It focuses on some notable women who were guests at the hotel like Grace Kelly, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath (who wrote it into The Bell Jar as the Amazon hotel. Until the mid-80s, it was a hotel exclusive for women – not the only one of its kind, but the most iconic and glamorous. This book is about, of course, the eponymous Barbizon hotel that operated from the 1920s until the early 2000s in New York City. The only criticisms are 1) occasionally it jumped around chronologically, which could be hard to follow, and 2) it could have dwelled more on race/class, how the hotel really only set a certain kind of woman free. I really loved this book – there’s so much fascinating history, beautiful descriptions Bren did a really impressive job drawing the story of a hotel out into the wider story of US women in the 20th century. The movement would call into question the need for sequestering women: What was the line between aiding women’s growth and independence in a no-man environment, protecting them in a man-free zone, and cloistering them from the world and its gendered realities? In Brief: The residential hotel built in the 1920s on the promise of women’s independence and the nurturing of their artistic talents and all-around ambition would become a casualty of that very same goal. Ironically, it would be the onset of the 1960s women’s movement that would sound the death knell for the Barbizon.
0 kommentar(er)
