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

she died, the same year Betty Friedan was writing The Feminine Mystique. These publications marked the cusp of the women’s movement, which would challenge the core values of the 1950s and the ways in which they besieged women. Friedan gave voice to America’s white middle-class women in that tightrope generation. She said that, despite their privilege, they suffered from something she called “the problem that has no name.” This “problem” played out in a Valium-soaked suburbia filled with college-educated women who had convinced themselves that a husband and six children was their ultimate dream. Only to discover it was not.

Years earlier, Betsy Talbot Blackwell had already noticed that upon arriving in the suburbs “a great sameness seemed to envelop most of them. The sameness of houses and cars and appliances began to erase the individual.” Moreover, in the spirit of neighborliness, the idea was strong that one had to conform together; as Fortune magazine wrote, one suburban couple, too ashamed of their bare living room, smeared the windows with Bon Ami household cleaner until their dinette set arrived.

By the late 1950s, the average marrying age for a woman had dropped to twenty. One woman, presumably panicked by her twenty-five-years-of-age-and-still-single status, “took thirty-five jobs in six months in the futile hope of finding a husband.” The number of women versus men going to college had dropped to 35 percent compared to 47 percent in the flapper decade of the 1920s. By the mid-1950s, 60 percent of women dropped out of college to marry, or to make themselves more marriageable by being less educated. Once married, they went to work only for the “PhT”—“putting husband through” college or graduate school. Girls were encouraged to go steady at twelve, and manufacturers made bras with foam rubber bosoms for girls of ten. Having two children was no longer enough; it was more impressive to have four, five, or better yet, six. Three out of ten women went blond and many more “ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young models.” Department stores reported that women were now three to four sizes smaller compared to 1939.

Phyllis Lee Schwalbe, Mademoiselle’s former College Board editor, the young woman who had mistaken George Davis for the porter, wrote a piece for the New York Times that Friedan would build on in her famous book. In summer 1960, as Plath was starting to work on The Bell Jar, Schwalbe wrote: “This June, while campus bells ring out… 100,000 women are graduating from colleges across the country. For the majority, in time, the satin-circled diplomas mark the descent from ivory towers to park playgrounds, push-button kitchens, supermarkets and finished basements. The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one.” Presidents of women’s colleges nationwide were scrambling to explain why women, if best suited to be wives and mothers, needed rigorous academic training: did that not set them up for depression, and rounds of Valium prescriptions to take the edge off? “The reason a college bred housewife often feels like a two-headed schizophrenic is this,” wrote Phyllis. “She used to talk about whether music was frozen architecture; now she talks over frozen food plans. Once she wrote a paper on the Graveyard Poets; now she writes notes to the milkman. Once she determined the boiling point of sulphuric acid; now she determines her boiling point with the overdue repairman.”

Nor could Sylvia Plath escape her generation’s fate. The writer Janet Burroway, a 1955 GE with Joan Didion, developed an uncharacteristic case of jealousy toward Sylvia Plath, but when she finally met her at a British embassy reception, she declared her to be “just as nice as possible.” After Mademoiselle, Janet would follow in Sylvia’s footsteps in many ways: she too would win the Glascock Prize and then a Fulbright to Cambridge University in England. But it was at a party at Plath’s London house, five weeks after Sylvia had given birth to her daughter Frieda in 1960, that Janet witnessed what she would later understand to be a revelatory moment: “What I remember in particular is this. I stood in the doorway of the narrow kitchen talking with Sylvia, who held Frieda in the crook of her left arm while she rattled pots with her right… you can’t cook a meal one-handed while rocking an infant.… Finally, she took the baby into the living room and with some emphasis handed her to Ted—I want to say shoved her at.”

Later that year, Sylvia wrote a short story, “A Day of Success,” which Ted Hughes would dismiss as “pastiche for a woman’s magazine.” It is the story of a writer and his wife. He sells a television play and heads off to a lunch with a “high-powered career woman while she nurses the baby and a daylong jealous fantasy.” The late Sylvia Plath would go on to become a feminist icon, but she was no renegade in her time. At age seventeen, Sylvia wrote about her worries that marriage, children, and domestic life would take up precious space that she wished to reserve for her writing, but by twenty-two, she had come to terms with it. She wrote to the novelist and poet Olive Higgins Prouty that she no longer saw academia or a career as her destination but instead imagined a quiet amalgamation of the jobs of housewife, mother, and writer. She had accepted her prescribed lot in life even before she married Ted Hughes.

But while Sylvia had filled up pages wrestling with it, others did not even question it. Yet the fallout to come was felt across the board. Grace Kelly and her roommates at the Barbizon were of the same generation as Sylvia and her cohorts. Looking back, one former bridesmaid at Grace Kelly’s grand royal wedding wrote: “The ’50s romantic idea that there was just one Mr. Right and finding him would make life happy ever after were put to hard tests.