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

and bright, young things with perky smiles and unspoiled dreams. BTB realized it soon enough: “There are occasions when, on viewing the nation’s long and heady love affair with Youth, I feel like the biter bitten.” Her magazine peddled youth, and the guest editors were the saleswomen.

Nevertheless, the opportunities that Mademoiselle provided for young women were revolutionary. For its young women readers, the magazine unapologetically offered both visual and intellectual stimuli; for its guest editors, it offered a prestigious launching pad, a jumping-off point for each generation’s most driven young women. This was especially valuable in the 1950s, a time when men—white men—ruled unchallenged, unopposed. Male dominance and female deference were entirely normalized. On-screen, formidable 1940s Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn had given way to bubbly 1950s Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. This was a time when, as Chris Ladd points out, “higher education was a carefully groomed preserve of white men, insulating them not only from racial minorities, but competition from women. Virtually every administrator, professor and admissions officer was a white man.”

These same privileges then carried over seamlessly into the workplace without so much as a raised eyebrow: “Every banker, attorney, accountant, realtor, doctor or bureaucrat… was a white man.” It was against this background that BTB, her largely female staff, and her young guest editors created an alternate universe within the offices of Mademoiselle and, equally, within the hallways of the Barbizon: two places where women (although certainly white, middle-class women) were seen and heard, where, like BTB, they ruled, where they had beauty and brains as both producers and consumers. This was at a time when no one, as Janet Burroway recalled, had the word “feminism” in their vocabulary, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, even within the strict confines of the 1950s.

CHAPTER SEVEN

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Gael Greene and “The Lone Women”

This photograph captures so many timeless elements of the Barbizon experience. A glamorous young woman dressed to the nines meets her date while her fellow residents look on. The younger set checks out her date from the mezzanine above while the older residents sit comfortably in the lobby, ready to remark on the goings-on.

In 1950, the New York Sunday News ran an illustrated feature about the Barbizon Hotel for Women with the heading: “No Men, but Who Needs Men?”

They had it so very wrong.

The decade ahead would in fact suggest the very opposite: any decent, self-respecting woman needed a man; a woman without a man was nothing. The days of independent Rosie the Riveter were long gone, as was the 1920s liberated flapper and the 1930s self-sufficient working girl. That is why Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion and all the others still found themselves oscillating—with all the angst and frustration that this elicited—between acting on their own dreams and following society’s expectations for them.

Then, of course, there was needing a man, as in dating, going steady, marrying, and moving to the suburbs—and “needing a man” the way in which Grace Kelly reputedly did, and which was most certainly not discussed because it would have meant confronting the decade’s glaring contradictions. After Grace was already married and crowned princess of Monaco, Malachy McCourt would hear of her coming to his bar around the corner from the Barbizon with “ugly, thuggish, beetle-browed types,” and he could only square it with the rumors that “she had a fondness for men sharing a certain overstated attribute.” Indeed, even prior to her marriage, she was known for a series of passionate love affairs, and also calculated ones; director Alfred Hitchcock, who would help make her famous in Rear Window, called her a “snow-covered volcano” but also, less subtly, the most promiscuous woman he had ever met.

The inconsistencies between women’s desires and America’s expectations of them wrought ire, anxiety, and moral contortions. The two essays in Mademoiselle magazine that provoked the most backlash among its young female readers were about sex. One was a 1958 short story about two college undergraduates in a heterosexual relationship; he is irritated by her, desiring her, repulsed that she puts out; she is cloying, quick to please him, emotionally overwrought. At the end, trying to release the tension between them, they hunt through the available cars behind the girls’ dormitories—cars left intentionally unlocked, with boxes of tissues and clean seat covers. She settles on a station wagon, and before she knows it, his sexual desire has tipped over into assault. The other piece was a 1959 report on a frank discussion with college graduates about the role of premarital sex. The consensus was that men wanted virginal wives, but they also wanted to be experienced lovers, and they flocked to the girls who “put out,” with whom they “practiced” in preparation for marriage with their bride. The magazine’s readers might have been appalled but, as usual, Mademoiselle was ahead of its time: it discussed what plagued its audience; it didn’t ignore these issues.

Just as female desire was not to be discussed openly, neither was female loneliness. If women were nothing without men, who then were the women who could not catch or keep them? Neither the lonesome woman nor the sexually active woman fit 1950s expectations for journeying the female path. (Nor, for that matter, the contentedly single woman or the gay woman.)

One of the key amenities that the Barbizon widely advertised was companionship. Mademoiselle regularly told its out-of-town readers that if they were to come to the big city, the Barbizon was the place for them to stay. In 1940, Mademoiselle called the hotel “a godsend,” a place that was “cozy, unstarched,” with “slews of young women interested in the same things you are.” Living at the Barbizon, it promised, you would have new friends in less time than it took to say “How do you do.” Within its walls there were more things to do than one had time for: the gymnasium, squash court, “a dandy