The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

by Paulina Bren

phenomenon very much fueled by Mademoiselle and editor-in-chief BTB’s discovery of the lucrative “youth market.”

The Barbizon dollhouse might well have been full of young, beguiling beauties, but there was much more behind their attractive facades.

But because the 1950s were rife with contradictions, especially when it came to women and sexuality, looks could deceive. Those who appeared pristine and proper might be masking another layer, whereas the overtly sexy could be hiding a guileless virginity—like

From where we stood, we were pretty sure that as long as we looked the right way, married the right man and did and said the right things life would unfold before us as easily and enjoyably as it always had.”

In the national imagination, it was understood that the East Coast was the country’s intellectual hub while the rest of the country remained its backwater.

Geography could be made up for, however, and the Barbizon was a potent site of reinvention for young women. It offered an alternative imagined life, even if it was as short-lived as one’s room rental.

“It is the place where you go when you leave something—college, your family, your old life. And for that it’s perfect—as long as you don’t stay too long.”

that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.”

“More than anything now, I realize I have to Live and Work with People… instead of forever being sheltered in this blissful academic environment where all the girls are the same age and have the same general range of nervous tensions and problems. My summer experiences have proved most versatile in story-background data.”

The quiet rebellions against these values were inevitably individual, unassuming, and—in the case of Peggy and Joan—cashmere-clad. They carried their typewriters, boyfriend-less, unencumbered, dressed in their cardigan sets, ready to tackle New York.

“15,000 women in fur coats; massive unbeautiful pillars; 3% emotion, 91% PRODUCTION, 5% capitalism, and probably, surely somewhere 1% religion. If Jesus had seen it he would have puked.…”

“when neuroticism among women authors was almost a necessary badge of membership in the women’s creative community.”

You don’t learn anything by being happy. Wisdom comes from unhappiness.”

The guest editor program was a testing ground from which even the very best emerged changed. It was a singular and necessary environment.

“There are occasions when, on viewing the nation’s long and heady love affair with Youth, I feel like the biter bitten.”

“higher education was a carefully groomed preserve of white men, insulating them not only from racial minorities, but competition from women.

These same privileges then carried over seamlessly into the workplace without so much as a raised eyebrow:

It was against this background that BTB, her largely female staff, and her young guest editors created an alternate universe within the offices of Mademoiselle and, equally, within the hallways of the Barbizon: two places where women (although certainly white, middle-class women) were seen and heard, where, like BTB, they ruled, where they had beauty and brains as both producers and consumers.

The inconsistencies between women’s desires and America’s expectations of them wrought ire, anxiety, and moral contortions.

If women were nothing without men, who then were the women who could not catch or keep them?

Neither the lonesome woman nor the sexually active woman fit 1950s expectations for journeying the female path.

What remained unsaid was that those easy friendships available at the Barbizon were to tide you over until you found your true love, your man.

“a sweet, creamy, rich something to feed the void mistaken for an appetite.”

“Respectability was the order of the day. There was so much to be ashamed of as a woman. But you could redeem yourself by taking a job as a secretary or marrying.” But sometimes you just couldn’t redeem yourself.

White Americans, regardless of their class, had always found common cause in their whiteness; it was the one sure thing they had. Even if you had no money or access, you still had your whiteness and the privilege that granted.

“The problem with you, Barbara, is you don’t know you’re colored.”

‘there’s no room left for living because we spend so much of our lives being entertained.’

On the one hand, postwar New York had the look of new beginnings, and young women

and others were anxious to start the lives they had dreamed about for so long.

the all-female Time-Life magazine clippers were told they could never be reporters, and the women’s fashion magazines paid a pittance because everyone assumed you’d soon be gone, wedded, pregnant; or else that you had what was called “mailbox” money coming in fr...

(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

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.

This was Mademoiselle in a nutshell: full of contradictions, and in that sense entirely emblematic.

This was indeed the tightrope generation.

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.

But what was telling was that more than a few of the GEs, upon hearing this news through the rumor mill, feared it was they who had set off the mental health alarm bells. All of them felt palpable relief after learning it was not them. The point is: perhaps it could have been any one of them.

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.”

The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one.”

“I see that Sylvia Plath is still at the top of the star and I’m still at the bottom.”

“There’s still time.” “It passes, darling,” Laurie replied.

“implying, perhaps, a faintly suspect, overbearing, and slightly inappropriate tenacity to life.”

“Whatever one may think of them, certainly if more voices like these speak up, lively and idiosyncratic, we may look forward to the decade with cheerful curiosity.”

the assumption was that men were sexual and therefore blameless. Blame, in all sorts of ways, lay with women. Men got excited, and either women had to put in their best effort to prevent that from happening or else, if they failed, take care of his “pain.”

“I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life,” Brown wrote. “During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course… but they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.”

a single woman had to be able to provide for herself. Sexual freedom only came with economic freedom.

In other words, the repression of female sexuality and ambition during the 1950s had been such that Helen Gurley Brown was being revolutionary by being retrograde.

While the two authors would disagree on what constituted women’s liberation, both understood that a woman without an independent life would suffer in a variety of ways.

She had found that if you started laughing at all the various incidents, then the crazy ones began to laugh too, and, she insisted, in this way everyone found some equilibrium. She saw a certain heroism in the Women, the ladies who had stuck it out all these years: “They are still in New York. They may be hiding at the Barbizon in their little cubbyholes, but they are still here in New York. That’s something.”

the Mademoiselle offices mirrored the Barbizon hotel perfectly, both “wanting to be current and to compete, yet clinging to the wholesome collegiate sensibility that we, the guest editors, were meant to embody.”