Works Cited and Consulted
ARCHIVES
Bobbs-Merrill Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
Newell Dwight Hillis Papers, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY.
Condé Nast Library and Vogue archives, New York.
ARTICLES AND BOOKS
Applegate, Debby. The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
Arnold, Rebecca. The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear and the Image of Women in 1930s and 1940s New York. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009.
Bagge, Peter. Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2013.
Barnet, Andrea. All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913–1930. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2004.
Berebitsky, Julie. Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
Bolick, Kate. Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own. New York: Crown, 2015.
Brown, Helen Gurley. Sex and the Office. New York: Bernard Geis, 1964.
———. Sex and the Single Girl. Reprinted with a new introduction by Helen Gurley Brown. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003. First published 1962.
Butler, Judith. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.” Yale French Studies, no. 72, “Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century” (1986), 35–49.
Cameron, Ardis. Unbuttoning America: A Biography of “Peyton Place.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Celello, Kristin. Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Chase, Edna Woolman, and Ilka Chase. Always in Vogue. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954.
Chesler, Ellen. Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Claridge, Laura. Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016.
Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry. Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements. New York: Live-right, 2015.
Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
———. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Creadick, Anna G. Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.
Davis, Rebecca L. More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Dennis, Patrick. Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade. New York: Broadway Books, 2013.
DePaulo, Bella M. Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.
Downey, Kirstin. The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins: Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and the Minimum Wage. New York: Anchor, 2010.
Draper, Dorothy, Decorating Is Fun!: How to Be Your Own Decorator. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran, 1939.
———. Entertaining Is Fun!: How to Be a Popular Hostess. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran, 1941.
Dubler, Ariela R. “ ‘Exceptions to the General Rule’: Unmarried Women and the ‘Constitution of the Family.’ ” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 4, no. 2 (2003): 797–816.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Sigrid Estrada. Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. New York: Picador, 2010.
Eldridge, David. American Culture in the 1930s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Elliot, Virginia. Quiet Drinking: A Book of Beer, Wines & Cocktails and What to Serve with Them. New York: Harcourt, 1933.
Ferrari-Adler, Jenni. Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Freedman, Paul. Ten Restaurants That Changed America. New York: Liveright, 2016.
Freeland, David. Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 50th anniversary edition. New York: Penguin, 2010. First published 1963.
Gabler, Neal. Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Gaines, Jane, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York: Columbia University Libraries, 2013.
Gluck, Sherna Berger. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. New York: New American Library, 1988.
Harrison, Cynthia Ellen. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Hasday, Jill Elaine. Family Law Reimagined. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Hauser, Brooke. Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman. New York: Harper, 2016.
Hawes, Elizabeth. New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life and the City, 1869–1930. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.
Hecht, Jennifer Michael. The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn’t Working Today. New York: HarperOne, 2008.
Hillis, Marjorie, Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936.
———. New York, Fair or No Fair: A Guide for the Woman Vacationist. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939.
———. “Newell Dwight Hillis.” In A Church in History: The Story of Plymouth’s First Hundred Years under Beecher, Abbott, Hillis, Durkee, and Fifield, 87–118. Brooklyn, NY: Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, 1949.
———. Orchids on Your Budget: Or, Live Smartly on What Have You. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1937.
———. Work Ends at Nightfall. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938.
Hillis, Marjorie, and Bertina Foltz, Corned Beef and Caviar for the Live-Aloner. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938.
Hillis Roulston, Marjorie. Keep Going and Like It: A Guide to the Sixties and Onward and Upward. New York: Doubleday, 1967.
———. You Can Start All Over: A Guide for the Widow and Divorcee. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951.
Inness, Sherrie A., ed. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
———. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001.
Israel, Betsy. Bachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules. New York: Perennial, 2003.
Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Kaplan, Carla. Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance. New York: HarperCollins, 2013.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
———. Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview. New York: Feminist Press, 1981.
Keyser, Catherine. Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010.
Klinenberg, Eric. Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. New York: Penguin Press, 2012.
Kushner, David. Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb. New York: Walker Books, 2009.
Lamb-Shapiro, Jessica. Promise Land: A Journey through America’s Euphoric, Soul-Sucking, Emancipating, Hornswoggling, an
d Irrepressible Self-Help Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Leff, Leonard J., and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2001.
Long, Kat. The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City. New York: Ig, 2009.
Lopate, Phillip. Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. New York: Library of America, 2008.
Maitland, Sara. How to Be Alone. New York: Picador USA, 2014.
Matt, Susan J. Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890–1930. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
McCarthy, Mary. The Group. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 2001. First published 1963.
Milkman, Ruth. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Mordden, Ethan. The Guest List: How Manhattan Defined American Sophistication, from the Algonquin Round Table to Truman Capote’s Ball. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010.
Morley, Christopher. Kitty Foyle. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1939.
Murdock, Catherine Gilbert. Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870–1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Myers, Eric. Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002.
Neuhaus, Jessamyn. Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Onion, Rebecca. “Lock Up Your Wives.” Aeon (September 2014).
Owens, Mitchell. “Living Large: The Brash, Bodacious Hotels of Dorothy Draper.” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 25 (2005): 254–287.
Parrish, Michael E. Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression 1920–1941. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
Peiss, Kathy Lee. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Henry Holt, 2007.
Peril, Lynn. Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
Petry, Ann. The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. First published 1946.
Recken, Stephen. “Fitting-In: The Redefenition of Success in the 1930s.” Journal of Popular Culture 27 (Winter 1993): 205–222.
Rombauer, Irma S. The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat. New York: Scribner, 1998. First published 1936 by Bobbs-Merrill.
Samuel, Lawrence R. Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Doubleday, 2014.
Schaap, Rosie. Drinking with Men: A Memoir. New York: Riverhead Books, 2014.
Schwartz, Hillel. Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat. New York: Anchor Books, 1990.
Seebohm, Caroline. The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast. New York: Viking Press, 1982.
Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. New York: William Morrow, 2016.
Shulman, Robin. Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Trappers, Hunters, Foragers, Slaughterers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York. New York: Crown, 2012.
Simonds, Wendy. Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading between the Lines. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
Staggs, Sam. Inventing Elsa Maxwell: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012.
Stannard, Una. Mrs. Man. San Francisco, CA: Germain Books, 1977.
Starker, Steven. Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007.
Tapert, Annette. The Power of Glamour: The Women Who Defined the Magic of Stardom. New York: Crown, 1998.
Traister, Rebecca. All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
Varney, Carleton. The Draper Touch: The High Life & High Style of Dorothy Draper. New York: Shannongrove Press, 1988.
Walker, Nancy A. Women’s Magazines, 1940–1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998.
Ware, Susan. Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Watts, Steven. Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America. New York: Other Press, 2013.
Wharton, Edith. French Ways and Their Meaning. New York: D. Appleton, 1919.
Whitaker, Alma Fullford. Bacchus Behave! The Lost Art of Polite Drinking. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1933.
Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Whitt, Jan. Women in American Journalism: A New History. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Whyte, William Hollingsworth. The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s New York. New York: New Press, 1996. First published 1939.
Wilson, Kristina. Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Yale University Art Gallery, 2004.
Wilson, Margery. Make Up Your Mind. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1940.
———. The Woman You Want to Be: Margery Wilson’s Complete Book of Charm. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1942. First published 1928.
Witalec, Janet, ed. The Harlem Renaissance: A Gale Critical Companion. Vol. II. Detroit: Gale, 2003.
CREDITS
Excerpts from Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. Copyright 1936 by Marjorie Hillis. Reprinted by permission of 5 Spot, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.
Excerpts from Orchids on Your Budget by Marjorie Hillis. Reprinted by permission of Little Brown, UK.
Excerpts from Keep Going and Like It by Marjorie Hillis Roulston. Copyright © 1967 by Marjorie Hillis Roulston, Member of the Authors League of America. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Two letters excerpted (on pages 41 and 157) from the Bobbs-Merrill Archive, courtesy Lilly Library, Indian University, Bloomington, Indiana. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. From: Quotes from “August 19, 1936” letter to Helen Robertson from D. A. Cameron, and the “January 28, 1939” letter to Marjorie Hillis from Laurence Chambers.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Marjorie Hillis’s parents, Newell Dwight Hillis and Annie Louise Patrick Hillis, were both Midwesterners. They met at Lake Forest College near Chicago and married in 1887. (Courtesy of the McHenry County Historical Society)
When Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis arrived in Brooklyn in 1899 to lead Plymouth Church, admiring newspaper reports described his intense gaze and forceful personality, and he became a local celebrity. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
Marjorie Hillis embraced the role of Live-Alone ambassador, signing books and addressing audiences across the country. Her ideas were very different from her father’s, but she inherited his charisma and skill at public speaking. (Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)
“Live Alone and Like It” soon became pop-culture shorthand for female independence. Claudette Colbert, playing Gary Cooper’s unhappy wife in the 1938 comedy Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, reads the book as she contemplates her escape. (Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)
The cover of Marjorie Hillis’s first bestseller, Live Alone and Like It, implied that a single woman’s indepedence would be rewarded with male
attention. But the book itself made clear that men were not essential to her happiness. (Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. From: 1936 Book cover edition of Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. Copyright © New York: Scribner.)
Department-store shoppers were encouraged to purchase the stylish accessories for a Live-Alone life along with the book. In San Francisco, a window display invited shoppers to “relax luxuriously in this pink and frothy NEGLIGEE.” (Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)
Marjorie’s publisher Bobbs-Merrill enjoyed another success in 1936 with Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, which the St. Louis housewife wrote to support herself after her husband’s suicide. By the 1950s, it was a household staple. (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)
As Kitty Foyle in the 1940 film, Ginger Rogers played the quintessential “white-collar girl” and gave voice for young working women’s struggles to balance independence and romance. Her signature white-collared dress became iconic. (RKO Pictures, 1940)
In one of her last features before she left Vogue, Marjorie Hillis profiled the famous interior designer Dorothy Draper in her chic “bandbox” apartment, which the divorcée shared with her daughter and her Dalmation. (Peter Nyholm/Vogue, November 15, 1936 © Condé Nast)
Tudor City, where Marjorie’s Live-Alone theories were born, was heavily marketed as a chic alternative to suburban living. A playbill advertisement targeted theatergoers tired of rushing out to make the last train. (Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library)
The 1939–1940 World’s Fair in New York inspired Marjorie Hillis’s fifth book, a guidebook aimed at women visiting the city alone. The Fair’s own publicity showed it off as a stylish destination for adventurous female travelers. (Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library)
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