The Barbizon Paulina Bren (read along books txt) 📖

to men whatever jobs and self-respect might be left for the taking. More than 80 percent of Americans believed that a woman’s proper place was again in the home. There was also widespread belief, which the government’s Women’s Bureau had to repeatedly quash, that women worked for frivolous “pin money,” taking jobs from men. This was of course entirely delusional. The reality was that many young women were now forced to venture out to provide for their families, while women without a spouse to help pay the bills had to take care of themselves.

The Barbizon, New York’s razzle-dazzle, exclusive women’s hotel, had to take a different tack with the onset of the Great Depression. Its female clientele had changed, and it would have to change along with them. Print advertisements now promised the economic advantage of simple rooms and the earning potential of social networking in glamorous surroundings. On the one hand, the hotel continued to lure in the artistically minded, the upper-class white college graduate whose family fortunes had not taken a sharp downturn, but, on the other, it was also starting to tap into other potential residents. The variety of advertisements that appeared in the New Yorker clearly conveyed the shift. There was still the appeal for the sort of resident envisioned when the Barbizon was first conceived:

To a Young Woman Who Is a Poet. Or a musician… or an artist… or a careerist in any sphere of activity… do you realize that THE BARBIZON was created expressly to give you a propitious background for your talents? […] and that it brings within your present income much of the luxury of your future dreams? [1932]

But the hotel was soon highlighting its networking potential for the ambitious (or desperate):

Intelligent Young Women LIVE Intelligently! Success depends, to a large extent, on your physical comfort, recreations and mental stimulation after business hours. Barbizon young women are alive… eager to achieve—because they associate with people active in business and professional life… artists… musicians… dramatists… writers… people capable of valuable and charming friendships. Be one of them! Learn the dollar-and-cents value of RIGHT ENVIRONMENT! [1933]

The Barbizon advertisements also played to the uncertainty of New York’s young female job seekers:

You Woman What Now? You are seeking a career?… a little uncertain at times?… The Barbizon is for you! Learn the dollars-and-sense value of right environment… encourage a zest for achievement by cultivating friendships with the right people. The Barbizon is ‘New York’s most exclusive residence for young women’—but you can afford to live here. A few charming little rooms now available… come in and inspect them. [1934]

What the Barbizon’s advertisements did not say, or at least not outright, was that the hotel now provided a different kind of security than before. In 1927, the Barbizon’s salmon-colored brick walls had offered the promise of propriety for its women in a society that was still rife with Victorian condemnations for the New Woman. Now the Barbizon Hotel for Women was offering comfort and protection from a different sort of censure entirely: if women were not meant to hold jobs, if such a luxury was to be reserved for breadwinning men, if women with jobs were now deemed unpatriotic, then any young woman in New York with a salaried job, or else seeking one, was a pariah.

Every time a woman walked down the street dressed for work, or stood waiting at the elevator banks of her office building, she was a reminder of “compromised manhood.” By 1932, twenty-six states had made it illegal for married women to hold a job, and in the states where it was not mandatory to quit work upon marriage, it was still mandatory to disclose one’s impending married status because it was considered outrageous for a woman to be taking a job away from a “real” breadwinner. The Barbizon provided shelter from such denouncements. It was not just a residential hotel anymore; it was safe harbor.

The winter of 1932–33 was particularly bad. It was not only Hoovervilles and breadlines, but also single unemployed women marching in New York’s streets, demanding jobs. Many of them were from “good families,” bred on the optimism of the Roaring Twenties. Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933 with the Great Depression at its peak—national income had been cut in half, and nine million savings accounts had been wiped out. As FDR was being inaugurated, home foreclosures reached a thousand a day, thirty-eight states had closed their banks, and many local governments did not have enough to cover relief payments. The stock market crash had exposed the illusion of the earlier optimism in a decade built on what First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt argued had been “a national preoccupation with material gain.” No doubt she was right: the 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.

Nevertheless, some persisted. Many of the young women in search of jobs were recent college graduates, but their chances of getting a job were slim: only one-third of Barnard College’s class of 1932 graduates who needed to work found work, and what work was to be had centered on typing. An English literature degree got you nowhere, not unless you could add secretarial school to your résumé, preferably a certificate from the finest: the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School. These young female college graduates who had dreamed of sophisticated futures, of fulfilling lives, were now knocking desperately on the doors of the famous secretarial school. If they were accepted, and if they survived the rigorous course of typing, stenography, manners, poise, business training, and more, they became Gibbs girls. The now largely forgotten Gibbs girl, once the pride of the American workforce, who represented nine-to-five glamour and grit, came into her own in the 1930s—exactly at the same time that