In her new book The Barbizon: The Hotel that Set Women Free, professor of international, gender, and media studies at Vassar College, Paulina Bren “unpacks” the luggage of several generations of women, mostly young and new to the city, who found a home in the hotel that became a legend.Īfter Paulina's presentation, she will be joined in conversation with Andrea Barnet, writer and author of Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World, whose 2019 talk at the Museum can be viewed here. Over time, it became the place to stay for any ambitious young woman hoping for fame and fortune.

By providing women a room of their own, the Barbizon was the hotel that set them free.Completed in 1928, at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the Barbizon Hotel was designed as a luxurious safe haven for the “Modern Woman” hoping for a career in the arts. 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. 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. 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. 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.īut 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. 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.

Liberated after WWI from home and hearth, women flocked to New York City during the Roaring Twenties. Welcome to New York’s legendary hotel for women, the Barbizon. The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free By Paulina Bren

Barbizon the hotel that set women free