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

Now the Katie Gibbs classrooms were filled not with Seven Sisters alumnae out for a good time but with young women desperate to find a path to real employment. Girls of leisure had turned into girls in search of work. It was harder for Vassar, Smith, and Barnard graduates to get into Katie Gibbs than it had been for them to get into their prestigious colleges. To accommodate the flood of students, in 1930 the sixteenth floor of the Barbizon Hotel became the official Katharine Gibbs residence in New York. Refinement and precision continued to be central to the Gibbs girl training. Mandatory classes in poise, voice, and manner were supplemented by art appreciation lectures by the likes of the famous Hungarian painter and Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy. Prestigious college faculty were tapped for other courses as varied as Health, Posture, and Personal Hygiene (taught by Dr. Dorothy Kenyon, assistant in neurology at Columbia University, and Dr. Faith Meserve, a consulting physician at Wellesley College); Modern Decoration; Banking; Management Problems; Fashion in Business; Income Management; and English Literature, presumably to keep up a conversation about books if the situation arose. Instructions for life after Gibbs suggested that a Gibbs girl always knew best:

You may find that it is the custom of the firm [where you are now a secretary] to use this form in writing the date, June 21st, 193-. Use it temporarily, at least, with good grace, although you know that the modern trend is to omit the st and the period at the end. Do not, however, allow these older methods to become such a fixed habit with you that they actually come to seem correct or even preferable.

In 1934, Katharine’s elder son committed suicide, and two months later, Katharine died, but her remaining son, Gordon Gibbs, continued to grow the business, making Katharine’s name sacrosanct for its thousands of students. He added the Barbizon’s seventeenth floor to the Gibbs girls’ dormitory and moved the school once again, this time to the prestigious New York Central Building (later renamed the Helmsley), the tallest structure in the Grand Central rail station complex. Its location was touted for its access to the Grand Central Terminal concourse through “convenient pedestrian subways.” The school was on the fourth floor with “modern ventilating and silencing equipment.” A private dispensary on-site catered to the students’ physical health while their mental and social health were buoyed by a calendar of coffee hours, department entertainments and parties, and a formal all-school dance in the midwinter season.

In addition to the reserved floors of the Barbizon, Gibbs girls also had the exclusive use of “an attractive suite of lounge and recreation rooms” on the twenty-second floor. Their meals (breakfast and dinner) were taken in the private and “picturesque Corot room,” with food catered by the downstairs Barbizon coffee shop. They also had their own Thursday teas in the twenty-second-floor lounge, separate from the rest of the hotel. 1930s issues of The Gibbsonian routinely featured its young female students in Barbizon’s open-air spaces, Manhattan’s glorious skyline behind them. The back pages of the Gibbs yearbook—named Platen after the cylinder roller in a typewriter that secured the paper—made the connection more explicit still. Sponsoring pages were from “Emile of the Barbizon; Fashion’s Dictator… All Other Beauty Work Done by Experts,” the Barbizon Pharmacy, and “The Barbizon Coffee Shoppe & Restaurant—Caterers to Katharine Gibbs School.”

Gibbs had successfully tied itself to the kind of efficient glamour the Barbizon now exuded. Never mind that many Depression-era students were like Barbara Coulter—and nothing like Helen Estabrook Stoddard, the well-bred Massachusetts philanthropist—who just barely managed to attend Gibbs on money her mother had saved. Living at the Barbizon as a Gibbs girl meant she got breakfast and dinner in the “picturesque” Corot room, as promised, but was always hungry in between with no spare funds for lunch. Any spending money she had went to the hats, gloves, heels, and stockings that Gibbs girls were required to wear at all times. Without them, Barbara Coulter would be fined at best, cast out at worst. Not even on the subway were the Gibbs girls allowed to take off their hats—this remained true well into the late 1960s when the hat, by then a symbol of outdated femininity, had been all but abandoned by anyone under the age of thirty.

While the Katharine Gibbs school’s stated mission was to put young women on the business career track, courses in culture and etiquette suggested alternate pathways through the pecuniary jungle. Frances Fonda, the future mother of Jane and Peter Fonda, was determined to go to Gibbs and “become the fastest typist and best secretary anyone could hire.” But her plan did not end there. Frances Fonda imagined for herself an ambitious descent onto Wall Street following her Gibbs training, and, soon after, a marriage to a millionaire. She did exactly that, twice over, before taking her own life in 1950. Gibbs job placements were ripe for various possibilities because with no laws, let alone qualms, against outlining exactly what sort of Gibbs girl one desired, it was quite acceptable for executives to request “girls” over five foot eight or only redheads. Charles Lindbergh, famous pilot and well-known fascist sympathizer, requested a secretary who would be in lockstep with his political ideologies. The Saturday Evening Post quoted an executive who was hiring another Gibbs graduate just two months after the first—because his son had married the first.

But Gibbs girls also used their secretarial positions to start climbing the corporate ladder. The recognition that took root in the 1920s that a woman’s career could extend beyond nursing and teaching continued into the 1930s, despite the mixed messages of the Depression era. This recognition was often reinforced at the Barbizon through various teas, talks, and lectures, including a dinner hosted by the Barnard College Club on the topic of women in the professions, with a round of speakers for the night: