A husband might also be a kind of orchid—a delightful splurge for a self-supporting woman. Why not marry that penniless artist, if he’s charming and willing? In chapter four, “Can You Afford a Husband?” Marjorie presents men as allowable indulgences for successful women. “It may be an extravagance, but even the periods of strict economy should include some extravagances if possible,” she begins, tongue firmly in cheek, putting men in the same category as lace underwear and scented bath oil.14 The joke of the chapter lies in treating an “unprofitable” man as an expense roughly comparable to a bigger apartment or a trip to Europe, but Marjorie’s serious point was that this approach to marriage was no less reckless than marrying a charmless man simply because he would be a good provider. Far better for a woman to take care of her own finances, and take the man on his merits. As long as prospective husbands and wives knew what they were getting into, and had actually discussed what marriage meant to them, then Marjorie thought they ought to “take the Leap” as soon as possible, rather than waiting for the economy to pick up. Modern marriage was about “affection and companionship,” rather than hope chests and “linen enough to last a lifetime.” The benefits of a husband are portrayed as social, decorative, and occasionally practical—but not so as to intrude upon the pleasant, self-determined independence celebrated in Live Alone: “It is perfectly understandable that any woman should like to have a man to sit at the head of her table when she entertains, and make a fourth at bridge, and go to the theatre with her, and open the ginger-ale bottles, and get out the ice cubes.”15
Even if she was largely spinning a fantasy for her female readers of financial security and autonomy in marriage, it was a sign of how profoundly the Depression had shaken up gender expectations that Marjorie could blithely imagine women in the masculine role, choosing a partner based on looks and personality rather than earning power. She describes a happy marriage between one such “delightful” man and the self-sufficient woman who chooses him, as though it is a form of artistic patronage, giving no hint that the man in question feels emasculated by the arrangement. The wealthy patroness-wife in this case study seeks out her unworldly husband because she knows how dull the rich are, having devoted themselves to the twenty-four-hour-a-day pursuit of wealth, which is wholly antithetical to the “arts and graces.”16
This playful rethinking of marital roles served to underscore one of Marjorie’s more earnest points, directed at her upper-class or upwardly mobile readers: It was absurd to try to maintain an arbitrary social position when the Depression had shaken up old hierarchies and “remoulded current opinion” around social status. The turmoil of the period had allowed for the emergence of a new class, the “Smart Poor,” who were not interested in faking their way into elite society, while even the stuffiest gatekeepers had to admit that “Nice People were often poor.” Society would only be enriched, Marjorie insisted, by welcoming in those who had deeper personalities than pockets.17
Majorie’s breezy review of the way that the Depression had readjusted both social class and the marriage market perhaps overstated the extent to which “arts and graces” were now valued—the smart poor, after all, were still poor. In George Cukor’s hit 1940 film The Philadelphia Story, the broke writer played by Jimmy Stewart protests to Katharine Hepburn’s heiress that the idea of artists being supported by “a patron Lady Bountiful” has rather “gone out.” Even with the romantic twist of marriage, a generous patron still reduced the artist to a position of dependence—something that Marjorie counseled women to avoid at all costs.
An exception who proved the rule could be found in the case study of “Miss C.” A pretty Southern girl who arrives in Chicago for work during the summer, Miss C. walks home past a string of tempting boutiques, and ends up wasting her entire small salary on the temptations she can’t avoid. When winter comes, she can’t afford the warm coat she truly needs, and ends up in a hospital with pneumonia. There, she’s lucky enough to catch the eye of a handsome and eligible doctor, so her story leaps from cautionary tale to fairy tale, putting her firmly out of the book. It’s clear, however, that this lucky escape is a rarity. The lesson of her story, like the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, is to save prudently for a big purchase before you need it, and not to rely on the slim chance of rescue by a white knight—who might not turn out to be reliable in the long term. Throughout the book Marjorie warns that dependence on others—whether friends, family, or a husband—will corrode affection and poison pleasure. As tough as it might be to resist the treats in the shop window, managing money and exercising independence were one and the same thing.
Don’t Keep Up with the Joneses . . .
The central moral lesson of Orchids was one that the Reverend Hillis might have preached from his pulpit: Envy is a deadly sin. Not, for Marjorie, because the Bible says so, or because it will send you to hell—she has no obvious opinion about that. The problem with envy is simply that it’s futile. “A house like the Smiths’ ” will not make you happy, and to pine for it is a waste of the energy that is a Live-Aloner’s most precious resource.
A book-length call to resist envy might seem like a surprising move from a writer who built a career selling rich women on the latest style of hat, and whose self-help philosophies were anything but self-denying. Envy was, after all, the engine of the economy in which Marjorie Hillis was raised, the driving emotion of the industrial boom of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, which soon became a consumption boom. During this Gilded Age, according to historian Susan J. Matt, what had once been a Victorian sin became a simple fact of life in the new consumer society.18 Quality of life became an arms race, as wealthy families jostled elbows to build grander houses on better avenues, make better marriages, and throw ever more lavish parties at which ever more elaborate gowns could be displayed.
“Keeping up with the Joneses” is a phrase from this era, and the name of a comic strip in the New York World that debuted in 1913. It’s been suggested that it derives from an actual family of Joneses, one of the wealthiest in New York, into which a daughter named Edith was born in 1862, who would grow up to become Edith Wharton, chief chronicler and critic of her social-climbing era. Keeping up with the Joneses was an impulse born of proximity—the desire to be better than your closest neighbors—and it held sway especially during a period when cities were growing but high society was small and exclusive, limited to the four hundred who, legend had it, could fit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom.19 During the wild stock exchange ride of the 1920s, however, more and more people from more and more places found themselves able to compete, to build their own palaces with even bigger ballrooms. They could come from nowhere, like Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, and status was no longer determined by birth and breeding, but by cash and conspicious consumption.
The arrival of the Depression shook things up once again. Early on in Orchids, Marjorie sets the scene for the new economic order that prevailed even among the privileged classes: “If you take out your address-book and read through from A to Z, you’ll be startled to find that a fair proportion of the people listed have changed their scale of living during the last few years, some of them moving up and more of them moving down.”20 In this shunted-around society, envy and competition had been replaced with a combination of sympathy, schadenfreude, and the obligation not to flaunt one’s wealth. Everyone had to budget now, even the Joneses; the first chapter of Orchids is called “Well, Who Isn’t Poor?” Thrift was no longer a rare, old-fashioned virtue but the most modern of morals. It could be satisfying and even fun (“up to a point,” Marjorie admitted)—because everyone else was doing it, too.
Poor, of course, was relative. The chapter “The Old Homestead” gives a taste of the class of reader Marjorie imagined herself speaking to, who had to weigh the expense of keeping up a large, inherited home against the practical gain of moving to a smaller house, and who had the luxury of worrying whether her address adequately reflected her social status. For those who didn’t have a spr
awling mansion to pack up, the advice Marjorie gave about where and how to live was still rooted in the principle of knowing yourself. Messy people would be miserable if they tried to cram into a too-small space, and ought to sacrifice a better neighborhood in the interest of bigger rooms. A neat freak, on the other hand, would be safe in a stylishly located studio.
. . . But Do Keep Up
With the publication of Orchids on Your Budget in June 1937, the nationwide department store “tie-up” campaign that had been such a success the previous fall cranked again into high gear. This time the publishers’ traveling salesmen were equipped with a more polished, three-color prospectus and the reassurance of the successful earlier campaign. The stores that had taken the gamble on the untapped market of the “Live-Aloner” were now eager for a repeat performance with Marjorie Hillis’s new book—and a promised audience that would extend beyond the single woman to any shopper who was interested in chic and economical goods.
Fashion remained central to the marketing campaign, even though Marjorie was no longer with Vogue. Stores in New Haven and Hartford planned fashion displays and presentations themed for Orchids, while in Milwaukee, to coincide with Fashion Week in September, the store took the theme literally, furnishing models with “live orchids in cellophane boxes,” which they threw into the audience at the end of a fashion show.21 The Emporium in San Francisco, meanwhile, demonstrated how the lessons of Orchids could profitably be spread throughout the store. In addition to clothing displays, it devoted several windows to other chapters, showcasing “slacks and plants from the roof garden” for the chapter on the home, and “gingham house dress and table settings” for the chapter called “You Have to Eat.”
Even the best-laid promotional plans, however, could go awry. In Baltimore, a woman in the store’s advertising department reported privately to Marjorie a comic mishap with its display, which featured mannequins paired with signs quoting the book, such as “Miss D. got the job.” After the display had been up for two days, the designer, a Miss Spicer, was checking on some missing items and asked the decorator where he had put them. “All was explained except a pair of white panties,” wrote the advertising whistleblower. “Oh, he said, I put them in her hand. And to Miss Spicer’s horrified delight—there stood the mannequin—Miss D. . . . got the job—with the panties nonchalantly dangling from her fingers!” She concluded that “I hope we have not cast aspersions on your Miss D.—but are afraid ours is not a Nice Girl, at all.”
As an experienced fashion editor, Marjorie was well used to the inherent cognitive dissonance of advertising new goods for sale while preaching a message of thrift and sensible spending. During the Depression, even a magazine as upscale as Vogue was forced to acknowledge the prevailing economic mood and to repackage extravagant purchases as “investments,” or as classics that wouldn’t date, no matter how cuts and hemlines changed. In Orchids, Marjorie’s rules for putting together an economical wardrobe likewise assumed that the reader had at least some money to spend, but needed help to spend it wisely and to resist the “semi-annual crop of temptations” that stores and magazines offered up.
Her advice did not begin with specific styles but with the command, once again, to know oneself. Before a woman could safely step inside Lord & Taylor she needed a detailed list of what she needed, “based on age, size, type, locality, what you do all day, and with whom you do it.”22 And before she could budget for the “orchids” that might be more fun to buy, she needed a solid wardrobe of clothes for the places she actually went, not the nightclubs she wanted to visit—which meant a hat, gloves, purse, shoes, and furs that all matched, or at least coordinated. As magazine editors would continue to do for the rest of the century, Marjorie recommended a little black evening dress as a versatile base for any kind of embellishment, and advised that a cheap evening wrap was a much smarter buy than a cheap pair of shoes. Cheapness was not just a question of price. It carried the risk of signaling something worse: a lack, or looseness, of morals. Especially in this era of shifting and uncertain class boundaries, it was acceptable to buy cheap items only as long as they could pass for something more expensive—economizing ought not to advertise itself. Anything that looked “extreme” or “too-too”—something with too much trimming, or a rhinestone buckle, or anything too skimpy or tight—ran the risk of upsetting the fragile balance of clothing and class.23
Another sign of the dreaded cheapness, just as obvious as extreme taste or flashy fabrics, was a wardrobe that was dirty, shabby, or threadbare. The ever-reliable French, the epitome of everything both sensible and chic, “would no more loll in a broadcloth suit than they would wear it to do the family washing.”24 French modes of fashion, food, and furnishings—not to mention sex—had been a source of inspiration for modern American self-help writers since Edith Wharton had extolled the virtues of what she saw as their more mature and sophisticated culture in her 1919 book French Ways and Their Meaning.25 For the American fashion industry in the 1930s, in thrall to the dictates of Paris, the superiority of the French way of doing things was still mostly taken for granted. The most notorious recent iteration of this idea was Mireille Guiliano’s 2006 bestseller proclaiming that French women don’t get fat—a goal that Marjorie also advocated, but not because it was stylish, or French, but because it was “an excellent economy.”26 Maintaining one’s figure and maintaining one’s wardrobe, just like sticking to a budget, were admittedly less fun than eating chocolate and shopping. Marjorie’s challenge, in Orchids, was to make this kind of self-restraint sound like a treat.
Marjorie was not alone in trying to convince her readers that taking care of their clothes, figures, and homes was satisfying and valuable—that it would “pay and pay and pay.” The message was widely broadcast during the Depression, especially to those women who didn’t work for wages but took care of a home, and for whom economizing was necessary but not a matter of life and death. Women’s magazines, which proliferated in the 1930s, built their empires on money-saving tips and ingenious ways to be both elegant and economical. The relentless challenge to cut down expenses without seeming to cut back on quality of life was presented as a prolonged exercise in ingenuity and triumph over circumstance. The gnawing anxiety that might accompany economic uncertainty was downplayed, and no doubt some readers found such an upbeat message patronizing and unrealistic. For thousands of others, however, books like Orchids offered an important shot of hope and solidarity in the grinding daily battle to stay within a stringent budget.
Just as there was a fine line between looking stylish and looking cheap, so it was perilously easy to tip from thrifty to mean. “A hair-line separates sensible economy from the first suspicion of closeness, one of the most unlovely qualities known to humankind,” Marjorie warned—and included a quiz (“This Will Tell You the Worst”) to help readers judge whether they had crossed it.27 But although her rules sounded arbitrary, there was a logic to them that measured up to the values put forward elsewhere in the book. The budgeter had gone too far when her penny-pinching made others pay, or went against the rule to take care of herself and her belongings. It was fine to save the string on a parcel or double check a restaurant bill—but whoever avoided paying her share, stiffed the help, or ruined her shoes in the rain to save on cab fare ought to know the bitter truth.
Although Marjorie was still writing mainly with independent women in mind, many of her case studies, like many of her readers, were married. For those women, it was part of the job to remain attractive during “lean periods,” even if it seemed frivolous to spend money on cosmetics and grooming. Letting yourself go was one of the “Things You Can’t Afford,” and was a graver sin even than gaining a reputation for meanness. Reflecting the prevailing wisdom of the time, and informed by her own somewhat cynical view of men, Marjorie implied that a husband who was out of work, or had seen his status reduced by the Depression, was going to look for someone to blame—“and a slovenly wife is as good an excuse as any other, if not a little better than
most.”28 It might not be fair, but the wife should be prepared—and devote time and energy to keeping herself attractive and her husband’s spirits up. If for no better reason than that if she didn’t, it was all too likely that another woman would. Even this gloomy scenario, however, was dispensed with briskly. Marjorie presented it as the unfortunate consequence of a “lean period” that could easily be remedied if the wife in question made more effort—an uncanny echo of how Marjorie’s own mother might have counseled the woman in question to behave.
Orchids on Your Budget did not presume to tackle the problem of serious, prolonged poverty. It spoke to readers who had a choice between options that were not too bad, rather than those who had no choice at all—as Marjorie put it, the difference between being able to choose whether or not to butter your bread, and being forced to forgo bread entirely. The latter case was not hard times but “destitution,” and she couldn’t tackle that in a shiny gold-wrapped book. But in her final chapter, Marjorie returned again to the problem of genuine poverty. She likened the frightening sensation of having no money and no job to “crossing a raging river on a plank without a railing,” evoking the metaphors of falling, drowning, and natural disaster that were commonplace in the language of the Depression economy. Marjorie’s advice on how to weather a financial storm reflected her class status, in her conviction that poverty was a temporary condition that could be alleviated with a little help from one’s better-off friends. The worst approach to financial disaster was misplaced pride: “Most people, and especially most men, would rather admit ignorance, dissipation, being jilted and a collection of physical disabilities than having no bank account,” she went on.29 Her advice, therefore, hinged on overcoming this pride, and confessing the situation to friends.
The Extra Woman Page 9
