Born: 1889, United States
Died: 1971
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Marjorie Hillis wrote popular nonfiction books for women in the 1930s. As a young woman, Hillis went to work for Vogue magazine, eventually becoming assistant editor. In 1936 at age 47, she published the bestseller Live Alone and Like It, an advice book for young women on how to live independently. Rebranded the single woman as powerful, chic and savvy “live-aloners” rather than “spinsters”, the book highlighted the benefits of living alone. “Even going to bed alone can be alluring. There are many times, in fact, when it’s by far the most alluring way to go”, she wrote. In 1937 she published another bestseller, Orchids on Your Budget: Live Smartly on What You Have, in which she offered hypothetical “cases” that encouraged women to match their goals with their financial means. Her mother, Annie Louise Patrick Hillis (1862-1930), was also a published author.
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Marjorie Hillis was 47 when her bestselling book rebranded single womanhood from “spinsters” to chic, empowered, and savvy “live-aloners.” Born in 1889, the future “spinster-in-chief” was, ironically, the daughter of a woman who had published her own book 25 years earlier—The American Woman and Her Home, a guide about the importance of marriage that vilified divorce and “self-centered” single women. Her own daughters grew up to be a “spinster” and a divorcée, and her husband shamed the family in 1915 with a very public financial scandal.
Hillis, seeing what marriage had brought her mother and sister, spent decades single as a flapper and successful writer and editor at Vogue before publishing the bestseller How to Live Alone and Like It in 1936. She did so at a time when tens of thousands of women in their 30s and beyond were single, due to factors like the Great Depression and the death toll of World War I. They were treated with pity and scorn—as one newspaper of the era put it, “They are all left-over ladies, biologically, racially, and in the end, personally.” These women were more than ready to embrace Hillis’s alternative perspective and practical tips, and the book sold six editions in its first year. She followed it up the next year with Orchids on Your Budget, another bestseller with advice on how to “live smartly with what you have.”
Having worked in the women’s magazine industry, she knew how to write for her audience, with quips like “You probably have your bathroom all to yourself, which is unquestionably one of Life’s Great Blessings.” But she also captured the zeitgeist of women’s growing independence in that era. In both World War I and II, women were proving they were capable of doing “men’s work,” and it was a bell that could not be unrung.