THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2020 by Maggie Doherty
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. for permission to reprint excerpts from “Halfway,” “Morning Swim,” and “Purgatory” from Selected Poems 1960–1990 by Maxine Kumin, and “In That Land” from Bringing Together by Maxine Kumin. “Halfway” copyright © 1960 by Maxine Kumin, “Morning Swim” copyright © 1965 by Maxine Kumin, “Purgatory” copyright © 1965 by Maxine Kumin, and “In That Land” copyright © 2003 by Maxine Kumin. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Doherty, Maggie, author.
Title: The equivalents : a story of art, female friendship, and liberation in the 1960s / Maggie Doherty.
Other titles: Art, female friendship, and liberation in the 1960s
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019036686 (print) | LCCN 2019036687 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524733056 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524733063 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women intellectuals—United States. | Women poets—United States. | Women artists—United States. | Women authors—United States. | Self-actualization (Psychology) in women. | Female friendship—United States—History—20th century. | Feminism—United States—History—20th century. | Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.
Classification: LCC HQ1206 .D58 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1206 (ebook) | DDC 700.92/52 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036686
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036687
Ebook ISBN 9781524733063
Cover photographs: Anne Sexton, 1961 by Rollie McKenna © Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography. Print: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rollie McKenna; women’s liberation demonstration (detail) © Freda Leinwand. Print: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Cover design by John Gall
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
For my parents
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
PART ONE: 1957–1961
1: Little White Picket Fences
2: Who Rivals?
3: Writer-Human-Woman
4: A Messy Experiment
5: I Got It!
PART TWO: 1961–1963
6: The Premier Cru
7: We’re Just Talking
8: Happily Awarded
9: The Equivalents
10: Me, Me Too
11: Mad for the Message
12: Genius of a Sort
PART THREE: 1964–1974
13: Do It or Die Trying
14: We Are All Going to Make It
15: Hurt Wild Baffled Angry
16: There’s Nothing Wrong with Privilege, Except That Everybody Doesn’t Have It
17: Springs of Creativity
18: The New Exotics
19: Which Way Is Home
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
A Note About the Author
Introduction
The poet Anne Sexton spent the summer of 1962 swimming. Months away from publishing her second book and poised on the edge of fame, she soothed her nerves with water. When the weather was warm enough for a dip, she would step out of her house, strip nude, and slide into the pool in her backyard. She delighted in the warmth of the sun, the smooth feel of the water, the quiet of the morning. She could see an old train track from her backyard, while just out of sight, beyond the old, rolling hills of a golf course, the Charles River flowed through Newton Lower Falls, wending its way to the harbor in Boston.
Sexton’s young daughters, Joy and Linda, didn’t like when their mom skinny-dipped. But the kids were often absent that summer, off with a babysitter or with Sexton’s mother-in-law, who frequently helped with child care. Sexton needed the time to work: though she’d only started writing poetry seriously five and a half years earlier, on a whim, her first collection had been a critical success. Fellow poets respected her; some of them expected great things. Sexton was a natural performer: an elegant woman with long legs and slim hips, she captivated audiences at her readings. But she was also a labile, anxious woman, and she frequently needed time off from mothering simply to relax. On these summer mornings, she would swim calmly from one end of her pool to the other, traversing its twenty-five-foot length.
Anne Sexton in her swimming pool in the 1960s
Poetry usually followed her ritual sun worship. She would experiment with new poems, tinker with old ones, write a letter or two. One of her major projects that summer was reviewing the galleys for her next collection of poetry. The book, her second, was to be published by Houghton Mifflin in October; the esteemed poet Robert Lowell, her friend and former teacher, had already agreed to let her quote some of his words of praise. If she were so inclined, she could drive into Cambridge’s Harvard Square and review the galleys in a gabled house where she and twenty-three other women created, studied, and worked, each with her own small office. But most days, Sexton found it more comfortable to work at home—especially now that she could, to her husband’s relief, work somewhere other than the dining room table.
Her home study had been built the previous summer. She described it to a friend as a “wooden tower” standing where the porch had once been. It had one long window that faced the backyard. Looking out, Sexton could see the pine trees and the blue hills from her desk, but when she was writing, she faced away from the window—“nature…becomes my enemy,” she explained. While working, she sat either in her straight desk chair or, more often, in a soft red chair with her feet perched on one of her many bookcases. She could spend hours sitting in this position, drawing inspiration from the great writers on the shelves, many of whom she’d encountered only recently—Kafka, Rilke, Dostoevsky—and many of whom she’d come to love. “I hoard books,” she once confessed to a friend. “They are people who do not leave.”
There was another advantage to working from home. Sexton lived just a few minutes’ drive from her best friend, the poet Maxine Kumin. Tall, lean, and dark-haired, Kumin could seem at first to be Sexton’s twin, until one noticed her athletic build, her slightly hooded eyes, the sharp angles of her face. She, too, was a suburban mother and the author of a published book of poetry. She was also Sexton’s main source of emotional and creative support.
In the early 1960s, the poets’ lives were enmeshed: they spoke on the phone every day, sometimes about writing, sometimes simply about their lives. They watched each other’s children. They served cocktails to each other’s husbands. After Sexton installed her pool, the friends developed a happy routine that blended work and play. Kumin brought her children over to swim, and she and Sexton sat by the edge of the pool with ty
pewriters in their laps, their legs dangling in the water, and worked together on a children’s book, a nice break from their adult compositions. Though Sexton often feared social gatherings, Kumin’s dependable, comfortable company was almost always welcome.
But in the mornings Kumin was usually still at her own home, caring for her own children. Sexton was left to appreciate her solitude. On these summer mornings, no one needed her—not her husband, not her children, not her mother-in-law, not even her friend. The day was beautifully, blissfully hers.
* * *
—
Everything about these summer days—the pool, the study, the solitude, the second book, the second place to write, even the companionship of Kumin—was the product of a novel experiment in women’s higher education. In the fall of 1960, the prestigious women’s college Radcliffe, the sister school of Harvard, had announced an unprecedented fellowship program, one that targeted a ubiquitous and yet marginalized class of Americans: mothers. In the words of its founder, the Radcliffe president and microbiologist Mary Ingraham Bunting, the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study was designed to combat the “climate of unexpectation” facing women in mid-century America. As she saw it, too many accomplished female undergraduates were giving up their dreams of becoming scholars or artists because they couldn’t see how they could do research or write a book while also managing a family and keeping house. The new program proposed to get these “intellectually displaced women” back on track.
Each woman admitted to the Institute as an “associate scholar” received a stipend of up to $3,000 (nearly $25,000 today) to spend as she pleased. She also received access to Harvard’s library resources and a private office—the proverbial “room of her own”—in a little yellow house at 78 Mount Auburn Street, just a few blocks from Harvard Yard. A mother of four children, Bunting believed that most women wanted to find a way to combine professional interests and family life: her own happiest years had been those she spent raising her children on a small farm in Connecticut while commuting twice a week to do research in a lab at Yale. As a university administrator and education reformer, Bunting recognized the role that institutions played in supporting women’s professional ambitions. She realized that you couldn’t simply tell women to work hard and keep studying if the world didn’t give them the tools and resources to do so.
The Institute’s founding had been announced on November 19, 1960. A New York Times article broadcast the news to the nation: “Radcliffe Pioneers in Plan for Gifted Women’s Study.” Almost immediately, the phone in Bunting’s office rang nonstop. Within ten days, Bunting’s secretary had been inundated with over 160 letters of congratulation and inquiry. Once the application process was formalized, the Institute received nearly two hundred applications from women all across the country; other women interested in applying had been turned away because they didn’t have the requisite qualifications. And in September 1961, the Institute offered an inaugural group of twenty-four remarkable women—including Sexton and Kumin—the resources they needed to succeed: fellowship money, office space, and, most important, membership in a professional and creative female community, the likes of which had never been seen before in the country’s history.
Imagine being a “gifted woman,” like the women accepted to the Institute, at the dawn of the 1960s. Perhaps you had graduated from one of the “Seven Sisters” colleges, maybe taken what people called a “little job” in New York after school. Maybe you even worked for the Allied war effort while your husband served overseas. Not long after the bombs fell on Japan, though, your job prospects dried up. The GIs returned Stateside, and they wanted their jobs back, or they wanted spots in graduate school so they could get even better jobs. As the Soviets built their missiles and nuclear destruction loomed, you were told that the best way you could serve your country was to build a happy home.
Now, by all accounts, you have the perfect life: you have the high-earning husband, the rosy-cheeked children, and the Buick in the driveway. But something isn’t right. Household tasks don’t seem to hold your attention; you snarl at your children instead of blanketing them with smiles. You fret about how little you resemble those glossy women in the magazines, the ones who clean counters and bake cakes and radiate delight. (Looking at those ads, a housewife and freelance writer named Betty Friedan “thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.”) Everything and everyone confirm that it’s just as you suspected: the problem is you. You’re oversexed, you’re undersexed, you’re overeducated, you’re unintelligent. You need to have your head shrunk; you need to take more sleeping pills. You ought to become a better cook—all those fancy new kitchen appliances!—and in the meantime be content and grateful with what you have. The cultural pressure of the 1950s was so intense that some women, in order to survive, killed off the parts of themselves that couldn’t conform.
Women like Sexton and Kumin didn’t want to amputate their passions. Neither did the writer Tillie Olsen, a communist organizer from San Francisco who planned to write the great proletarian novel; nor the painter Barbara Swan, a portraitist who grew up in Newton and studied at Boston’s finest art school; nor the sculptor Marianna Pineda, who was born in Evanston, Illinois, and apprenticed at various ateliers in the United States and Europe before settling down in Brookline, Massachusetts. Each of these five women won admission to the Institute during its first or second year. They gathered in Cambridge, where they met historians and psychologists, composers and scientists, poets and painters—all of whom were women.
Many Institute fellows hadn’t experienced such female community since their days at Vassar or Sarah Lawrence. Others—including Sexton, who never earned a college degree—were experiencing this kind of camaraderie for the first time. At the Institute, a woman could forget about her housework and her children and simply be a mind among other minds—at least until the dinner hour. The founder of the Institute often called it a laboratory. It was also an incubator where new growth could take place.
The results of what Bunting called her “messy experiment” were not what she, or anyone, anticipated. For the women it supported, the Institute was nothing short of life changing (one called it her “salvation”). It offered each of the writers and artists discussed in this book a crucial mix of solitude and community, ideal conditions for artistic growth. For the first time, these women found themselves in a community of the like-minded. They conversed about everything from their best publishers to their worst marital spats. They read each other’s work and collaborated on different projects. Many a woman discovered that problems she had once felt were hers alone—an absent husband, an excess of housework, a condescending male colleague—were in fact common, even structural. In other words, there was nothing wrong with her, but there might be something wrong with the world.
The Institute became a site for the development of influential feminist art and thought. The writers and artists there encouraged each other to represent female experience in all its difficulty and complexity. They broke taboos about what was a fit subject for lyric poetry; they etched their experience of womanhood into stone. Along with the other associate scholars, they discussed the feminist polemics of the day. (Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book that Bunting had helped Friedan develop, was published during the Institute’s second academic year.) They also advanced some of the first critiques of the ideology behind the nascent women’s movement. Was motherhood always a form of oppression? Did all women, regardless of race or class, suffer in the same way? Can a woman ever really have it all? At the Institute, with each other, they began to tease out some possible answers to these important questions.
Together, the women of the Institute learned to take themselves seriously; when they left Radcliffe, they insisted that the world do the same. The feminist activist and civil rights organizer Carol Hanisch coined the second-wave slogan “the personal is political” in 1969.
Far earlier in the decade, the women of the Institute discovered this truth for themselves.
* * *
—
This book is about a small group of women writers and artists who operated as a hinge between the 1950s and the 1960s, between a decade of women’s confinement and a decade of women’s liberation. It tells the story of their careers, their friendships, and their art as a way of describing how and why the feminist movement reemerged in 1960s America. But this book is also about their particularities, their inner lives, their conflicts. It attends to the rich, idiosyncratic, loving, competitive relationships that form between women—the kinds of relationships that so often go unexamined and unrecognized.
During their two years at the Institute, from the fall of 1961 through the spring of 1963, Sexton and Kumin met a number of “intellectually displaced” women who thrilled at this chance to jump-start their studies. They befriended historians, learned from psychologists, and listened to educational researchers. They became especially close with three other artists who attended the Institute during its first two years: Olsen, the writer; Swan, the painter; and Pineda, the sculptor. These five women formed a close, collaborative clique. Joking about the Institute’s application standards, which required that applicants have either a doctorate or “the equivalent” in creative achievement, they called their friend group “the Equivalents.”
The women in this group were unalike in many ways. Vibrant, moody Sexton was a WASP from money who wrote openly about her experiences of mental illness and motherhood while also worrying that her subject matter would prevent her from achieving success. Kumin wrote neat, formal poems about the natural world. A Jewish woman from Philadelphia who never felt that she fit in, Kumin dreamed of escaping the Boston suburbs for the New Hampshire countryside, though she feared that abandoning Sexton would be disastrous. Olsen was charismatic, passionate, an activist who, in the 1930s, had published inventive reportage and fiction. At the Institute, Olsen, at age fifty, hoped to write her long-awaited great proletarian novel, which would underscore the importance of all human lives. Swan, a painter from the Boston suburbs, had studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and received a traveling fellowship to paint in Europe. She painted and sketched portraits, including her own, that exposed the sitter’s soul. Pineda, a sculptor since her teenage years, had grown up in privilege and had made a living as a working artist. Her life-sized figurative sculptures portrayed pregnancy, labor, and motherhood in unprecedented ways.
The Equivalents Page 1