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

discussion was permitted among the GEs until they had turned in their written reports that same evening to Cyrilly Abels’s office. They were given a copy of the article each and sent off to read and write.

Neva Nelson offered some solid critical analysis, pointing out the report was based on Kinsey’s statistics but that “statistics even from 9,460 people is not to be taken as the everlasting truth.” Janet Wagner was game: she liked how it showed that “the facts disprove popular beliefs,” and noted that while the finding that “girls with pre-marital experience were better prepared for marriage” might offend some, they were Mr. Kinsey’s and not Mademoiselle’s, letting the magazine off the hook. Janet, although described by Sylvia as a country hick, was always partial to a little elitism and was pleased that Kinsey “studied women in different classes and the educated came out on top.” Another GE smarted at precisely this, arguing that “many people are better off not knowing ‘what it’s all about.’… This would be true of the laborers and non-college women who already feel at a disadvantage without having sexual response added to their deficiencies” (this comment elicited an enormous exclamation point in the margin by Cyrilly Abels—an exclamation point that could just as easily have been an expression of the snobbish Radcliffe graduate as of the left-wing sympathizer in her). Of course this GE was perfectly right; one of the more serious criticisms later leveled at Kinsey was that his sample group was overwhelmingly made up of white middle-class college-educated women.

Laurie Glazer was perhaps the most direct about the effects of writing about sex: “It is extremely timely (and when is sex not timely? If people would only break down and admit that sex occupies a tremendous amount of society’s time—via movies, advertising, even fashion: dressing to please a man’s eye, etc.)” Indeed, the Kinsey Report would become crucial as the starter engine to the 1960s sexual revolution because it pointed out the hypocrisy of American society, which refused to discuss sex even as men and women were fully participating in its many variations behind closed doors. Carol LeVarn, Sylvia’s best friend at the Barbizon and the inspiration for the morally loose and sexually charged Doreen in The Bell Jar, was glad to see that the Kinsey Report was doing away “with some old superstitions”—“high time” in fact—yet her “major criticism” suggested a character quite different from Doreen: “Is there no way to eliminate the implicit distinction between love and sex both on the part of Kinsey and the author?”

Sylvia Plath wrote the longest report, a full two pages, but for someone who was constantly balancing, and contemplating, the 1950s demands for women’s chastity with her own sexual desires, and who strongly felt the sting of that double standard and its burden, she was surprisingly bland. Sylvia embarked on a point-by-point explanation of why and how the piece should appear in Mademoiselle. She wanted the writer of the review to leave all editorializing until the very end. As to the possibility that “some readers might take the statistics and implied go-ahead for experience seriously, as advisable, as well as pleasurable. And parents might resent the danger of this interpretation,” Sylvia felt the writer had argued sufficiently that the statistics had to be placed “in relation to the moral philosophy of each of the readers.” The kind of frankness Sylvia showed in her journals and letters was entirely gone here. It would be left to The Bell Jar’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, to say what Sylvia Plath had really thought: “I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.”

That very night, when the guest editors were done reading the Kinsey piece and had submitted their reports, BTB sent the information on to the publisher, Gerald Smith, apologizing for intruding on his weekend although, as she wrote, she was glad he was not yet bored by “l’affaire Kinsey.” But by the next day, those on the business side of Mademoiselle, having heard what was afoot, were apoplectic, writing to BTB that publishing this review of the Kinsey Report would mean “an avalanche of advertising and subscription cancellations. This kind of stuff is dynamite… and has no place in MADEMOISELLE.” Revenue arguments won, and no mention of the Kinsey Report ever appeared.

This was Mademoiselle in a nutshell: full of contradictions, and in that sense entirely emblematic. Staffed by highly educated career women, the magazine brought similar young women to the Barbizon each June, to help mold a magazine catering to the very same kind of readership, who expected a mix of fashion and cutting-edge fiction, art, and commentary. At the same time, the magazine offered a prescription for womanhood that was its very opposite. Guest editor Dinny Lain (later Diane Johnson) noted that while Vogue was for sophisticated women, Mademoiselle was intended for a much younger female audience, and “yet how strict was the version of womanhood the… editors imposed on us.” This was indeed the tightrope generation. As another 1953 GE explained, “We were the first generation after the war and the last generation before the Pill.”

The rules were clear, and the expectations sky-high: women should be virgins, but not prudes; women should go to college, pursue a certain type of career, and then give it up to get married. And above all, living with these contradictions should not make them confused, angry, or worse, depressed. They should not take a bottle of pills and try to forget. Mary Cantwell witnessed many times over the consequences of failing to meet these expectations: sobs in the bathrooms, rumors of abortion, and hurried trips to Hoboken, New Jersey, to take care of it.

On Friday, June 26, most of the 1953 guest editors—including Sylvia—headed home. Sylvia was not the only one to leave feeling deflated by the experience. Only Janet Wagner seemed not to have had to