Manhattan’s Female Fortress
The history of the Barbizon women’s hotel showcases that even with the freedoms introduced in the twentieth century, nothing is perfect.
Review by Veronica Clarke
New York City is the setting of many well-known tales of female ambition, of young women who longed to scrape the New York sky with their perfect fingernails. Paulina Bren’s The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free tells the interconnected story of some of the women who poured into twentieth-century New York to pursue their dreams. What did they have in common? They all stayed, at one point or another—from its grand opening in 1928 to its eventual conversion into condominiums in 2007—at the exclusive, women-only Barbizon Hotel on Lexington and Sixty-Third Street. Everything the Barbizon women could want or need was right at their fingertips: a dry-cleaner, hair-dresser, pharmacy, hosiery store, millinery shop, bookshop, swimming pool, gymnasium, roof gardens, lecture rooms, a library—and, perhaps most importantly, camaraderie.
Constructed on the heels of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Barbizon was one of many new women-only residential hotels built in the Roaring Twenties, providing a safe haven for women fresh out of college looking to “make it” in the big city as models, writers, actresses, and more. Men were not allowed beyond the first floor—easing the minds of anxious mothers all over the country as their daughters ventured into the City of Dreams—though that didn’t stop them from congregating in the lobby and, in the case of J. D. Salinger, lurking in the hotel coffee shop.
Like its guests, the hotel was multifaceted: it was a “female fortress” and “secular nunnery,” providing a (sometimes dubious) guarantee of virtue; it was a “dollhouse,” housing beauty-icons such as Grace Kelly, who danced topless “to Hawaiian music down the hallways of the Barbizon.” In many ways it was also like a hospital: There were the women who emerged from it revived, ready to “suck on the pap of life”; and there were those who never left. Among the latter are “the Women,” the residents who refused to leave even in the face of numerous constructions to the hotel, and who are still there to this day, paying the same rate of rent as when they first came to the hotel. There are also those who died at the hotel: The “unsinkable” Molly Brown, survivor of the Titanic, died in her Barbizon room in October 1932 of a brain tumor; Mrs. Edith La Tour, after checking into the hotel, jumped to her death in 1934; Ruth Harding was mysteriously strangled in her eleventh-floor room in 1975. Even the most glamorous New York settings are touched by tragedy.
Sylvia Plath was one of the many renowned residents who stayed at the Barbizon. One of the lucky winners of Mademoiselle magazine’s (famous for publishing fiction by Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, and more) guest editor competition, which included a room at the Barbizon, Plath stayed at the hotel in June of 1953. To her, “New York in the summer of 1953 held the promise of a fairy tale.” In a letter home, she wrote of her excitement: “I feel like a collegiate Cinderella whose fairy Godmother suddenly hopped out of the mailbox and said: ‘What is your first woosh?’ [sic] and I, Cinderella, said: ‘New York,’ and she winked, waved her pikestaff, and said: ‘Woosh [sic] granted.’”
The book, to some extent, seems to realize that even with the newfound freedoms of the twentieth century, nothing is perfect.
The fairy tale didn’t last long for Plath. Overworked and crushed by the pressure to succeed, Plath found that “New York had changed her, but not in the way she had hoped.” To her brother, she wrote: “The world has split open before my gaping eyes and spilt out its guts like a cracked watermelon.” In her Mademoiselle guest editor photograph for the August issue of the magazine, part of a feature introducing the guest editors to the magazine’s readership, Plath is holding a downturned rose, an image that, in hindsight, seems to foreshadow the tragic trajectory of her life: depression, an unhappy marriage, divorce. Not long after returning home from New York, Plath was admitted into a mental institution and, after that, attempted to take her life. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, is largely an autobiographical novelization of her experience in New York.
Bren dedicates an entire chapter to Sylvia Plath (as well as Joan Didion, also a Mademoiselle guest editor), because she regards Plath as the archetypal 1950s woman, struggling between ambition and family, cradling her dreams in one arm and a child in the other. But to declare Plath the “embodiment” of 1950s womanhood would be an irresponsible generalization. It is a shame that, beneath Bren’s fascinating portraits of the Barbizon women’s individual lives, there lies the tired old feminist narrative, first outlined in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Within this narrative, “family and family expectations” are a “burden,” marriage and motherhood are unfulfilling, and the suburbs are graveyards of “untapped ambition.” The subtitle of the book—“The Hotel That Set Women Free”—is based on the same premise: that women were not free until they were liberated from the support of their fathers, brothers, uncles, and husbands.
The book, to some extent, seems to realize that even with the newfound freedoms of the twentieth century, nothing is perfect. As New York of the 1920s–1950s comes vividly alive on the page, the sixties and seventies—the supposed high point of the feminist movement—hardly appear to be the triumphant era feminists purport it to be. By then, the hotel had begun its slow decline: Ironically, the 1960s women’s liberation movement sounded “the death knell for the Barbizon.” Men were allowed into the hotel in the eighties, marking the end of an era.
In spite of its faults, The Barbizon is rich enough in anecdotes to be an enjoyable, informative read. I couldn’t help wondering, along with the author: “Why do I wish a place like this had existed when I came to New York after graduating from college?” One certainly laments the state of the “languished” hotel industry today, with hotels offering “little more than a bed for the night, maybe with some added luxuries.” While the women of the Barbizon heralded the beginning of a new age for women, not only in New York but all over the country, we now look back on many of its qualities as relics of the past—intentional community life, elegance, formality, chivalry—all of which speak to a higher form of freedom, and don’t leave us saying regretfully, “Be careful what you woosh for.”
Veronica Clarke is assistant editor at First Things, and graduated from Wyoming Catholic College in 2019.
The Barbizon was published by Simon & Schuster on March 2, 2021. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
