Summary of Paulina Bren's The Barbizon

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 The New Woman was a woman who wanted independence and liberation from everything that weighed her down. She could be seen pedaling down the street in her bloomers and billowing shirtsleeves on the way to somewhere.

#2 Molly Brown was a survivor of the Titanic disaster, and she used her status to raise money for the survivors. She had separated from her husband, J. J. Brown, a few years prior, and she had become a feminist, child-protection advocate, and unionizer.

#3 Molly Brown was not a flapper, but she did have an antipathy towards the flappers of the Jazz Age, who seemed to define themselves by one single hard-won victory: sexual liberation. She chose to stay at the Barbizon Club-Residence for Women in New York because she wanted to test out different versions of herself.

#4 The Barbizon Hotel, where Molly stayed, was a Gothic-style building with studios for its budding artists. The front entrance was on Sixty-Third Street, while the ground-floor shops were on the Lexington Avenue side of the corner building.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669355359

IRB Media

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Book preview

Insights on Paulina Bren's The Barbizon

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The New Woman was a woman who wanted independence and liberation from everything that weighed her down. She could be seen pedaling down the street in her bloomers and billowing shirtsleeves on the way to somewhere.

#2

Molly Brown was a survivor of the Titanic disaster, and she used her status to raise money for the survivors. She had separated from her husband, J. J. Brown, a few years prior, and she had become a feminist, child-protection advocate, and unionizer.

#3

Molly Brown was not a flapper, but she did have an antipathy towards the flappers of the Jazz Age, who seemed to define themselves by one single hard-won victory: sexual liberation. She chose to stay at the Barbizon Club-Residence for Women in New York because she wanted to test out different versions of herself.

#4

The Barbizon Hotel, where Molly stayed, was a Gothic-style building with studios for its budding artists. The front entrance was on Sixty-Third Street, while the ground-floor shops were on the Lexington Avenue side of the corner building.

#5

The architecture of the early twentieth century was as new as the New Woman who had broken free of old constraints. Critics of nineteenth-century New York condemned the brown mantle spread out across Manhattan, but today’s prized brownstones are quaint and historical.

#6

The New Woman received a publicly sanctioned right to live independently, to express herself sexually, to indulge as a consumer, and to experience urban life’s thrills. And in exchange, she needed a place to live.

#7

The first women’s hotel was the Martha Washington, built in 1903. It was a squat twelve stories that stretched one city block along Madison Avenue from Twenty-Ninth to Thirtieth Street. It addressed a need for accommodations for self-supporting white-collar women when New York hotel rules stipulated that no single female traveler could be offered a room after 6:00 p. m.

#8

The Martha Washington was a residential