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Joanna Scutts: THE EXTRA WOMAN


Join us for an evening with Joanna Scutts as she discusses her new novel, The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.

In 1936 Marjorie Hillis’s gutsy, brisk, and endlessly quotable Live Alone and Like It became an overnight sensation. A reclamation of Hillis’s life and work, Joanna Scutts’s THE EXTRA WOMAN restores Hillis to her rightful role as the original guru for independent women.

Born into a conservative family in 1889, Marjorie Hillis fled to Manhattan at her earliest opportunity, eventually landing an editorial position at Vogue magazine. From those pages, which preached the virtues of fantasy and aspiration, Hillis built a career as self-help magnate (à la Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill) with a decidedly feminist slant; Hillis celebrated the industry of single women everywhere in her jazzy guides for the “Live-Aloner.”

Traveling through the decades by way of Hillis’s books (published 1936–1967) THE EXTRA WOMAN tracks the story of the Live-Aloner from the Depression to the dawn of second-wave feminism. Investigating long-held stigmas attached to unattached women, Scutts explores how Hillis’s guide transformed single women from “extras” on the fringes of society to self-assured members of the social pecking order (and valuable assets to a newly tender economy) by advising them on money, fashion, etiquette, and even affairs. While the tone of Live Alone and Like It may have been light and quippy (i.e., “Be a Communist, a stamp collector, or a Ladies’ Aid worker if you must, but for heaven’s sake, be something”), its message was revolutionary.

Details

Date:
November 16, 2017
Time:
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Cost:
Free
Website:
https://www.astoriabookshop.com//?q=h.calevent&eid=1076

Organizer

Zora Shaw
Phone:
7182782665
Email:
Website:
http://www.astoriabookshop.com

Venue

The Astoria Bookshop
31-29 31st Street
Astoria
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Phone:
7182782665
Website:
www.astoriabookshop.com