The Barbizon Paulina Bren (read along books txt) 📖

in which Sylvia Plath was prominently featured with the other GEs. Mary Cantwell asked her boss, Mr. Graham, what Sylvia had been like. “Like the others,” he said, “Eager.” Edie Locke, then assistant fashion editor, also remembered her as “just a very pretty blonde”—but then so many of them were. Many years later, Mary Cantwell would watch a documentary on Sylvia, thinking how indeed they were all the same then, even the ambitious ones who planned to resist, for however long, the suburbs, marriage, the white picket fence. The grainy images of Sylvia’s graduation from Smith College suggested it was little different from her own: instead of the Smith College daisy chain, Mary Cantwell had had a laurel chain, but it was also June, they also had the same pageboy hairdos, they also wore Arpège perfume.

Of course all the guest editors, by definition, were ambitious. That was why they were at Mademoiselle and the Barbizon. In 1956, Polly Weaver, Mademoiselle’s careers editor and later a women’s rights activist, penned an article about the steady influx of young, single, ambitious women coming to New York since 1949 to find their place and make their mark. Weaver titled the article, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” Apparently lots, if you were to believe the responses the article elicited: one reader wrote in chastising ambitious women for having “forgotten the true functions, duties, and gracious living pleasures of the mature woman—creating for others, not for herself,” and calling ambition “unnatural and frightening.” Another reader went out on a limb: “I could shoot the first woman who went to work in a man’s job.”

If one’s brewing ambition was not sufficiently anxiety-producing, something to feel ashamed about, then the other taboo—sex—certainly was. The consequences of premarital sex in an age without the pill or legal abortion could be devastating. In her journal Sylvia Plath spoke for her generation when she wrote, “I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely,” while her fate, as a young woman, was an unrelenting and unsatisfied “soggy desire.”

These very anxieties of which Sylvia was so keenly aware enveloped the whole country that same summer with the publication of the scandalous Kinsey Report Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist by training, whose research specialty had been gall wasps until he was asked to teach a course on marriage and discovered there was little to no research available. He changed his focus from wasps to human sexuality. Five years earlier he had published his findings on the human male, which had caused enough of a stir, but the 843-page book on women’s sexuality that came out in the summer of 1953 led to a torrent of outrage. Even though it was a dry work of methodical research, based on thousands of interviews, it was utterly titillating and sold 270,000 copies in less than a month. More would have sold if people could get their hands on it. The book was banned in many places and some pastors forbade their flock from reading it. Not since Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had there been such an uproar. Kinsey’s methodology would be criticized (on campus at Indiana University, virgins were interviewed for one hour while nonvirgins were kept on for another hour; word got out and male students hung around to see who took two hours), but it was revolutionary to research women’s sexuality, let alone take it seriously.

The findings were shocking too. The report included statistics on just how many women were engaging in same-sex relations, in adultery, in masturbation, and, of particular interest to the young women of the Barbizon, in premarital sex (half of all single women were having sex before marriage, it turned out). In June 1953, Cyrilly Abels toyed with the idea of publishing something in Mademoiselle about the Kinsey Report. She commissioned a long review piece that was to lay out the findings for the magazine’s readers in a neutral but cautionary manner. Once ready, she sent it out to Mademoiselle staff for comment. In memo after memo, they responded: “Mothers and ministers will go up in arms, won’t they? This is hot, sensational stuff”; “I must say this is far from what I expected, and consequently more interesting than I expected. For one example, his findings that college women from upper-middle-class, white collar families who marry late are better sexually adjusted certainly surprised me”; “should be read with interest and gratification by most women… the whole thing makes women seem very normal and very admirable as human beings. I’m inclined to be rather pleased—on the basis of the Kinsey Report—about being a woman”; “this certainly should hit our readers with a greater impact than any page of your nephew’s top atomic secrets.” But while the editorial staff was largely enthusiastic, there were concerns about the author’s lack of analysis of the lengthy Kinsey Report, and the possible encouragement of premarital sex for the magazine’s young readers. Betsy Talbot Blackwell decided they needed to solicit the opinions of their onsite guinea pigs—the guest editors who were right there in June 1953.

The debate around the Kinsey Report never shows up in The Bell Jar, nor in the later recollections of the guest editors from 1953, but on June 18, while at a showing of Mr. John’s millinery, the GEs were suddenly told to return to the Mademoiselle offices at 5:00 p.m. instead of heading back to the Barbizon. Assembled in the mirrored conference room, BTB addressed them: “We are taking advantage of having a group of young college women here and asking you to report on a controversial article.… We are pledged to keep the contents of this article absolutely confidential, and may we count on you to keep our confidence?” To make it easier on those “more prudish,” BTB decided to ask for a twofold response: for their personal opinion on the report and also its suitability for Mademoiselle publication. No