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“women in between,” one might say; those who were neither upper-class, letter-writing society women nor union-organizing, working-class women.
how the memory of women’s lives is easily forgotten and how the silence can make us believe that women were not fully participating in everyday life throughout the twentieth century.
being a New Woman meant taking control of one’s life.
the New Woman had been democratized. To defy traditional expectations was no longer the purview only of those who could afford it.
“I am a daughter of adventure. This means I never experience a dull moment and must be prepared for any eventuality.
That’s my arc, as the astrologers would say. It’s a good one, too, for a person who would rather make a snap-out than a fade-out of life.”
New Woman received something in exchange: the publicly sanctioned right to live independently, to express herself sexually (up to a point), to indulge as a consumer, to experience all the thrills of urban life, and to enter public space on her own terms.
Hotel residential living—for families and for bachelors—had been in vogue since the late 1800s.
“reflect the larger life opened to the female sex,” while keeping in mind that women “have by no means lost their feminine attributes.”
“The Barbizon seems to give evidence of a new understanding of civilization, wholly convincing.” Form and mission were now one.
both as producers and consumers of art.
The new post-suffrage femininity required that both the mind and the body be fed,
She saw herself as a true pioneer of women’s rights whereas the flappers were merely putting on the finishing touches, gaudy ones no less.
1920s had taken everything from the shadows and rebranded it as white, middle-class, American, decadent and fun: jazz came from the black ghetto, sexual experimentation from Greenwich Village, and rouge, powder, and eye shadow from the prostitute’s toolbox. The flapper, the 1920s’ best-known incarnation of the New Woman, was now at the center of it all.
Once, a debutante fell apart after her fourth cocktail as it suddenly dawned on her that this was the very house in which she had spent much of her childhood.
Illegal booze, premarital sexual encounters, a body freed of Victorian restrictions in dress and manners and lifestyle were the definers of the 1920s as women began to come into their own in this decade.
The French girl is very carefully reared, and it is not until she is married that she has any liberties to speak of. No, the American miss is much ‘faster’ than the Parisian mademoiselle.”
“I may be amazed at the sight of short hair and short skirts, but surely these are far healthier than long skirts and tight waists and curl papers and all the other paraphernalia that we women have had to put up with for years. I haven’t had intelligence enough to bob my hair, but I take off my hat to those who have.”
Her death certificate listed her occupation as “housewife,” when she had been anything but a housewife. She had been a plucky nineteenth-century woman who had propelled herself into the twentieth century by embracing the mantle of independence and female drive.
With the flapper, so too went the very idea of the New Woman. All women of the twentieth century were now new.
For them, it was part finishing school and part party school, where they could escape for a year between college and getting married and let their hair down—even
Within a year of Black Thursday, a quarter of America’s workforce had become unemployed.
By 1934, there would be seventy-five thousand homeless single women in New York.
the invisible victims of the Great Depression.
Now both white and black women were expected to hand over to men whatever jobs and self-respect might be left for the taking.
people capable of valuable and charming friendships. Be one of them! Learn the dollar-and-cents value of RIGHT ENVIRONMENT! [1933]
1920s had championed a modernity defined by individualism and consumerism, but it had also benefited women who were allowed to aspire to something other than hearth and home. Now they were being told to go right back there, even as financial circumstances demanded that they do the very opposite.
Gibbs job placements were ripe for various possibilities because with no laws, let alone qualms, against outlining exactly what sort of Gibbs girl one desired,
The recognition that took root in the 1920s that a woman’s career could extend beyond nursing and teaching continued into the 1930s, despite the mixed messages of the Depression era. This recognition was often reinforced at the Barbizon
“repository for some of the lost aspirations of the 1920s.”
Popular culture, in other words, offered a 1930s-type reprimand of 1920s female liberation; and smaller, localized, and less cinematic reprimands were commonplace, experienced by the Barbizon’s residents daily.
If you didn’t have to cook your meals, let alone cook them for others, if you didn’t have to accompany Mother to dinner and instead could visit restaurants and cocktail bars with your fellow female career gals, you would not only have a better time but a better career. And the flurry of white-gloved Gibbs girls that emerged from the doors of the Barbizon each morning was a testament to this very idea.
she could give a party without debutantes but not without at least six Powers girls.
most young women emerged from the Great Depression with a string of broken promises.
When the financial dark clouds finally cleared, they wanted to make up for the fun they had missed out on as an entire generation.
she would tie the reputation of Mademoiselle magazine to the hotel forever, so that the fate of one followed that of the other, and the hallways of both became shelter as well as testing ground for generations of ambitious women.
Sublime acceptance of everything the publicity men tell you, and the apparently general assumption that all young women in America actively interested in fashion are either nieces of J. P. Morgan or slaves to [sewing] patterns.”
The Mademoiselle GE program was the most sought-after launching pad for girls with literary and artistic ambitions.
The “smart young woman” was ready for both a poetry reading and a college party and needed to know what to wear to both. She liked to dress well but without spending a fortune: Mademoiselle was the first to turn the spotlight away from Paris fashion, to focus on American designers and actually print the prices of the clothes it featured, most of them midrange and accessible.
each issue of Mademoiselle was hypnotic for the college girl because it was never just about fashion.
It was BTB’s genius in combining the frivolous with the serious that ultimately hooked readers and differentiated the magazine from all others on the newsstand.
The Barbizon was not just a hotel with rooms, it was protection for young women, and just as it had in the 1920s and 1930s, so too in the 1940s still, protection meant freedom. In the case of the young GEs, it meant the freedom to come to New York and get a head start on their own lives as career women.
By the 1940s, Mademoiselle’s influence was so vast among college-age women that America’s colleges themselves worried about the magazine portraying them in a good light.
even if students appeared to be participating in the everyday life of American college coeds, they “were squirming in their desk chairs,” “wondering if they should be studying while others were fighting.”
In this immediate moment, what the Depression and then the Second World War had taught Nanette and her friends was that fun was fleeting and they should grab it while they could.
Clearly the war had done nothing to disrupt the demand—articulated
that women be slim to be desirable.
But there were also enormous variations, including career women who defied the trend, and whom McCarthyism wanted to punish for daring to do so. Some of them sought shelter and found it in the hallways of the Barbizon and the corridors of Mademoiselle.
The postwar Barbizon now staked its claim as New York’s “dollhouse,” as the place to spy shapely young females, made all the more alluring by being tantalizingly out of reach in their sequestered, women-only lodgings. The dollhouse was a place many men dreamed of.
But it was the Carolyns, not the debutantes, who truly understood that their time at the Barbizon offered a finite window of opportunity—while they were still young, pretty, desirable, driven.
