While a famed, glamorous women’s hotel like the Barbizon might allow the romantic mythology of “hotel residence living” in the mid-twentieth century to endure, Daniel M. Lavery’s Women’s Hotel paints such a unique setup and period in history as more Girl, Interrupted than, shall we say, Gossip Girl. The “women’s hotel” of Lavery’s imagination is called the Biedermeier, and it knows that it’s “beta” at best and “zeta” at worst. Run by a “matronly” “widow type” named Mrs. Mossler, whose views haven’t much changed since 1927, around the time of her own youth, the Biedermeier is in the midst of an existential crisis. As were most institutions in the 1960s. And the women’s hotel, as a concept, was an institution. As such, for “wayward” girls like Katherine, Pauline, Lucianne, Gia and Ruth, to name a few of the leads of Women’s Hotel, even a joint as “below Barbizon level” is a much-appreciated port in the storm.
For Katherine, a resident who also serves as an auxiliary “manager” (at least of certain floors) alongside Mrs. Mossler, that storm is her home back in Ohio, where she was essentially forced to leave her family behind after putting them through too much during a bizarre dalliance with alcoholism. Bizarre in that Katherine had no “reason” whatsoever to be attracted to the “habit.” No trace of it in her DNA or bad influence encouraging her to do it. It was just something that “happened.” And so, she became the kind of lush who drank alone in her room. Thus, during the peak of her youth, she was effectively “blacked out,” leaving her to wonder who else could possibly identify with such a strange experience or how she could explain to others why she lacks specific social graces typically cultivated in one’s late teenage years and early twenties (e.g., that of the sexual and courtship varieties). As the narrator puts it, “Whether there were in fact fifty other women with Katherine’s particular history, who drank almost exclusively indoors and under quiet parental supervision, she did not know [if only she could have met Lizzy Grant during her own ‘teenage alcoholic in my bedroom’ period]. If there were, none of them ever came to her meetings.” The meetings in question referring, of course, to AA. One of the few steady constants in Katherine’s life apart from the Biedermeier. Indeed, most of the women who find themselves at this hotel seem to make it (and the mini-dramas contained within) their entire lives. For some, that’s an especially literal turn of phrase, as the four walls of their room are all they can afford to see of New York.
Case in point, Josephine. A woman somewhere in her upper sixties who has increasingly struggled to make her scant budget work amid the ever-rising prices of the city and Mrs. Mossler’s own sudden tightening of the Biedermeier’s belt. That is to say, she’s been left with “no choice” but to cut breakfast out of the equation. A trivial but monumental conceit in Women’s Hotel. For breakfast was formerly one of the few perks included in the cost of staying at the Biedermeier (along with an “elevator boy” named Stephen, practically one of the group [especially in terms of being classifiable under the “societal reject” column] more than a “proper” worker). And while it might seem inconsequential to those on the outside looking in, for Josephine, the loss of that “free” meal means going hungry (read: hungrier), for how can she be expected (particularly at her age) to live on one scant meal a day? However, for other residents, it isn’t even about the breakfast as a form of money-saving sustenance. As Lucianne describes it to Katherine, “What I really hate about [losing] it…is not so much that the breakfast was particularly good, and therefore worth missing, because of course it wasn’t, but it means having to leave my room, and quite possibly the building, first thing in the morning, and to a person with even the slightest delicacy of feeling that can upset practically the whole day.”
Yes, Lavery has hit the nail on the head regarding how wretched it is to be trotted out of one’s own personal area so early in the morning without even an hour to get acquainted with the idea of leaving this proverbial “womb.” To be sure, many of the women at the Biedermeier treat their respective spaces like just that: a womb. A lone source of comfort in an otherwise cold, callous world. Particularly the money-hungry world of New York City. As for Lavery setting the narrative during the NYC of the early/mid-1960s, it not so coincidentally aligns with what is called the “white flight” of that era. A mass exodus of white people from the city and into suburban areas that were more “off-limits” (even if “tacitly”) to, let’s say, anyone with high concentrations of melanin in their skin. This was also a time when New York City was showing the initial traces of its decline, which would peak by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some might even say that the existence of “flophouses” like the Biedermeier was already a clear sign of the city “going to hell in a handbag.” Becoming far too open to a “certain kind” of person. That is, a person who could not function amongst polite society. And yet, there was the Barbizon, which housed elegant, sophisticated women like Grace Kelly and Sylvia Plath. But, again, the Barbizon was on a different tier than a more “accessible” women’s hotel like the Biedermeier.
Whatever their classification or price point, Lavery sums up the phenomenon of these hotels best when remarking, “None of [these hotels] held a unified definition of collective living. Few of them shared ideals. There were no Oneidans among them. Their heyday was briefer than that of the Shakers, and their legacy weaker… They served as short-term stand-ins to replace those now-lost, sometime-consecrated institutions for feminine maintenance that had once served as catchments for the middle class and superfluous: religious houses, country schoolrooms, the ever-retreating frontier, ladies’ seminaries. They were made obsolete by the credit card, by hippies and the New Age movement, by lesbianism and feminism, by the increase in affordable apartment stock and the increased acceptance of premarital cohabitation.” But oh, for one brief, shining moment in history, they were all the rage (in major metropolises anyway). Less so for the “glamorous types” often highlighted by the Barbizon, and more so for the “shunned” types highlighted by Lavery, a trans man who so clearly found an affinity for the characters furnished by this sort of material based on their own background, having transitioned from one gender to another circa 2018. Indeed, one might argue that Lavery’s trans-ness provides an even more perspicacious viewpoint on women, both in general and during this time period. Particularly those with enough “daring” to live their lives as they wished—which is to say, not in accordance with societal norms.
That said, one of the larger points of Women’s Hotel is to underscore how important these spaces were, yet how they vanished almost as quickly as they arose. Part of a blip in mid-twentieth century time when all of the conditions were right to accommodate their cropping up, only for those very conditions (feminism, free love, increased acceptance of divorce, etc.) to lead to their gradual demise. Clocking that demise with her hawk eye, Mrs. Mossler laments the decrease in new residents as Moving Day approaches, asking Katherine, “I can’t understand where they’re all going. Don’t girls still work? Don’t they still have to live somewhere? They can’t all be going to the suburbs.”
Katherine, ever the pragmatist, replies, “I think quite a lot of them do.” To which Mrs. Mossler adds, “Well…then wouldn’t the suburbs all be as big as cities by now? If everyone’s going there, how can they still be suburbs? It seems to me like it was just a few years ago that the whole world was living in New York, or wanted to. The suburbs was like a ring of waiting rooms for everyone who was trying to get in. They weren’t a destination in their own right. I can’t imagine where everybody has gone to. Besides which…there’s never been a generation yet that’s married ‘em all off. At least not all of ‘em at the same time. Even if this were the marryingest generation in seven, there still ought to be a few leftovers.” “New York syndrome” (a condition where people living in New York can’t possibly imagine others not wanting to live there) aside, that word, “leftovers,” so appropriately conveys how women living at the Biedermeier (and pretty much any women’s hotel that isn’t the Barbizon) are viewed. As dregs, cast-offs, people who can’t “gel” with society.
“Where are they going, if not here?” Mrs. Mossler demands. Katherine shrugs, “Where did the milkmen go?” Where did the icemen go, or goeth? Ubi sunt reges, ubi sunt principes? [Where are the kings, where are the princes?]” And then, as though to further send Mrs. Mossler into a tailspin, Katherine mentions that even the Automat on 72nd has closed, this being a running line throughout the book, as it acts as a harbinger for the Biedermeier. For if the Automat (or what Neil Simon once called “the Maxim’s of the disenfranchised”) can close, then nothing is safe. Least of all for society’s “cast-offs” to feel slightly less dehumanized. To convey how valuable—how normalizing—an Automat could make a broke ass feel, Lavery interweaves its closure in relation to the loss of breakfast at the Biedermeier. This done through the lens of Josephine’s already poverty-stricken state. For, in processing the reality of what her life will mean without breakfast, she also considers going to the Automat for a cheap fix and a place to be outside her four walls. Then, the realization: “But the Automats were closing, hadn’t Katherine said? So it had closed; it was already gone; there were no more marvelous lunches and dinners hidden in the walls; it was like any other building in the city now; you could pull apart every door and wall and ceiling and never find anything to eat inside it, except for maybe rats. So she could not even go watch other people eat, because in other restaurants, you had to order something if you wanted to sit down and look at the people eating inside.”
Josephine’s grim reality is further compounded by trying to call her sister, Inez, for something like moral support. Instead, this attempt at seeking solace only results in the horrifying suggestion that Josephine go into “a home.” So it is that she does something that would have been previously unthinkable to her: she starts stealing from people—more specifically, pickpocketing them. But what choice does she really have? Backed into a corner in the aftermath of this “breakfast business.” And the narrator is quite deft at making the reader feel sympathetic to her plight, explaining, “She had extracted all the money from the world that she had known how to get, and she did not know how to get more. Her income had been fixed for years, but the world was not fixed—every year every thing cost more and more; there seemed to be no limit to how rich the world could get around her, while she sat at her little table with her nickel’s worth of coffee, and watched prosperity rolling in and around—but never in her direction.” A familiar tale, to be sure…most notably for those who have always struggled to “fall in line” with what the world expects of them.
Naturally, Josephine isn’t the only “odd duck” who can’t quite “hack it” (read: capitalism renders any non-normie into someone constantly fighting to maintain even the bare necessities). There’s also one of the two newest additions to the Biedermeier, Ruth. At first, she seems merely “off,” but steadily, it becomes apparent to everyone (especially Katherine, Carol and her boyfriend, Bryan) that Ruth is the kind of mentally unstable that one should be very, very afraid of. But that curveball doesn’t hit the reader (or most of the Biedermeier residents) until the final act of the book—though, looking back, all the signs are there. This includes a bleak characterization of Ruth as follows: “[Most people] only knew that they did not like Ruth, as decisively and instinctively as the family dog decides to take against the mailman. Her inability to attract friends was immediately and incredibly obvious to everyone but herself, which made them dislike her all the more.”
Ruth’s descent upon the hotel, however, is not something Mrs. Mossler can complain about—for (theoretically) she’s better than no new residents at all. As for the beautiful and well-liked Gia, who arrives on the same Moving Day, she has her own “off-kilter” pursuits in coming to New York/the hotel: to bide her time as she sets the trap to ensnare (a.k.a. marry) a recently widowed older man that her mother used to date. The scandals and salaciousness of the Biedermeier, thus, only add to its unspoken “base” repute. This further piled upon by the axing of breakfast: “It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else.” In other words, the hotel itself. And with many of the residents having a keen awareness of their days at the hotel being numbered, there seems to be an amplified uptick in, well, mad behavior. Apart from Ruth, Josephine best embodies this (though Katherine comes close as well, at one point punching a fellow resident named Kitty—even if for good reason). But, unlike Ruth, Josephine’s madness is made more relatable because it’s caused by the same thing that makes most everyone mad: money. Or rather, a lack of it.
In taking stock of her life after the breakfast announcement forces her to, Josephine has to wonder, “Where had all her money gone? Surely she had made enough throughout the long course of her working life to retire in comfort, but there was no evidence of that work as far as she could see. Her mind rebelled at the prospect of its all being gone. There must have been something to show for those fifty years, it must have gone somewhere—she had lived in New York, in a rented apartment instead of a home, and later in a residential hotel instead of her own apartment, because it had meant she had less to take care of, meant she could be independent, meant that she could be closer to people, to crowds, to New York—but now the people did not do her any good, and New York was as far away as the moon. What good was independence in your old age, if you did not have the money to back it up? You needed money to live in New York, and she did not have any; therefore, she did not live in New York after all, and it was as simple as that.” Here, Lavery accents the meaninglessness of living in New York under pauper’s conditions, therefore accents the frequent love-hate relationship that many of the city’s residents have with it…long before the gentrification-on-steroids practices that set in post-2005 (see: the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning measure). That a woman’s hotel was once an affordable way to help ensure one could “partake of” the city as it ought to be also makes this book as much of a love letter to New York’s swan song (as a haven for bohemians and other assorted “freakshows”) as it is to the swan song of women’s hotels. Places where people were bonded by nothing more than the square footage of a building, yet somehow shared an indelible experience together.
As Women’s Hotel draws to a close, a chapter about “marriage season” reveals that one of the residents, Sadie, got married without telling anyone. Unveiling the news only after the fact and, with it, the expected revelation that she’s going to leave the hotel. Though she jokes that she might return if things don’t work out with her new husband, the others are well-aware that “…she would not come back… the Biedermeier was not the kind of place where people came back. You either stayed on longer than you had ever intended to, or you left for good; it never hosted reunions. They had not come there on purpose, and they left as often as they could.” Yet, despite Lavery’s narrator reporting on these places as leaving no lasting impact on “the culture,” it’s obvious that, for however briefly, they provided a refuge for those women who otherwise didn’t quite “fit” anywhere else. So it is that Lavery ultimately makes the argument that the decay and disappearance of the women’s hotel is a symbol of something far bleaker. A symbol of the decay and disappearance of “alternative situations” (namely, with some semblance of dignity) altogether.
Nonetheless, there’s nothing wrong with marveling over the fact that such institutions ever could have existed and thrived at all. Or, as Lavery sums it up in the intro to Women’s Hotel, “Let this book be taken for no more than what it is: a diffuse sketch of a short-lived, patchwork commonwealth, a few impressions of a manner of living that was briefly possible for a small group of women in the middle decades of the last century. It is a story of provisional, often unwilling, cooperation between people with no real allegiance to one another, the diary of some women, and a few men, who occasionally found themselves sharing the cells of unheaded and deconsecrated abbeys, and were sometimes glad of it.”