The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

freed of Victorianrestrictions in dress and manners and lifestyle were the definers of the 1920s as womenbegan to come into their own in this decade. For those from an older generation, likeMolly Brown, the changes were astonishing. Before World War I, asingle woman at a bar with a drink was automatically labeled a “lady of thenight.” In 1904, a woman lit a cigarette while out on Fifth Avenue, and wassummarily arrested—for being a woman smoking in public. But by the 1920s, suchbehavior was not only acceptable on the streets of Manhattan but mimicked across thecountry. Lois “Lipstick” Long played her part, toutingthe sort of madcap life that young women everywhere could begin to appropriate forthemselves. It is what sixteen-year-old Lillian Clark Red fromCanton, Ohio, did. Bored with high school, she grabbed a checkbook and took a train toCincinnati. There she rented a room in a hotel on Walnut Street, outfitted herselfsplendidly from various stores, and then headed on over to a real estate agent,presenting herself as an heiress. She decided on a pretty bungalow overlooking the OhioRiver, and wrote out a $25,000 check for its full purchase price. The house, of course,needed to be furnished, so she did that too, spending $6,000. The last touch was a car,and she found one she liked for $2,600. She was eventually found out and delivered backto her humdrum life. But Lillian Clark Red from Canton, Ohio, had followed theflapper’s handbook and taken life to its extreme. She was not the “NewWoman” as the suffragettes like Molly Brown had envisioned her, but she wasthoroughly “modern.”

Unsurprisingly then, censure for the modern woman, in all her variations,was widespread. Everyone had something to say about her. AMonsieur Cestre, professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, spent 1926 on a lecture tour of theUnited States, where, somewhat creepily, he “studied the American girl.”“Loaned” to Vassar College—Lois “Lipstick” Long’salma mater—for two weeks he observed the Vassar girls with anthropologicalintensity and concluded that while everyone thought it was the French girl who was fastand easy, in fact it was “just the opposite. The French girl is very carefullyreared, and it is not until she is married that she has any liberties to speak of. No,the American miss is much ‘faster’ than the Parisian mademoiselle.”The New York Times sardonically noted that Professor Cestre “did notamplify his statement on the American girl in this regard.” He hardly had to; hewas clearly of the mind that women at bars were automatically suspect. But he was notentirely wrong if suspect meant sexually active. Of the women bornbefore 1900, about 14 percent had had premarital sex, yet of the women who came of age in the 1910s and 1920s, between 36 and 39 percent did; and,statistically, they were also far more likely to have orgasms—even as they weremost likely losing their virginity to the men who would become their husbands.

Criticism of her was not just about loose morals, however. Therewere other violations of cultural norms. New York’s RabbiKrass charged that the modern woman tended to “mimic man.” With much greater originality, a Mrs. Ruth Maurer explained to a Chicago school ofcosmeticians: “Many a modern woman has a face as hard as the crockery of arailroad lunch counter, and the reason is chewing gum. Human beings were not meant to beruminating animals.…” In the long-held tradition of fat-shaming, numerousassertions claimed that the modern woman was uglier than her predecessors, and mostdefinitely larger. When dress manufacturers were accused of failingto make clothes that fit contemporary women, they lashed out that the average hip sizehad recently increased by up to three inches. Women’s feet were not free ofscrutiny either. Between 1920 and 1926, precisely the heyday of theflapper, it was charged that the average shoe size had gone from four and a half to sixand a half, and the ankle had become decidedly thicker because of the trend for wearinglow-heeled oxfords.

Others defended this particular incarnation of the New Woman. In 1926,Lady Astor, a Virginia native and now first female member of the British Parliament,tried to make it back home incognito to the United States for a quiet family vacation.But already in wait at Boston Harbor as the Samaria pulled in was a crowd ofreporters, who assailed her with questions ranging from her thoughts on wartimereparations to the modern woman. “You’ll get the shockof your life in America, Lady Astor,” one reporter called out. “You’llsee people drunk. You’ll see girls drunk. Cocktails everywhere.” A month later into her trip back home, although she still feignednot to know what a flapper was—“but I suppose they mean a modern young woman”—Lady Astor persisted in defending her: “I may beamazed at the sight of short hair and short skirts, but surely these are far healthierthan long skirts and tight waists and curl papers and all the other paraphernalia thatwe women have had to put up with for years. I haven’t had intelligence enough tobob my hair, but I take off my hat to those who have.”

The Jazz Age had proven to be a balancing act: the post–World War INew Woman had an independence previously unimaginable, but it was accompanied bywidespread indictments of her, as if independence was itself a transgression. The boomin women’s residential hotels facilitated this independence, and so they too wereopen to the same sort of criticism. The Barbizon was however given an added boost ofrespectability when the National Association of Junior Leagues, the charitable sororityfor upper-class women, opened its clubroom on the twenty-second floor of the hotel withmajestic views of Manhattan. The room, featured in Vogue, waslauded for “retaining its common denominator of modernity” while providing apractical clubroom for young women: an angular white laminated fireplace was the centralfeature, with an enormous mirror from the top of the mantel up to the ceiling, whichreflected the art deco ceiling lights that looked like translucent stacked matchboxes.The posh Junior League was not the only one to set up beautifully appointed clubrooms atthe Barbizon. Back in 1922, the Vassar College Club had already rented out a whole floorof the Allerton House because women’s