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The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free
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About This Book
From award-winning author Paulina Bren comes the remarkable history of New York's most famous residential hotel and the women who stayed there, including Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, and Joan Didion.Welcome to New York's legendary hotel for women, the Barbizon. Liberated after WWI from home and hearth, women flocked to New York City during the Roaring Twenties. But even as women's residential hotels became the fashion, the Barbizon stood out; it was designed for young women with artistic aspirations, and included soaring art studios and soundproofed practice rooms. More importantly still, with no men allowed beyond the lobby, the Barbizon signaled respectability, a place where a young woman of a certain class could feel at home. But as the stock market crashed and the Great Depression set in, the clientele changed, though women's ambitions did not; the Barbizon Hotel became the go-to destination for any young American woman with a dream to be something more. While Sylvia Plath most famously fictionalized her time there in The Bell Jar, the Barbizon was also where Titanic survivor Molly Brown sang her last aria; where Grace Kelly danced topless in the hallways; where Joan Didion got her first taste of Manhattan; and where both Ali MacGraw and Jaclyn Smith found their calling as actresses. Students of the prestigious Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School had three floors to themselves, Eileen Ford used the hotel as a guest house for her youngest models, and Mademoiselle magazine boarded its summer interns there, including a young designer named Betsey Johnson. The first ever history of this extraordinary hotel, and of the women who arrived in New York City alone from "elsewhere" with a suitcase and a dream, The Barbizon offers readers a multilayered history of New York City in the 20th century, and of the generations of American women torn between their desire for independence and their looming social expiration date. By providing women a room of their own, the Barbizon was the hotel that set them free.
Reviews
"Bren occasionally wanders too far into tangential material."
"It's timely too: 100 years after it was built, in the wake of #MeToo and the death of Sarah Everard, the idea of a women-only hotel feels not anachronistic but liberating."
"More than a biography of a building, the book is an absorbing history of labor and women's rights in one of the country's largest cities, and also of the places that those women left behind to chase their dreams."
"[a] scintillating, many-faceted history ..."
"A must read for anyone interested in the history of 20th-century women's lives, fashion, publishing, and New York."
"But it was also a place where ambition met reality, and Bren, a Vassar historian, ably documents that sad fact."
"a deeply researched history, leavened with gossip ..."
"Bren elegantly weaves interviews with former residents and archival research with context on the social and political conditions that limited midcentury women."
"The Barbizon should be required reading for thoughtful, free-thinking women of all ages."
"The Barbizon is touching in its loyalty to these women, the ones who arrived with suitcases and dreams in the Barbizon's grand lobby."
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