Books On Living Alone

 

A few books I've read on women living alone are so varied in their choices of lifestyle that they encourage the reader to find her best life and live it. They go from living solo in the sprawl of New York in 1936 to a widow who sells her home in America and makes a new life in a Paris apartment.  Check them out.

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LIVE ALONE & LIKE IT: A GUIDE FOR THE EXTRA WOMAN  by  Marjorie Hillis.

 

In 1936 this Vogue editor, a preacher's daughter and spinster, who's twenty year career with the magazine was unprecedented for that era.  Her book challenged the prevailing social norm that a normal woman desired marriage and would only live alone if a spinster with no family to serve as unpaid caretaker.  This small book gave advice on how a woman living solo could make a very satisfying life for herself.  Her opinions were so unusual for the time that the delighted shock of women and stunned backlash of men and ministers made her famous.  In the Thirties women were still expected to be married and be quiet.  She spent her life living alone, writing books, and lecturing and had a good time doing it all. 

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THE EXTRA WOMAN   by   Joanna Scutts. 

 

This cultural critic discovered Hillis's 1936 book and in 2018 published her own exploring  "the revolutionary years following the Live-Alone movement".  Her book reads easily as it traces Marjorie's busy life and its influence on writers through the next four decades.  Live Alone & Like It gave birth to bestsellers encouraging women to take charge of their own life, even while homemaking.  Like Irma Rombauer's popular The Joy Of Cooking, also in the thirties, contrasting with Betty Friedan's decades later,The Feminine Mystique, both of which took for granted women's right to make their lives what they wanted them to be. Scutts shows how these four decades gradually grew into the women's social norm of choice in the modern world we live in today. 

 

 

C'EST LA VIE   by  Suzy Gershman. 

 

Gershman's experiences as a professional shopper for New York stores and her love of Paris shops and flea markets gave her the courage to sell her house and move there after her husband suddenly died.  She discovered that visiting Paris and living there were two vastly different approaches to life.  With finding an apartment and living there the hard one.  Her French was inadequate, her cooking in a ramshackle kitchen difficult, and her one sexual adventure with a French count not romantic or worth her effort at being a middle aged Cinderella.  Suzy's book is funny, her new Parisian life a parable of caution, and her admission that she skipped the depressing parts makes one wonder what was even worse.  

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