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

the fiction department to find up-and-coming writers at rock-bottom prices, including Truman Capote, James Purdy, Flannery O’Connor, and Edward Albee. Between the just-discovered writers and the affordable fashions modeled by young collegiate types, the magazine fed the desires of ambitious, pretty, creative young coeds, and the guest editor program was the honey to the bees. In the years ahead, it would entice future writers Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Ann Beattie, Diane Johnson, Mona Simpson, Meg Wolitzer, Janet Burroway, as well as actress Ali MacGraw and fashion designer Betsey Johnson. Each of them walked the hallways of Mademoiselle; all of them spent their nights at the Barbizon.

It was back in 1944, toward the end of World War II, that BTB decided that the “Millies,” as the guest editors would later be called, needed to be housed at the Barbizon. On the one hand, the Barbizon fit the image that Mademoiselle projected; on the other, housing the GEs there was also the best way to convince their parents to give permission for their young daughters to go to New York alone, unchaperoned, often traveling cross-country, by plane and by train, to get there. Because when that telegram from BTB arrived, congratulating you on having won one of the coveted spots in the guest editor program and inviting you to be in New York by the first day of June—even if it meant missing final exams and graduations, there was not one college girl out there who would refuse. The Barbizon helped allay the parents’ concerns: their daughters would be appropriately accommodated in a highly reputed and well-secured hotel for women, with curfews, stern front-desk receptionists, a watchful doorman, and a strict policy of never letting men, any men—not fathers, nor brothers, and certainly not boyfriends—anywhere near the bedroom floors. The Barbizon was not just a hotel with rooms, it was protection for young women, and just as it had in the 1920s and 1930s, so too in the 1940s still, protection meant freedom. In the case of the young GEs, it meant the freedom to come to New York and get a head start on their own lives as career women.

Young women during World War II were being told they could do anything they put their minds to. That promise was cemented by Rosie the Riveter’s relentless message. Wherever one looked, there was Rosie, America’s favorite poster girl, with a red-and-white polka-dot bandanna keeping her hair out of the machinery, flexing her biceps, urging women that “We Can Do It!” Among the young women she fired up was Nanette Emery, although Nanette had no interest in testing her skills on the factory floor: she was more interested in following in the footsteps of BTB.

Nanette Emery, a dark-haired Bryn Mawr College sophomore from Detroit, approached the 1945 guest editor contest with calculated ferocity. Her first step was to get accepted onto the Mademoiselle College Board. Back in Mademoiselle’s New York offices, a map of the United States stretched across one wall, with each board member’s college location marked by a red pin. That this setup mimicked a war room was no accident; throughout World War II, Blackwell had worked closely with the US government to help recruit her readers for women’s wartime services like the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), the navy’s WAVES, and the coast guard’s SPARS, and the magazine, much like America’s culture generally, had been affected by the war effort. A flyer for College Board membership announced: UNDERGRADS ATTENTION! Mlle INVITES YOU to enlist now for the COLLEGE BOARD. No commissions—but War Stamps and Bonds for silver-barred ideas from collegiate artists, writers and shutterbugs. For details write to the College Board Editor, MADEMOISELLE, 1 E. 57 ST., New York 22, N.Y.

College Board editor Phyllis Lee Schwalbe had started at Mademoiselle in 1942, when she herself was barely older than the guest editor applicants. Just out of college and more accustomed to serious women who taught Chaucer and Shakespeare, she quickly learned “that Arpège [perfume] by the quart and turquoise eyelids were not the only hallmarks of a fashion magazine editor. One had to make provisions, for example, for a cigarette holder worn out of the side of the mouth, the way a flamenco dancer bites a rose.” In 1944, as Nanette was preparing to apply to the Mademoiselle College Board as the first step toward her ticket to New York, Phyllis Lee Schwalbe wrote to her: “As you probably know, we’ve organized the College Board on practically every campus in the country. Being a Board member means covering your campus from head to toe, inside and outside the classroom and dormitory. It means reporting on war activities, new courses, charities, volunteer work, hairdos, fads and fashions, in fact, EVERYTHING that’s NEW.” (BTB had not been exaggerating when she boasted in a speech to the Fashion Chicago Group that “these assignments tell us what she and her schoolmates like; what they dislike; what they wear; what they pay; what they read, think, and do.”) By the 1940s, Mademoiselle’s influence was so vast among college-age women that America’s colleges themselves worried about the magazine portraying them in a good light. Aware of the power of a young College Board member to make that happen, the Bryn Mawr College administration sent Nanette a note congratulating her on her intention to try out for the board but also asking her to meet with a Mrs. Chadwick-Collins who “does not mean to exercise any censorship over what you send in but she does want to explain a few things to you.”

Nanette successfully cleared this first hurdle, but her acceptance to the board was followed by various assignments throughout the school year, and her performance on them was crucial for her guest editor contest chances. The statistics were not in her favor. Eight hundred and fifty young women had won a place on the College Board out of a pool of three to four thousand applicants; from that pool, only fourteen would now win the position