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

some sort of liberation slogan. Dix’s real name was Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, but she had lifted her pen name from a slave who had saved the family silver during the Civil War. She would recklessly intertwine the 1828 phrase with white women’s empowerment in the first half of the twentieth century.

Barbara Chase, however, while free and twenty-one, was not white. A student at Temple University, African American, and a reader of Mademoiselle magazine, she decided, like so many other college coeds that summer, to apply for the prestigious guest editor program. She thought nothing of it, which is the way she moved through life, whether truly unaware of the racism around her or willfully ignorant of it is hard to say. Moreover, as she saw it, she was already on a roll, and having other prizes improved one’s odds—just as they had for Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. Barbara Chase had recently won the Seventeen magazine illustration prize: the winning illustration was exhibited in the ACA Gallery in New York, where the curator for prints and drawings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art happened to see it and purchased it for the museum.

Back in New York at the Mademoiselle offices, as deliberations began in the late spring about the finalists for summer 1956, Barbara Chase was a front-runner. But there were serious concerns voiced about choosing a young African American woman: as of yet, no fashion magazine had even published a photographic image of a black woman on its pages. As a guest editor, Barbara would have to be on the pages of the August College Issue, the most anticipated of the year. The Mademoiselle GE program was all about exposure, about bringing the readers and the GEs—the readers’ peers, in essence—along for the ride as they told their story of their magical month in New York with breathless narration. There were also the GE biographies (with photo), their “We Hitch Our Wagons” celebrity interviews (with photo), everyday snapshots of their brief but glamorous lives at the Barbizon, and finally the traditional group photograph, in which they would all don the same outfit, the one that Mademoiselle had been paid to feature.

When the question of Barbara Chase’s potential guest editorship came up, president of Street & Smith wrote to editor-in-chief Betsy Talbot Blackwell: “I will not take issue with anyone regarding their views on segregation. Personally I am sympathetic to the problem, however, it appears to me we have attempted to establish another ‘first’ when we weren’t called upon to do so.” He argued that people at the magazine had let “their liberalism” “dictate,” and that, at best, they might gain “a few colored readers and possibly alienate—Southern stores—many white readers—possibly some advertising accounts.” “Whose views prevailed here?” he demanded to know. Others were also concerned about the logistics. If they picked Barbara Chase—even as she was “attractive as all get-out” and “the most outstanding of the art contestants, by far”—it would be a logistical nightmare. There were questions, many, for which no one in the offices of Mademoiselle or Street & Smith Publishers could even find an answer: “Will she be allowed to stay at the Barbizon with the rest of the GEs!?” “What about dates for her when the big St. Regis do comes?; in restaurants when luncheon parties are given?; our Southern advertisers?” No one knew.

Yet anticipating this issue might eventually come up, a year earlier Street & Smith had in fact approached Betsy Talbot Blackwell, the staunch Republican Party member with a chauvinistic husband, about the possibility of an African American guest editor finalist. BTB had answered that she was not worried, and she held on to that view even now. Barbara Chase thus was chosen as one of the twenty 1956 guest editors. Barbara arrived in New York, where, as far as she could see, “the segregation was as rigid as in the South,” even if others pretended otherwise. Barbara Chase was not light-skinned. She was used to being stared at, for various reasons, not just the color of her skin, but she also genuinely believed that no one at the Barbizon ever gave her “funny looks,” or then again, perhaps she was choosing not to see it? When she walked into the hotel for the first time on June 1, 1956, she thought the place very glamorous, particularly the lobby. But that didn’t mean she didn’t think she belonged. Barbara always thought she belonged.

As one of the Mademoiselle internal memos had noted, Barbara was attractive, with a straight bob that curled up at the ends just above her shoulders (which sometimes she pulled back, adding white pearl earrings), almond eyes, and a dancer’s body. In her Mademoiselle bio, Barbara Chase, guest promotion art director, was introduced to readers as a young woman who had “won scholarships to seven colleges, has a print included in the Museum of Modern Art’s print collection. At Temple she directed the modern dance group and art-edited the annual while doing a six-foot clay composition and 20 art projects (she thrives on pressure). ‘But the biggest event in my life,’ she modestly insists, ‘was acquiring a studio that’s cold as a barn.’… now she wants a ‘one-man show and eventually one man.’ ” In a sense, with that last sentence, Barbara had announced that she was no different from the other girls, the white girls, at the Barbizon.

Even so, the other GEs did not quite know what to make of her, nor did the high-powered women of Mademoiselle. They had definite ideas about things, but then so did Barbara. Conflicts arose, but Barbara did not believe they were related to race but rather to class and age. Barbara guessed that the Mademoiselle editorial staff was surprised that she was sophisticated, educated, articulate. They seemed at a loss as to what to do with a self-described “girl who came from another planet, who doesn’t know her place in life, who isn’t aggressive, or angry, who is not particularly friendly, instead reserved,