The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

“Women and Newspapers,” “Women in Government,” “Women in Medicine,” and “Women in Local Politics.” Popular culture too in the 1930s, as the movie industry expanded, radio ownership doubled, and newspapers proliferated, often showcased “assertive” women. The 1930s on-screen heroine—played by the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, and others—was “the ambitious career girl, the gutsy entertainer, the sophisticated socialite, the blond seductress, and, leading the list, the worldly wise reporter.” (In fact, women had entered journalism in large numbers in the 1920s, and the trend continued into the 1930s, especially with the boost that Eleanor Roosevelt gave them by organizing a weekly women-only press conference to ensure female journalists did not lose their jobs.) These fictional screen heroines became a “repository for some of the lost aspirations of the 1920s.”

At the same time, however, these celluloid heroines were also set up to tumble or be tamed, an extreme case being the rape that turned Scarlett O’Hara from lion to lamb in Gone with the Wind. Popular culture, in other words, offered a 1930s-type reprimand of 1920s female liberation; and smaller, localized, and less cinematic reprimands were commonplace, experienced by the Barbizon’s residents daily. A 1935 handbook So You Want to Be a Reporter told it like it was: “In the films you have seen, there have been women who find work as reporters and go on to break the big story. Fairy dust, ladies, fairy dust… if you imagine in your dreams that’ll be you covering the presidential conference, take a good deep breath, and remember that you are a Susie. ‘Susie?’ Didn’t I mention Susie? All the gang call the new female recruits ‘Susie’ until they do something outstanding and earn themselves another nickname.”

But there were people and places that continued to believe in women’s meaningful employment, and the Barbizon was among them. Elizabeth Curtis, social director and vocational adviser at the Barbizon, passionately believed that a women-only residential hotel could offer what society outside its pink brick facade could not. Curtis believed that women had to cut loose from the home, that kitchen chores, compulsory entertaining, and family obligations had to be wiped clean from any modern woman’s life if she was to pursue a career: “Women who go to their offices thinking of the dinners they must get or the visiting relatives they must entertain to please mother are only about one half on the job.” Curtis was making a point: If you didn’t have to cook your meals, let alone cook them for others, if you didn’t have to accompany Mother to dinner and instead could visit restaurants and cocktail bars with your fellow female career gals, you would not only have a better time but a better career. And the flurry of white-gloved Gibbs girls that emerged from the doors of the Barbizon each morning was a testament to this very idea.

Gibbs girls were cloaked in acceptability because by the 1930s secretarial work was viewed as exclusively female. But there was also another big-city vocation understood to be singularly female—that of looking pretty. The Gibbs girls occupied a fair percentage of the Barbizon Hotel’s rooms during the 1930s, but right behind them were the Powers models. John Robert Powers had arrived in New York in the 1920s as an aspiring actor, but he soon found his real calling as the founder of the world’s first modeling agency. One day he overheard a businessman say he needed a group of attractive people to pose for a magazine advertisement. Powers gathered his friends, delivered the goods, and the rest was history. His success story was even turned into a 1943 movie musical, The Powers Girl.

The Powers Agency specialized in what was considered the typical Midwestern look: tall, blond, and curvy. A quarter of the agency’s earnings came from its models posing for mail-order catalogs such as the Sears Roebuck, rural America’s latter-day shopping mall. Some really were Midwestern, but the Powers models came from all over the country, and they inevitably stayed at the Barbizon. As Powers boasted, his unmarried models could of course “find rooms at a lower rent,” but they felt it was “worth while to spend a little more money for an atmosphere which offers both prestige and protection.” Thus the Barbizon became suffused with their glamour. Elsa Maxwell, the Waldorf Astoria in-house party hostess, liked to say that she could give a party without debutantes but not without at least six Powers girls. Because blond and cute was the look that Powers was after, the models looked so “startlingly” alike that New York’s gossip columnists abandoned trying to identify them and simply took to writing “he was seen out with a ‘Powers model.’ ”

These models were not supermodels: they were working models. They were the young women sandwiched in between magazine stories, who, as Mr. Powers liked to explain, “sip your favorite coffee, drive your dream car, display the latest fashion, show you how to cook a waffle.” He would look at the girls as they arrived at his offices on Park Avenue and appraise them for their potential in selling everything from “sables to society or groceries to the great American housewife.” The “Powers girls” were typically five foot nine inches and a voluptuous 34-24-34—“long stemmed American beauties,” illustrator William Brown called them. They came not from the chic Hamptons (although they often ended up there) but from Middle America.

The case of Evelyn Echols was in this sense typical, a journey from the Midwest straight to the Barbizon. Evelyn had always dreamed of New York, and in April 1936, for her twenty-first birthday, she and her best friend bought the cheapest car shuttle tickets to get them cross-country to New York, their luggage crammed into the back seat, driving straight through the night. Upon arriving, the first thing they did was take a room at the Barbizon because that was “where almost every unmarried woman who came to New York in the 1930s resided.” The second thing they