The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

by Paulina Bren

The hotel was built in the Roaring Twenties for the flocks of women suddenly coming to New York to work in the dazzling new skyscrapers. They did not want to stay in uncomfortable boarding houses; they wanted what men already had—exclusive “club residences,” residential hotels with weekly rates, daily maid service, and a dining room instead of the burden of a kitchen.

But it was Sylvia Plath, Mademoiselle’s most famous guest editor, who would also bring the greatest notoriety to the hotel. Ten years after her stay there, and shortly before her final, successful suicide attempt, she would disguise the Barbizon as “the Amazon,” spilling out its secrets in her famous novel, The Bell Jar.

By 1932, twenty-six states had made it illegal for married women to hold a job, and in the states where it was not mandatory to quit work upon marriage, it was still mandatory to disclose one’s impending married status because it was considered outrageous for a woman to be taking a job away from a “real” breadwinner. The Barbizon provided shelter from such denouncements. It was not just a residential hotel anymore; it was safe harbor.

Men left for war, and women were now expected to take over their jobs—even as before they had been reprimanded for it. When General “Wild Bill” Donovan put out a call for women to come work for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, he explained the ideal employee would be “a cross between a Smith College graduate, a Powers model, and a Katie Gibbs secretary.” He might as well have come right over to Mrs. Mae Sibley at the front desk and asked for a Barbizon resident.

The “Red Scare” quickly became intertwined with a postwar fear of the feminist.

Sibley would say she looked out for the hotel’s exclusivity; others would say she commodified the young women who came through the Barbizon’s doors, knowing full well that their attractiveness added to the notoriety of the hotel.

During the 1950s, one in three women were married by age nineteen, and by 1957, fourteen million girls were engaged by the age of seventeen.