The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

by Paulina Bren

AS HEARD ON RADIO 4 WOMAN'S HOUR' Captivating ... a brilliant many-layered social history of women's ambition and a rapidly changing New York' Observer' A fascinating look at a piece of forgotten female history ' Sunday Times' A treat , elegantly spinning a forgotten story of female liberation , ambition and self-invention' Guardian'A deeply researched history, leavened with gossip ... offers a full sweep of the changing status of American women in the twentieth century' TLSWELCOME TO THE BARBIZON, NEW YORK'S PREMIER WOMEN-ONLY HOTELBuilt in 1927 as a home for the 'Modern Woman' seeking a career in the arts, the Barbizon became the place to stay for ambitious, independent women, who were lured by the promise of fame and good fortune. Sylvia Plath fictionalized her time there in The Bell Jar, and over the years, its 688 tiny floral 'highly feminine boudoirs' also housed Joan Crawford , Grace Kelly (notorious for sneaking in men), Joan Didion , Candice Bergen , Charlie's Angel Jaclyn Smith , Ali MacGraw , Cybil Shepherd , Elaine Stritch , Liza Minnelli , Eudora Welty , The Cosby Show's Phylicia Rashad , Grey Gardens's Edith Bouvier Beale , and writers Mona Simpson and Ann Beattie , among many others. Mademoiselle boarded its summer interns there - perfectly turned-out young women, who would never be spotted hatless - as did Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School its students - in their white-gloves and kitten heels - and the Ford Modelling Agency its young models.THE BARBIZON is a colourful, glamorous portrait of the lives of the young women, who -- from the Jazz Age New Women of the 1920s to the Liberated Women of the 1960s -- came to New York looking for something more.'The story of the Barbizon is in many ways the story of American women in the twentieth century' Economist' Illuminating . . . this vivid, well researched account is testament to its vibrant history and the women who made it such a powerhouse ' Daily Express

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Feminism, Audiobook, New York, Book Club, Biography

521 pages, Hardcover

First published March 2, 2021

Reviews

[Violeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given that life as we know it these days doesn’t give back much by way of stimuli, I find myself increasingly drawn to reads that transport me into the particulars of life in years past. In this context this well-researched and aptly narrated account of New York’s most famous women-only residential hotel did the job perfectly. And, mean as it may sound, offered a small consolation in thinking that even during an immobilizing pandemic our lives as the female of the species offer more diversity and choices than most women living in the first half of the 20th century would have dared dream of.

To say that The Barbizon set women free is a tad exaggerated, I think. But it’s an indisputable fact that from 1927, when it first opened its doors, to 1981, when it began admitting male guests, the hotel provided a sanctuary to the middle to upper-class women who could afford its rates and were willing to participate in its sorority-house atmosphere. The advantages outweighed the downsides of its rigid rules of comportment that, ironically, acted as home-away-from-home in being a guardian angel of its guests’ morality. But: at a time when a woman’s coming to the Big City and making a decent living on her own was not as simple as it sounds nowadays, anything that would facilitate the move was welcome.

This book, without being hardcore feminist, recounts the many hurdles along this journey, the many preconceived ideas and ways women had to struggle against in order to gain that necessary space in which a person can move and breathe freely. Insofar as The Barbizon provided that in its tiny, yet private rooms, it made a definitive contribution to women’s liberation. It was a place that enabled them to re-imagine themselves and act accordingly. Some of them realized their goals, many didn’t and went back to wherever they came from with only a brief taste of what an independent life could have been like. But they all made the effort, they had the guts to make the move and that’s a feat in itself regardless of the outcome.

The author does a nice job in describing female ingenuity in finding ways to survive and thrive in a society where men called all the shots. Large parts are dedicated to describing Mademoiselle magazine’s https://timeline.com/mademoiselle-sma... annual guest-editor contests, the winners of which were lodged in The Barbizon for their one-month dream stay in the city. Among the young and aspiring college-educated women were future writers such as Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Gael Greene and Meg Wolitzer. In fact, Plath fictionalized the experience in her one and only novel The Bell Jar, where The Barbizon features as The Amazon.

I enjoyed these descriptions although at times they were unnecessarily elaborate. But then, I love vintage magazines such as Mademoiselle for exactly this kind of sociological details (and the ads :-) If by any chance you share this love for the ways of the past you’ll be thrilled with the reconstruction, otherwise it might get tiring.

All in all, an entertaining and informative read/listen that had me thinking time and again of the slogan in the Virginia Slims cigarette ads, back when cigarettes could still proudly advertise:
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
Oh yeah, we sure have!!

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the last book unfinished in March and it was the perfect one in which to end Women's history month. So much history inside all seen through the eyes of the Barbizon. So many women stayed, passed through its doors. Hearts and dreams of becoming more than just a housewife mother. After WWII, women had more opportunity and they came to this safe haven from all over the country.

The Gibbs secretary school opened in the Barbizon, Ford models provided a different opportunity and Madamoiselle housed their girls here for their intern program. So many notables passed through these doors. Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Ali McGraw, Grace Kelly, so many, taking advantage of the changing times. We meet ordinary girls from various places, all with one thing in common. Finding a little something for themselves. Living a New York life before settling down. Some found it, some didn't.

The wider history of women is not ignored. Expectations of the wider world and the changing face of society's view of the role women could play is also included. Such a interesting book, so well done.

[Marialyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderfully researched and informative book! I enjoyed reading about the Barbizon and the people who stayed there. A a former New Yorker, this building truly became a landmark in the women's march to freeing themselves and being able to join the workforce.

It became what women wanted, a place to live, where they were treated well and received services that men had formerly only received, a residential hotel.

Through its doors passed the famous, names such as Sylvia Plath, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly to name a few.

It afforded women that independence they were so looking for, a place where they could discover their true selves away from the prying eyes and constraints of family.

Such a well done interesting book which I definitely recommend most highly!
Thank you for an advanced copy of this story Edelweiss! This book is due to be published on March 2, 2021.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. They should not take a bottle of pills and try to forget.

When I woke up on New Year's Day 2021, checked my email, and learned I had won an ARC of The Barbizon in a Goodreads giveaway, I literally clapped my hands with glee. For years I'd been fascinated by Mademoiselle magazine's college guest editor program, which had welcomed such soon-to-be-luminaries as Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion and put them all up at the Barbizon for the summer. I figured any history of the hotel would also be a history of the Mademoiselle program, and I was right.

Built in 1927, the Barbizon was a single-room-occupancy long-term hotel for women, abundant with amenities and restricting men to the lobby. Many women who came to New York City to make their fortunes found it a comforting nest from which to launch their lives. Any history of the Barbizon, then, is a history of single women and, more significantly, a history of working women. The book takes us from the relatively progressive flapper era through the Great Depression, when many states made it illegal for married women to work, and on to the war era when women filled positions men vacated for the battlefield. This, of course, was followed by the 1950s, when women were encouraged to find their fulfillment solely as mothers and wives, eventually inspiring a book (The Feminine Mystique) about how well that worked out.

Through it all, the Barbizon was there, housing models, actresses, and secretaries: the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school reserved several floors for its students, and Bren recounts the history of the school and the women who enrolled there. She then moves on to the Mademoiselle program, which understandably takes up a large portion of the book. If you're a fan of Sylvia Plath or Joan Didion, these sections may well be catnip for you, as they were for me. There's something fascinating about very young writers at the very start of their careers, and Bren did an impressive amount of research, hunting down their fellow guest editors and providing lots of firsthand perspectives. Plath in particular casts a very long shadow, and the portrait of her here is more rounded, in fewer pages, than the one in Pain, Parties, Work, which covers the same time period.

As Bren herself acknowledges, the Barbizon housed a certain type of woman: reasonably well-off, and almost always white. There are so many stories that can be told about women and work in twentieth-century America, and The Barbizon is only one of them. Still, it's a first: as Bren relates, other writers have attempted to write histories of the Barbizon and given up in frustration. Bren herself nearly gave up, but persevered, pulling and prying material from many different sources. The end result is meant for a general audience; if you're expecting deep historical analysis, you may be disappointed. But I wasn't. The Barbizon is right in my wheelhouse, and I found it illuminating and hard to put down. It's 5 stars from me.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a little more bleak than I would have thought - which makes full sense given that it’s women’s history! - but I still don’t think I’d second the “stylish and charming” endorsement given by Stacy Schiff on the cover: that makes the book seem much lighter or more uplifting than it is.

The Barbizon sort of comes off here not at all as a place that “set women free,” but rather as an only slightly less-shitty (and extreeeeemely limited by privilege: thinness/beauty, social class, geography, race/ethnicity) option for minimal empowerment - only for women who made the cut - in a time of very limited options. While there is some effort to cover what diversity and like, intra-systemic subversion may have been present at the hotel, there was honestly soooo much uncritical and even praise-filled emphasis on the subjects’ general conformity to expectations (as opposed to those who may have been able to exploit any opportunities for subversion or even interrogation) and just excessive talk of how very beautiful all the women were, and how so many of them became models to support themselves while there, even if they initially came there for writing or other purposes, that it kind of began to feel like I was reading about social media influencers and mean girls of the time. Which, as especially was evident in the parts about the Mademoiselle magazine Guest Editorship program in which artists like Sylvia Plath participated, I suppose was accurate!

The book sort of frames this whole depressing scenario as kind of the thing that sent Sylvia over the edge, and I don’t know enough about her life yet to assess if that’s a reasonable conjecture, but I will say that I also felt kind of depressed and hopeless while reading it, and that I am now especially eager to read my copies of the new 1150-page/45 audiobook hour, national award-winning Plath biography to find out!

My reading of this book may have suffered from just having read Julia Cooke’s Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age History of the Women of Pan-Am, which in my opinion somehow better presented how women in similarly oppressed and circumscribed positions still managed to creatively subvert power structures - and embrace an early version of Shine Theory, supporting rather than competing with one another - in meaningful ways. Cooke’s book also pays far more critical and research attention to privilege, including issues related to beauty/weight and to the role of and impacts on BIPOC and AAPI women.

As other reviewers have observed - the book felt somewhat divided in what it proposes to accomplish. **At its core is a dissertation about the talented, pretty and thin, privileged white women of Mademoiselle and modeling who were able to most benefit from the resource or outlet the hotel was able to provide them.** I would have preferred more focus on the “other” women who resided at the hotel as opposed to the lucky luminaries, I guess. (There is a little bit of this sprinkled throughout.)

In general, a solid and worthy read, but just left me a little underwhelmed and down - while the authors had different (albeit equally rich and kind of analogous) material and eras to work with, I far preferred Cooke’s approach as something that felt to me a bit more subversive and empowering.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is such a rich topic with such opportunity for sweeping stories, however I don’t think a single editor ever saw the book. Chapters, explanations, and superlatives are highly repetitive. It’s like talking to someone with short-term memory loss. I wish this were better — it certainly could be.

[Dianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this book really kicked butt! It was everything I expected it to be. I learned about the reasoning behind the Barbizon, I learned some good gossipy facts about some of the women staying there, learned about the society of the time period, got an understanding of what companies had their 'girls' stay there -think Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School and different modeling agencies and I just had fun with this book.

Suddenly, this book turned from a fun read into a mishmash - Mademoiselle (magazine) introduced itself and its affiliation with the Barbizon. Learning about that was interesting; however, when the magazine introduced its Guest Editor editions, the second half of this book just dealt with that. Well, the Guest Editors and Sylvia Plath, and the editor Betsy Blackwell (1937–1971).

Had I wanted to learn about Sylvia Plath, I would have gotten a book expressly written about her. Yes, I grasp that the book "The Bell Jar" was written about her experience at the Barbizon, but I still didn't expect this sort of 'hero worship' from this author. Nearly the entire second half of this book became the most tedious read except for the part when the hotel kept going through different hands and remodeling up until it eventually became condos.

*ARC supplied by the publisher and author.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well researched history of The Barbizon, a women only residential hotel, in New York. The hotel was built in 1927 to cater for (mainly younger) women who came to work, and live independently, in New York and to replace the outdated boardinghouses that most lived in previously. Of course, many still did. Although this is subtitled, "The New York Hotel that set women free," it catered mainly for a certain class of girls.

The book starts with New York in the Jazz Age, full of speakeasies and glamour, although one of the first residents - the 'unsinkable' Molly Brown (from Titanic) was not a fan of the flappers. We then go through the Great Depression and women seen to be taking paid employment from men, which meant that the Barbizon helped literally protect women from ill feeling as they looked for careers. Weaved into this story are those companies who used the Barbizon, such as the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school. Secretarial work was seen as essentially female, so less of a threat, but many of those who took the first step on the corporate ladder taking shorthand, would end up with careers, rather than jobs. There was also the Powers modelling agency and Mademoiselle magazine, with the 'Millie's,' guest editors - something Sylvia Plath fictionalised in, 'The Bell Jar."

This is a fascinating portrait of a glamorous residential hotel, which offered many women an opportunity to find a career and independence in a safe and secure environment. There were lectures, talks and tea and it opened its doors to many women who later gained success or fame - from Sylvia Plath to Joan Didion, Grace Kelly and many, many more who simply savoured possibly the first personal and economic independence of their lives.

[Chrissie Whitley · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded up — maybe. Let's see if it stays.

"But before they were household names, they were among the young women arriving at the Barbizon with a suitcase, reference letters, and hope."

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free loses itself and feels like more of a mishmash of The Changing Times for White Middle-Class Creative Women Who Briefly Visit Manhattan as Guest Editors for Mademoiselle Magazine (1930ish-1970ish). I feel vaguely disappointed but still enjoyed parts of this hodgepodge.

Built at the end of the 1920's, exclusively for women, the Barbizon hotel seems to be intrinsically linked with Mademoiselle magazine and Gibbs College. But the focus in this book is definitely on the former. There are times when reading The Barbizon that I forgot that it wasn't really The Mademoiselle instead. Many of the famous residents at the Barbizon were there for the quick summer guest editor program sponsored by the magazine. People like Sylvia Plath. While Bren does mention and pay nice tributes to other women, she spends an inordinate amount of time on Plath and the summer she was there — especially considering Plath lays this summer out to bare in The Bell Jar, which Bren also mentions often.

I get the fascination. I do. But I wanted less of a character study on these women we already know so much about and I wanted to know more about the hotel itself. I wanted to feel as if the hotel was a character within these pages — and I just don't think Bren quite got there.

Also, there's a whole swarm of women, who come to be known as "The Women," who never leave and, because of the tenant laws are never forced out by rent increases. A small group continues and protests through various renovations — around whom they design and redesign a whole floor on which to contain these elderly ladies. Please, more of these ladies. And large photographs.

And even some more of the dirty laundry (pardon any pun); some digging into these murders and attacks and suicides that took place there — who were these women? "In 1975, seventy-nine-year old Ruth Harding, a lonely resident who liked to hang out in the lobby and talk to anyone willing to listen, was strangled to death in her eleventh floor room. Her murder went unsolved."

Perhaps it would've been better served as a larger format, coffee table book — I certainly would've loved more focus on the actual hotel Barbizon and the ways in which it changed over the years and the women — famous or not — who passed through its doors.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This affected neither my opinion of the book, nor the content of my review.

[Elyse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a lot of fun reading this book. The Barbizon Hotel was built in the 1920s strictly for women. It was considered a safe place for young women to stay in the big bad city of New York. It served its purpose until women became “liberated” and now has been converted into condominiums.

I was a high school freshman in 1968 so just missed this restrictive era. I dressed in the requisite bellbottoms and had pretty wild hair but was still fairly traditional in my beliefs. As Frank Zappa would say, I was a fake hippie.

[Darla · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Barbizon, through much of the twentieth century, had been a place where women felt safe, where they had a room of their own to plot and plan the rest of their lives. The hotel set them free. It freed up their ambition, tapping into their desires deemed off limits elsewhere, but imaginable, realizable, doable, in the City of Dreams.

New York City is brimming over with history and the story of the Barbizon intrigued me. The first few chapters were a fascinating view of its beginnings. The historical context was well articulated and I was engaged. When the Mademoiselle magazine GE program became the focus, I started skimming. There were so many names and so many details that really had nothing to do with the Barbizon itself. The magazine was using the hotel as a dormitory, but other entities were doing the same and did not get the same intensive focus. For me it was a bit off balance and I would have loved to see more photos like the one of Rita Hayworth at the beginning of Chapter One. Well researched, but could use some additional editing in my opinion.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for a DRC in exchange for an honest review.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This can feel a bit dry and slow moving at times, but it does pick up quite a bit and becomes progressively more interesting as the author brings all the threads together. A large portion of the book is given over to Mademoiselle magazine and its guest editor program. That's because the magazine required all participants in the program to stay at the Barbizon during the forty years that the program existed. While the Barbizon with its strict rules did protect the girls and women who lived there, it also shackled them to the societal restrictions and expectations that prevented them from achieving their potential.

It's sweet, delicious justice that the two women who were treated as "less than" by Mademoiselle ended up being the most successful and well known. Gael Greene and Barbara Chase were kept hidden, not allowed to participate in the fashion show. Gael because they thought she was too zaftig, and Barbara because she was black and they thought their Southern buyers and advertisers would be upset. Gael became a famous restaurant critic, and Barbara became a very successful artist, sculptor, and poet.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was instantly intrigued by this book and decided to start reading it straight away. The Barbizon hotel was for women and women only. Started in the roaring twenties and closed down in the 80's, this hotel hosted a long row of famous women but also lesser known. Here they could be them self,away from society's standards for women and engage in their hopes and dreams with other women who wanted to engage in a life of writing, acting or just away from men of their time. The writing was very engaging and entertaining, not a dull moment and was the most exciting nonfiction writing I've read in a long time. One of My absolute favorite non fiction of all time that's for sure

[Britta Böhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's probably a bit high rating-wise but I loved the idea of both, the hotel and the book, too much to give it less than 4*.

[The Library Lady · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is basically a pedestrian history of white, middle/upper class young women who passed through the Barbizon Hotel in NYC in the 20th century. There is a great deal about the Katherine Gibbs secretarial school and even more about the Guest Editors program at Mademoiselle, both of which housed young women at the Barbizon. There's a lot of focus on Grace Kelly and Sylvia Plath, and a bit about Barbara Chase (later Barbara Chase-Riboud), who broke the color barrier, and a few other more typical women, but this mostly just rushes on and on, naming names and making comments on society in general.

The hotel offered safe, downright cloistered, housing for women. But how did it "set them free"?

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really more of a snapshot of women in Manhattan as experienced by those making the transition of coming of age in an era of accelerated change. The Barbizon, built in the late 1920's, initially represented a vision of female independence as the constraints of Victorianism gave way to more mobility and self reliance. But there had to be an intermediate step for women leaving the protection of home for the first time, and the Barbizon with its combination of hotel amenities and housemother type managing style gave both parents and young women a sense of security. Paulina Bren did her research, spooling out her history with personal stories of many of the more famous residents, each of which personalized an era.

Much is here about Sylvia Plath who embodied the transitional 1950's, forever memorializing the hotel calling it the Amazon in her account of the month she spent there as one of the guest editors, or GEs, of Mademoiselle Magazine, which is covered extensively. Also covered is the connection to Katharine Gibbs school and the part it played in the hotel's past. While it was interesting to read of Gael Greene, Ali McGraw, Grace Kelly and others, there was a fair amount of repetition which became tedious after a while. The purpose of the hotel has shifted with the times and fortunes of New York, its current status as a location for very high priced real estate and multimillion dollar co-ops.

Not a perfect read, but fun for those who love reading about the popular history of New York in unique ways.

[Vonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stunning history of American women seen through the scrim of The Barbizon in NYC. The residential hotel housed single women only, propelled to pursue their career dreams via post-WWI freedoms and the right to vote. The residents are enthralling ... from actresses Grace Kelly to Ali McGraw, writers Sylvia Plath to Joan Didion, along with fashion models and secretaries all clambering for success in the big city. A 20th Century historical gem!

[Elizabeth Mahon · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a native New Yorker who was obsessed with Sylvia Plath as a teenager, I was eager to read the new biography of the Barbizon Hotel. I walk past the former hotel whenever I'm in Midtown East to see my doctor. If you have read Michael Callahan's book Searching for Grace Kelly or Fiona Davis's The Dollhouse, or even Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (where the hotel was immortalized as The Amazon) then you will want to read Paulina Bren's book The Barbizon. It's not a perfect book by any means, I found a few inaccuracies. For example, it was the Daily News, not the Daily Mail that had the infamous headline "New York, Drop Dead." There are a few others like that (books like this really need to be proofread better by both the copy editor and the author). The book is not just a biography of probably the most famous women's only hotel in New York but also of Mademoiselle Magazine and Katherine Gibbs. Only Katherine Gibbs survives unfortunately. I was an avid reader of Mademoiselle and I will be forever sad that I was born too late to participate in the Guest Editor program. It's too bad that nothing like that exists anymore or that there is no magazine that speaks for young college or twenty something women. Yes, I know there are online forums but there is something about a print magazine.

Anyone interested in not only the history of New York but about women's history, particularly the 1940's and 1950's, should pick up this book. It's not just the story of women like Sylvia Plath, Bren also includes Barbara Chase-Riboud's story, not only the 1st African-American guest editor at Mademoiselle but also the first to stay at the Barbizon Hotel, Ali McGraw, Betsey Johnson, Phylicia Rashad, Jacklyn Smith and Meg Wolitzer also get a mention. I would have liked to have known more about the hotel during the 1960's for example, but I can't really quibble. The fact that this book exists is fantastic.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was excited to find a book about the Barbizon Hotel. I remember my mother talking about taking the train from Cincinnati to NYC to shop, attend the theater and visit museums and stay at the Barbizon Hotel. I always held a somewhat mystique for me. It would have been in the 1950's that my mother and her friend would stay there.

It was interesting to learn the history of how a woman's only hotel came about and learn a bit about the residents. They tended to be those of the upper class.

The progression of the book was interesting for me. The first third or so held my interest as it talked about the women looking for work, such as models. As it progressed, it felt as though the book was more about Mademoiselle magazine whose guest college editors stayed at the Barbizon. The last third was very easy for me to put down as it became very repetitious. The editors need to tighten up the book. I am giving the book 3 stars though it is really 2.5. What could have been a great read was just a book about those who "have" and not as well written as it could have been.

Thank you Simon and Schuster and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest feedback.

[Marianna Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating piece of non-fiction! I've never heard of the Barbizon hotel, and its significance was a complete surprise to me. The historical context of all of this was very interesting to read about as well - I definitely learned a lot, and seeing all of these fascinating women and the historical events that shaped them through the doors of the Barbizon, so to speak, was a perspective that was simultaneously entertaining and enlightening. It's a very easy non-fiction book to get into, which makes it easy to recommend - it's well paced, not overly dense, and the writing style isn't dry. My only complaint is that I really wished it went deeper - a lot of the stories felt pretty surface level, and there is a lot more I would have loved to learn about the women of the Barbizon. But then again, a lot of ground needed to be covered here, and Paulina Bren does it very well.

[DeB · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Paulina Bren wrote in her introduction that there is actually little history of the hotel, and this novel actually is a compilation of the experiences of the business which were housed in the building. The Barbizon was intimately connected to Mademoiselle Magazine, the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School and John Powers Modeling.

Overall, the novel is quite fascinating, describing the effect of this hotel where young women flocked to from all over the country, their parents comfortable with their safety while their daughters learned skills and looked for husbands. The shift in the perception of “freedom” is ascribed to the women who experienced time at the Barbizon, leading to the Women’s Movement.

Many famous residents stayed at the Barbizon over the years, and author Bren writes comprehensively especially about Sylvia Plath, whose book, The Bell Jar was based on her month there while a guest editor for Mademoiselle Magazine. Joan Didion, Meg Wolitzer also came as editors- though their skills weren’t necessarily well matched at the magazine. Actresses Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Jaclyn Smith and others enjoyed the reasonable rent and services of the Barbizon.

The first half of the book vibrated with life - 1927’s opening and through the 1960’s- but the hotel itself became an anachronism, a women’s only residence, and eventually was turned into condos. Bren looked into the lives of the less famous to some degree, which I found very interesting.

I’ll admit that my interest in reading The Barbizon was piqued by the novel The Dollhouse, by Fiona Davis. They are definitely complimentary to one another.

[Book Concierge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook read by Andi Arndt
4****

Subtitle: The Hotel That Set Women Free

I remember reading Mademoiselle magazine when I was a teen, anxiously poring over the “College” issue and imagining myself on some distant campus, dressed “just so.” I never saw myself in New York City, however, HAD I imagined that I would have imagined myself living at the Barbizon.

Bren has done her research and chronicles the history of the iconic hotel from its conception and construction in 1927 to its eventual conversion to multi-million dollar condominiums in 2007. As she tells the story of the hotel, she tells the story of women in America, of their hopes, dreams and aspirations as contrasted with society’s expectations and the structured roles assigned to “proper” women. The list of famous women who lived there is impressive, from writers such as Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, to film stars (Grace Kelly and Ali McGraw), but it is the countless others who grabbed the chance for independence and success who should really be celebrated. Brava, ladies!

The audiobook is narrated by Andi Arndt and she does a marvelous job of it. Even my husband got hooked on the story when he listened as we drove to dinner one evening.

[Cindy Burnett (Thoughts from a Page) · Rating 5 out of 5]

After World War I, women flocked to New York City to follow their dreams and sought safe, female-only places to live. While residential hotels for men existed, no such thing was available for women at the time. The Barbizon Hotel for Women was built to fill this void, housing such well-knowns as Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Ali McGraw, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Phylicia Rashad and many more, and was so successful that it remains the most famous of the women-only residences erected in the first half of the 20th century. In The Barbizon, Paulina Bren captures not only the history of the legendary hotel but also important moments in women’s history from that time period.

Want to hear more about some great new reads? Listen to my podcast here: https://www.thoughtsfromapage.com. For more book reviews and book conversation, check out my Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/thoughtsfro....

[♥ Sandi ❣ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars

There were parts of this book that I really enjoyed- then there were parts that I was not so fond of. I think this book gave a lot of information about the early days - meaning the 1920's through the 1950's - of both the woman's hotel and of New York City. And some information about the later days, as in the 1980's up to current, of both the hotel itself and of "The Women" who still inhabited it.

However I did not find this book as enjoyable when it rattled off into the realm of the life of the magazine Mademoiselle or to the length it took it's chapters on Sylvia Plath or Joan Didion. I felt that these sections were very distracting.

I am happy I read the book. The Barbizon, in all it's many lives, was the legendary hotel for women. It was safe, it was affordable and it housed the many dreams of thousands of young women. There, to this day, has never been another hotel quite like the Barbizon - and sadly probably never will be.

[Bronwyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man, I wanted to like this more than I did. Three stars maybe isn’t fair, but four stars would be too much. And I liked it quite a bit in places. There are a lot of good anecdotes told and interesting people featured. But.

I don’t understand what this book was trying to do. The first few and last chapters are about The Barbizon, which is what the book is supposed to be about. But the whole middle of the book is really about Mademoiselle magazine. And that was super interesting! But it didn’t really fit the book as presented, even though Mademoiselle was closely linked with the hotel for much of its existence. If the title/subtitle had just been changed to The Barbizon and Mademoiselle, I wouldn’t have such issues and would rate this higher. (Maybe that’s bad of me since it was still an interesting book. I don’t know.)

I wanted to like this more than I did, despite all the interesting information. I just didn’t understand what the point of the book was. It’s like Bren found all these interesting stories that vaguely connected to the same place and decided to make a book out of it. I’m still glad I read it, but it wasn’t what I wanted. (Though now I do want to read more about Sylvia Plath, so sort of good job, book.)

(Also, I don’t know who edited/proofread this, because they didn’t get Gypsy Rose Lee’s name right.)

[Emmkay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Framed around New York’s famous Barbizon hotel for women, which opened in 1927 and provided accommodation for generations of women - mostly white and middle or upper class - alone in the city. The famous Katie Gibbs secretarial school had rooms for their students there, as did Mademoiselle magazine for the college students who won coveted spots in their summer guest editor program. Sylvia Plath and Grace Kelly were both young residents for a time.

I wondered if the author intended all the way along to focus on the Barbizon, as it seemed she might have waffled about whether that or Mademoiselle would be her subject. I had no idea about the fascinating history of Mademoiselle, which was just another fashion magazine when I was young, but which had once upon a time published cutting edge fiction and pioneered seeking the voices and views of real life young women. Overall, not entirely focused and heavy on the anecdotes, but interesting enough.

[Shelby · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars for the topic of this book. I didn't know much about New York City's residential hotels before picking this book up, and I definitely didn't know anything about the Barbizon, the all-female residential hotel that counted among its guests the likes of Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, and Phylicia Rashad. The history of this hotel, which spanned almost 100 years and hit its peak in the 1940s and 50s, is an absolutely worthy subject for a book. I was really looking forward to learning more about this hotel that, according to the subtitle, "set women free"

Unfortunately, Paulina Bren failed to wring any intrigue out of her premise. In the introduction, Bren notes that other authors have tried and failed to write books about the Barbizon, owing to a lack of sources about the Barbizon itself. It seems Bren's sources were equally thin, but rather than openly shift her focus, she maintains that this book is about the Barbizon...except it isn't really. This is almost more a book about Mademoiselle magazine, the magazine who headquartered its summer interns at the Barbizon throughout the mid-2oth century. And that's fine. If Bren really couldn't find any sources about the hotel, then focusing on the people and companies who made a home base there makes sense. But rather than acknowledge her change in focus, Bren keeps making sweeping statements about "the Barbizon" and its influence when her focus for the previous 50 pages has been on Mademoiselle or Powers models. Her evidence just never felt strong enough to back up her points, mostly because her overarching thesis (the Barbizon was a hotel that sort of liberated women within the limited confines of the 1900s) doesn't have anything to do with her individual chapters (women who worked as Powers models or interned for Mademoiselle). The Barbizon almost feels like an afterthought in its own book.

Despite being less than 300 pages, the book feels deeply repetitive. Part of the repetition occurs on a sentence level. Bren has certain phrases and sentence structures she overuses--the Barbizon is described as "a soft landing" twice within 5 pages at the end of the novel and it's like...were there no other descriptions available? Did an editor not catch this at all? It's also repetitive in its content. To her credit, Bren does acknowledge that the Barbizon catered to an extremely narrow segment of American society: namely, white, middle-class American women who could afford to live in New York for a summer and hopefully find careers as actors/models/writers/secretaries/etc. But boy, did I get tired of reading about these middle-class white women living at the Barbizon. Part of it surely was limitations presented by history itself--if so many of the Barbizon's residents were middle-class white women whose lives followed similar paths (Barbizon, job, marriage, suicide/death in some cases), then it makes sense why their stories would sound so similar here. But I think part of the problem were Bren's own limitations in writing. She presents EVERY single one of these women in the exact same way, and then seems to shy away from diving into anyone who doesn't quite fit that "pretty blonde from the Midwest becomes a model/writer/whatever and then goes home and gets married" archetype. Far and away the most interesting segment in this book is the part of the chapter devoted to Barbara Chase, the first African American guest editor at Mademoiselle who stayed at the Barbizon during her internship. Unfortunately, Chase's time at the Barbizon takes up barely half a chapter. I'm not sure if Bren didn't have enough material to write about Chase for an entire chapter (in the acknowledgments, Bren mentions that she did interview Chase, so it's not as though Chase was one of the women who'd passed on by the time Bren started researching the book), but it's disappointing that one of the few BIPOC women Bren focuses on gets so little page time compared to the likes of Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. I get that Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion were a big deal, but like...we can read a gazillion biographies about them. Why not give the women who didn't fit the Barbizon's mold a little more time? (Although, to be fair, Barbara Chase has also lived a full, successful life as an acclaimed artist and writer, and the Mademoiselle internship was really just a blip on her resume, so maybe when Bren interviewed her, she didn't have much to tell because how could her guest editor summer in New York compare to her later life and work in Paris and Rome?)

Still, the Barbara Chase episode feels like a microcosm of the wider issues of this book, which is that Bren just doesn't seem that interested in anything outside of the extremely conventional and famous Barbizon resident stories. Two entire chapters are devoted to Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion (three, if you count the chapter about how the other guest editors who interned the same summer as Plath reacted to her death), and it just got tedious to read about. It's not that Didion or Plath are irrelevant to the story of the Barbizon (Plath especially), but in picking up a book just vaguely titled "The Barbizon," I wanted a wider-ranging survey of the women who stayed there, not a hyper-focused look at one of the most famous female writers in recent literature. I got so bored with Bren's focus on the Mademoiselle guest editors that I found myself more interested in some of the men who tried to sneak into the hotel. I'm not sure, in a book so obviously concerned with women's history, I should have walked away more curious about men, but such was the effect Bren's repetition had on me. Just anything to break up the "gee whiz Ohio good girl tries to make it as a model and stays at the Barbizon for a summer" story Bren kept trotting out.

It also just seemed, for all Bren harped on how the Barbizon encapsulated the various contradictions of the 1950s, that she just never went beyond surface level in her analysis. She was constantly gesturing at how the Barbizon embodied so much of the dichotomy of the 1950s--women came there to pursue careers, but only to the extent that it wouldn't interfere with their inevitable fates as housewives--but then never really dove into that in any depth. She kept circling around this idea that the Barbizon gave women limited freedom, but then never really analyzed it. And, I'm sorry, but if you're going to keep bringing up how this hotel actually limited women when your subtitle is "The Hotel That Set Women Free," then I expect the author to really dig in to the contradictions of her own premise, and Bren didn't, at least not in any satisfying way.

Ultimately, The Barbizon demonstrates why maybe it's for the best that historians prior to Bren gave up on writing their accounts of the hotel. The lack of sources shows, and Bren just didn't have the skill to create a nuanced, engaging history out of the sources she did have. So 2 stars for the fascinating history this book exposed me to, but nothing else for the writing and analysis of that history.

[OutlawPoet · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Glam!

The Barbizon, by Paulina Bren, is a very accessible book that lets the reader into a very glamorous world!

Oh, I would have loved living there! But the author is very frank in her history and in the early days of The Barbizon’s glory, it was exclusively white – with no place for me lol. The author does tell us a little bit about the very first African American woman who was allowed to stay there – and what a strange experience it must have been for her!

The book focuses more on some of the most famous (and iconic) residents, all while giving us a glimpse into the history and culture of America and how The Barbizon played a role. It’s definitely a story of glamour, but it’s also a story of feminism and independence and of a place that gave women a footing to fight for what they wanted.

I also loved the photos interspersed in the book, though I’d love to have seen even more!

This was a wonderful escape of a read – a bit of time travel into days gone by.

*ARC Provided via Net Galley

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the beginning of the book the author Paulina Bren says that many had tried to write about The Barbizon before but gave up due to lack of sources. Perhaps Bren should have shifted her focus as well, as this book is only tangentially about the famous hotel. Mostly it’s a history of women in New York in the mid 20th Century which still mostly held my interest, and occasionally Bren remembers to mention The Barbizon. But too much of the book becomes an uninteresting history of Mademoiselle magazine, a biography of Sylvia Plath that is all over the place, and a history of the Ford Modeling Agency (actually was one of the better parts). A lot of redundancy here as well. I listened to the audio book, I might have abandoned if I was reading.

[Eva · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was loaded with information about the decades surrounding the hotel... but that was actually the drawback and why I couldn't finish it. There were too many times where I was saying to myself "wait, go back to that, I want to know more about that" or "we were just talking about X and we've already moved on the Y, and M?!?!"

The first chapter the author admits that there was not a lot if information on the Barbizon and you could feel it as the pages progressed.

I couldn't finish the book. Life is too short, I moved on.