The Barbizon

work, they talked over problems with one another, they applauded eachother’s successes and gave solace to those with disappointment and heartbreak. They felt empowered just by being at the Barbizon. ActressAli MacGraw, a resident in the summer of 1958, recalls cradling her morning coffeein its paper blue-and-white Greek coffee cup, feeling like she was“going somewhere” just by being there.
The Barbizon Hotel for Women, built in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, opened its doors in 1928 to women pursuing independent lives in Manhattan.
The Barbizon tells a story that, until now, has been heard onlyin snippets. When I first set out to write about this unique hotel and theremarkable women who passed through its doors, I did not realize others before mehad wanted to tell the story of the Barbizon, and then given up. Like them, at firstI too hit a wall in my research: there were just too few sources about the hotel. Atthe New-York Historical Society Archive, where I expected to find a stack ofdocuments, I was handed only a thin folder marked “Barbizon” withnothing more than a few newspaper articles. There are also too few sources about thekind of women who stayed at the Barbizon; the “women in between,” onemight say; those who were neither upper-class, letter-writingsociety women nor union-organizing, working-class women. Of course these archivaland historiographical gaps I encountered tell us something: they tell us how thememory of women’s lives is easily forgotten and how the silence can make usbelieve that women were not fully participating in everyday life throughout thetwentieth century.
But they were, very much so, in creative ways and with ambitiousplans. I learned this as I slowly began to unravel the Barbizon’s hiddenstories—as a historian, an interviewer, an internet sleuth. I located itsformer residents, now lively, funny, and sharp-minded ladies in their eighties andnineties. I found scrapbooks, letters, photographs. I even discovered an archive inWyoming. Together they reveal the history of single women of a certain set, of whatit meant for them to finally have a room of their own and the air to breathe,without the burden of family and family expectations, in New York, the City ofDreams. The Barbizon Hotel was about the remaking of oneself, and nothing like ithad existed before or has since.

CHAPTER ONE
B
UILDING THE
B
ARBIZON
The Unsinkable Molly Brown vs. the Flappers
The Unsinkable Molly Brown in her prime, already a suffragette and activist, but before she would become the Titanic’s most famous survivor and one of the Barbizon’s early residents.


TheNew Woman arrived in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. She was a womanintent on being more than just a daughter, wife, and mother. She wanted to explorebeyond the four walls of her home; she wanted independence; she wanted liberation fromeverything that weighed her down. She could be seen pedaling down the street in herbloomers and billowing shirtsleeves on the way to somewhere.
The writer Henry James popularized the term “New Woman” whenhe used it to describe affluent American female expatriates in Europe living their livesindependently of the restrictions back home. But the term gained traction: being a NewWoman meant taking control of one’s life.
First there was the Gibson girl, a sort of little sister of the New Woman;upper-middle-class, with flowing hair, voluptuous in all the right places, but cinchedin at the waist with a swan-bill corset that had her leaning in, as if she wereperpetually in motion, intent on moving forward. Then came World War I, thewomen’s vote, the Roaring Twenties, and the Gibson girl gave way to a wilderversion of herself, the flapper. This little sister dumped the corset, drank, smoked,flirted, and worse. She was all giggles and verve and too much exposed ankle. But theflapper made it clear to anyone willing to listen—or not—that the New Womanhad been democratized. To defy traditional expectations was no longer the purview onlyof those who could afford it. Women, all women, were venturing out into the world now.The war and women’s suffrage had poked holes in earlier arguments for why womenneeded to stay home. The time had come for the world to adjust.It was in this spirit that the Barbizon Club-Residence for Women was built in 1927.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown, made famous for surviving the Titanic,was among the Barbizon’s first residents. The woman who had mustered up thecourage to row-row-row, when the men did not, sat at her small desk in her Barbizonroom, pen in hand. It was 1931, and Molly Brown (whose real name was Margaret TobinBrown) was now a sixty-three-year-old former beauty, overweight, a little rough aroundthe edges, her eccentric and flamboyant fashion sense looking gently comical. But MollyBrown could not care less; she still carried the confidence of a first-generation NewWoman, and she knew that no matter what anyone said, she had planted her flag firmly inthis new century.
She paused her letter to her friend in Denver and looked out the window ofthe Barbizon at the bleak February sky. It reminded her of the sky the night theTitanic began to list to the side, far faster than she would have thoughtpossible. That was back in 1912, two years before the First World War, another eraaltogether now it seemed, when Molly Brown had joined her friends, the famous Astors, ona trip through Egypt and North Africa. Her daughter, a student at the Sorbonne in Paris,met her in Cairo, and together they posed in heavy Edwardian dresses for the must-havesouvenir photograph sitting on top of two camels, with the Sphinx and the pyramidslooming behind them. Molly returned with her daughter to Paris, but when news arrivedthat her grandson had fallen ill back home, she quickly booked a cabin on the same shipas the Astors. It was called the Titanic.
It was only the sixth night on board. She had had a nice dinner and waslying comfortably in her first-class cabin, reading, when she heard a crash. She wasknocked out of bed, but being a seasoned traveler, she thought