Hillis to Be Bride of T. H. Roulston,” New York Herald Tribune, June 24, 1939.

  5. Washington Post, August 11, 1939.

  6. “ ‘Live Alone’ Advocate Admits Being Mrs. Roulston is Better,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 25, 1939.

  7. “Marjorie Hillis to Be Bride of T. H. Roulston,” New York Herald Tribune, June 24, 1939.

  8. D.L. Chambers to Marjorie Hillis, January 22, 1940, Bobbs-Merrill Archive.

  9. “Miss Hillis Wed: Wrote ‘Live Alone and Like It,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, August 29, 1939.

  10. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 273.

  11. Ibid., 276.

  12. See Marcy Kennedy Knight, “Rosie the Riveter,” Saturday Evening Post, July/August 2013, http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/07/01/art-entertainment/norman-rockwell-art-entertainment/rosie-the-riveter.html; “The Rosie the Riveter Story,” Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont, http://www.normanrockwellvt.com/rosie_riveter_story.htm.

  13. Tony Marcano, “Famed Riveter in War Effort, Rose Monroe Dies at 77,” New York Times, June 2, 1997.

  14. Ben Cosgrove, “Women of Steel: LIFE with Female Factory Workers in WWII,” Time, July 15, 2014.

  15. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 279.

  16. Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (New York: Plume, 1988), 23.

  17. Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (New York: Civitas, 2013), 36.

  18. Ibid., 7.

  19. “Women in War Jobs,” The Ad Council, http://www.adcouncil.org/Our-Campaigns/The-Classics/Women-in-War-Jobs.

  20. Sonya Michel, “The History of Child Care in the US,” Social Welfare History Project (2011). http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/child-care-the-american-history.

  21. Quoted in Caroline Cornell, “The Housewife’s Battle On the Home Front: Women in World War II Advertisements,” The Forum: Journal of History 2, no. 1 (2010), 28.

  22. Life, September 28, 1942, 32.

  23. “Before and After,” internal reader’s report, n.d., Bobbs-Merrill Archive.

  24. Thomas H. Roulston obituary, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 19, 1949.

  CHAPTER 8: STARTING ALL OVER

  1. Hillis, You Can Start All Over, xiii.

  2. Marjorie Hillis, “People and Ideas: Who Is the Older Woman?” Vogue, October 1950, 169.

  3. The novel was published July 16, 1951, by Little, Brown.

  4. The race became notorious in California politics for its low tactics. See Colleen M. O’Connor, “ ‘Pink Right Down to Her Underwear’: The 1950 Senate Campaign of Richard Nixon against Helen Gahagan Douglas Reached an Unequaled Low,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1990.

  5. Hillis, You Can Start All Over, 29.

  6. Gaile Dugas, “ ‘Live Alone, Like It’ Author Learns to Overcome Grief,” Austin American Statesman, April 17, 1951.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Hillis, You Can Start All Over, 3.

  9. Ibid., 19.

  10. Ibid., 9.

  11. Ibid., 11.

  12. Marjorie Hillis, “Everybody’s Etiquette: A Word to Widows,” New York Herald Tribune, March 30, 1952.

  13. Hillis, You Can Start All Over, 53.

  14. Ibid., 105.

  15. Ibid., 61.

  16. Ibid., 62.

  17. Ibid., 72.

  18. Ibid., 138.

  19. Ibid.,120.

  20. “Widow Talks to Herself in Mirror,” Washington Post, February 25, 1951. The review is signed only S. N., leaving the reviewer’s gender unclear, but given the tone and the time, it seems safe to assume it’s a man.

  21. Hillis, You Can Start All Over, 16.

  22. “Dorothy Dix Says,” Daily Boston Globe, December 16, 1951, A18.

  23. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 6.

  24. One recent cultural study of the 1950s focuses explicitly on the era’s celebration of normality: Anna G. Creadick, Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

  25. Coontz, Strange Stirring, 51.

  26. Madison Park, “U.S. Fertility Rate Falls to Lowest on Record,” CNN.com, August 11, 2016.

  27. May, Homeward Bound, 28.

  28. This history is analyzed in detail in David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb (New York: Walker & Company, 2009).

  29. Cynthia Lowry, “Challenge to Women,” Baltimore Sun, January 7, 1951.

  30. Cited in Coontz, Strange Stirring, 67.

  31. See Ruth Milkman, “Redefining ‘Women’s Work’: The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World War II,” in On Gender, Labor, and Inequality (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 47–78.

  32. Coontz, Strange Stirring, 123.

  33. Ibid., 126.

  34. Look, October 16, 1956.

  35. Coontz, Strange Stirring, 61.

  36. Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 49.

  37. Coontz, Strange Stirring, 109.

  38. Quoted in Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket, 77.

  39. Ibid., 80.

  40. May, Homeward Bound, 24–28. Revealingly, the only woman who is visible in William Safire’s famous photograph of the kitchen summit, he describes as “my boss’s wife, Jinx Falkenburg.” Jinx was famous in her own right—before she married the publicist Tex McCrary in 1945, she was one of the most photographed women in the world—an actress, swimmer, and tennis star who regularly graced magazine covers and billboards in the late 1930s. After their marriage “Jinx and Tex” became the celebrity hosts of a series of radio and television interview and talk shows. William Safire, “A Picture Story,” New York Times, July 27, 1984.

  41. George Gallup and Evan Hill, “The American Woman,” Saturday Evening Post, December 22, 1962, 15–33.

  42. May, Homeward Bound, 26.

  43. Lawrence R. Samuel, Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), xi.

  44. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 50th anniversary edition (New York: Penguin, 2010), 5. First published 1963.

  45. See James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), for a fuller account of his fascinating story.

  46. History of Kinsey’s research via the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, kinseyinstitute.org.

  47. Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket, 90.

  48. Quoted in Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket, 89.

  49. Kristin Celello, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 13–15.

  50. Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket, 90.

  51. Rebecca Onion, “Lock up Your Wives,” Aeon, September 8, 2014, https://aeon.co/essays/the-warped-world-of-marriage-advice-before-feminism.

  52. Celello, Making Marriage Work, 7.

  53. Ibid., 78.

  54. Coontz, Strange Stirring, 15.

  55. Albin Krebs, “Obituary: Marion Tanner, Known as Model for Mame,” New York Times, October 31, 1985. For a while, Tanner took pride in the Mame comparisons, but her relationship with her nephew soured in later years, as her generosity turned her house into a makeshift homeless shelter. She claimed to be “much nicer” than the character, and despite the parallels, the teetotal vegetarian Tanner apparently did not approach life’s banquet with quite the appetite of the fictional Mame.

  56. Orry-Kelly’s story is told in Gillian Armstrong’s 2016 documentary Women He’s Undressed.

  57. “Ex-G.I. Becomes Blonde Bombshell,” New York Daily News, December 1, 1951.

  58. Quoted in Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 14.

  59. Coontz, Strange Stirring, 139–42.

  60. Friedan, F
eminine Mystique, 27.

  61. Ibid., 37.

  62. Ibid., 19.

  63. Quoted in Coontz, Strange Stirring, 74.

  64. Ibid., 144.

  65. Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 15.

  66. Coontz, Strange Stirring, 27.

  67. Wendy Simonds, Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading between the Lines (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

  68. Coontz, Strange Stirring, 151.

  69. Hillis, Live Alone, 93.

  70. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, reprint edition with a new introduction by Helen Gurley Brown (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), 4. First published 1962.

  71. Ibid., 6.

  72. Ibid., 8.

  73. Ibid., 15.

  74. Ibid., 35. This line reads like a joke, but as Elaine Tyler May shows, the prospect of sharing a nuclear bunker was taken quite seriously in discussions of marital compatibility in the 1950s. She cites one couple featured in Life magazine that honeymooned in a backyard shelter, surrounded by an abundance of donated tinned food, smiling blissfully at their good fortune; May, Homeward Bound, introduction ix–xi.

  75. Ibid., 45.

  76. Ibid., 54.

  77. Ibid., 48.

  78. Ibid., 65.

  79. Ibid., 71.

  80. Ibid., 24. An “affair” at the time wasn’t necessarily extramarital; as Marjorie Hillis and Helen Gurley Brown both use the term, it merely means some kind of romantic liaison, although by the 1960s, the implication was that it was also sexual.

  81. Ibid., 224.

  82. Ibid., 231.

  83. Ibid., 234.

  84. Starker, Oracle at the Supermarket, 90.

  85. Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, 10.

  86. Ibid., 134.

  87. Ibid., 179.

  88. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Office (New York: Bernard Geis, 1964), 3.

  89. Ibid., 6.

  90. Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, 103.

  91. Ibid., 117.

  92. Ibid., 253.

  93. Ibid., 263.

  94. Marjorie Hillis, Keep Going and Like It: A Guide to the Sixties and Onward and Upward (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 53.

  95. Ibid., 79.

  96. Ibid., 81.

  97. Ibid., 13.

  98. Ibid., 15.

  99. Ibid., 91.

  100. Ibid., 104.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY