The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Each woman entered the Institute at a crucial moment in her artistic career. Fresh off the surprise success of her first book, Sexton wanted to become what she called a “lasting” poet. At the Institute, she wrote her strongest collection of poetry and became confident in herself and in her career. Kumin, who was also just starting out as a poet, used her time at the Institute to rekindle her scholarly interests and experiment with different genres; soon after her fellowship, she wrote the first of three novels and became a writer known for her prose as well as her poetry. Olsen, a mother of four, came to the Institute to escape an overwhelming life at work and at home and with the hopes of finishing an ambitious novel. While there, she wrote something far more important: a revolutionary theory of how material oppression had shaped the literary canon. Swan, meanwhile, had long wanted to experiment with media other than pencil and oil paint, but it wasn’t until she came to the Institute that she had the time and resources to explore lithography. And Pineda, fascinated by what she thought of as the “mythological” feminine, used her Institute time to create a series of female oracle statues.

  The years at the Institute were a tipping point in each of these artists’ lives. For the unstable, prolific Sexton, these years were a once-in-a-lifetime blend of productivity and quietude. She began to think she might no longer need therapy. As soon as she left the Institute, however, her mental illness worsened, her writing came in fits and starts, and she once again sought professional help. Kumin’s years at the Institute prompted her to think about how to cultivate peace in the rest of her life. During her fellowship years, Kumin began to search for an escape from the demandingly social, creatively stifling Boston suburbs. She bought a farm in New Hampshire—a move that would define the rest of her life and work. Olsen made good on the literary promise she’d shown decades earlier: the research and writing she accomplished at Radcliffe propelled her to literary fame. Her time at the Institute marked her transition from wage laborer to literary celebrity. For Swan and Pineda, two sociable people who usually worked in solitude, collaborating at the Institute drew them into community once again. Swan, who later referred to the Institute years as “a real turning point,” started collaborating with the poets (she later illustrated her friends’ books and designed their covers), while Pineda, inspired by the women she encountered, began an important sculpture series; one sculpture would end up in Radcliffe Yard. The Institute provided the Equivalents with a refuge, but then it pushed them back into the world, for better and for worse.

  Among the group, the relationship that remained strongest and most consistent throughout these years was the one between Sexton and Kumin. It therefore serves as the backbone of this book. Their creative, intimate bond predated their years at the Institute—they agreed to apply at the same time, but they kept their preexisting connection a secret from Institute administrators—and outlasted the end of their fellowships. It persevered through career ups and downs, changes of address, emotional crises, and divorce. This isn’t to say it was always easy: Kumin was sometimes overwhelmed by Sexton’s needs, while Sexton, in the last years of her life, struggled to grant her reliable companion autonomy. It is because of these ambivalences and complexities that I spend the most time studying the bond between these two women, drawing on their interviews, their letters to each other, and their essays in praise of each other’s work. Kumin and Sexton left us a rich archive of their friendship, the love they had for each other, and the words they used to express it.

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  The Equivalents is the first book to tell the story of the Radcliffe Institute’s emergence, a crucial and yet often overlooked event in the history of American feminism. The story of second-wave feminism usually starts with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and with good reason. Friedan’s galvanizing polemic—which recast the suburban home, the emblem of American success, as a “comfortable concentration camp”—resonated with thousands of women who wrote to her with praise and gratitude; according to the historian Stephanie Coontz, the book “sold approximately 60,000 copies in hardback, a large number even nowadays, and nearly 1.5 million copies in paperback.” Three years after the book’s publication, Friedan and a group of like-minded women founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and began agitating and advocating for women’s civil rights. Barriers began to fall: birth control became legal, abortion reform commenced, and women brought sexual discrimination cases before the courts. By the time radical feminist organizing cells sprang up in the late 1960s, “women’s liberation” was well under way.

  What this story misses, however, is how the groundwork for feminist revolt was laid, sometimes unwittingly, by women reformers, educators, and artists of the 1950s and early 1960s—a decade that can appear to be a dead zone for liberation politics. With a few exceptions, the women at the Radcliffe Institute didn’t think of themselves as revolutionaries. Some of them didn’t even think of themselves as feminists. They were well-behaved women; they had not yet made history. Their earnest efforts at self-expression enabled those who came after them to make bigger, bolder changes. Sexton’s poetry, often called confessional, inspired the angry young women who would later take to the streets. Olsen’s talks about the challenges of working-class motherhood riveted audiences; her classes on the literature of poverty radicalized college English departments. Friedan—who had originally invited Bunting to work with her on The Feminine Mystique, and who stuck with the project after Bunting dropped out—must have been pleased to see what her former collaborator’s project had produced.

  The story of the Institute also connects back to a long history of feminist thinking on creative work and intellectual production. In 1929, Virginia Woolf published the essay A Room of One’s Own, based on two lectures she had delivered in October 1928 at the women’s colleges of the University of Cambridge. The title is taken from a declaration she makes early in the essay: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The rest of the essay describes a frustrating day spent by an anonymous woman at “Oxbridge”—a composite of Oxford and Cambridge—who is trying to think about her upcoming lecture but keeps being interrupted. She is shooed from the grass, prevented from entering the library, and forced to eat a bad dinner because she’s not allowed to dine in her female friend’s room. The essay articulates the importance of material resources for writers and intellectuals—Woolf refers to “the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space”—and is perhaps best remembered for this. But it expresses too desires for female community and for intergenerational support between women. Sitting with her friend, the narrator imagines an alternate history wherein her friend’s mother had made money instead of bearing thirteen children:

  If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex,…we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry.

  They might have lived like male writers and scholars who support each other’s intellectual growth. The Institute made Woolf’s supposition into something real.

  I discovered the Equivalents when I was in my late twenties. I was finishing up a doctoral degree in English, and I was contemplating my future. I was dating a man whose career took precedence over my own. A child of the “girl power” 1990s, I was committed to the idea that I could pursue my intellectual interests and devote myself to a career while also having a happy family. I could
and would do it all! Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was going to have to choose between my professional dreams and being a mother. My own mother had struggled to balance career and family even with a supportive spouse. Whenever I thought about raising children, I was filled with dread.

  Alone in Radcliffe’s library, on the same grounds the Equivalents once walked, I opened manila file folders and sifted through old papers. I read about women who couldn’t find adequate child care. I read about women who feared social opprobrium for leaving their children alone while they, selfishly, went off to work and to learn. I read about jealous husbands, condescending male teachers, books sacrificed at the altar of domestic tranquility. I took very good notes.

  Later, I unearthed old cassettes, recordings of the seminar talks delivered during the Institute’s first years. Across fifty-five years, I could hear the clinking of sherry glasses and the rustling of skirts being rearranged. I felt as if I’d discovered a lost world, one that was oddly familiar. I listened to Kumin charm her audience with tales of a pouty teenage daughter who took revenge by insulting her mother’s books. I listened to Sexton read her poetry in a clear, loud voice that belied her intense society anxiety. I listened to Swan joke, in her slight Boston accent, about the “backbreaking labah” required of lithographers. I listened to Pineda speak seriously about the significance of sculpture throughout history. And I listened to Olsen describe the challenges of balancing motherhood, a day job, and writing fiction. She talked about how little time she had alone, how she wrote on city buses and late at night. At that moment, I felt lucky to be the only one in the library—and luckier still to have a boyfriend who lived in a different city.

  The years passed. I left my boyfriend; I finished my degree. I visited other libraries: in Austin, Texas; in New Haven, Connecticut; in Palo Alto, California; in Washington, D.C. I kept reading: notebooks, letters, manuscripts, recipe books, bills. I read about child-care challenges, maternal guilt, debts unpaid, dreams unrealized. I read, too, about the ways these five women offered each other understanding, support, and recognition. And I read letters in which the writer, pressed to her limit, responded to a friend with jealousy or with rage.

  I knew what it felt like to be hopeful and what it felt like to rage. The gender revolution that began decades ago remains unfinished. So much has changed since the days the Equivalents walked through Radcliffe Yard: Title IX is on the books, female CEOs are on the Fortune 500 list, books by women receive praise in the pages of national magazines. But study after study reports that within heterosexual couples women still do more of the housework. As of 2018, women made just over eighty cents on the dollar compared with men. There is still no widely available state-supported child care.

  We’re still trying to find, and to fight for, solutions. And as one of the inaugural members of the Institute told me when we spoke in the spring of 2016, women still need institutional support. They need places where they can find community and inspiration, and they need material assistance to pursue their dreams. This is the story of what five women achieved, over fifty years ago. It is, in part, a story of how they changed the world. It is also a story of how much remains to be done.

  PART ONE

  1957–1961

  CHAPTER 1

  Little White Picket Fences

  THE SUN WAS ALREADY SETTING one evening late in the winter of 1957 when twenty-nine-year-old Anne Sexton, shaking with nerves and clutching a cardboard folder, walked down Commonwealth Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Boston’s Back Bay. She passed Victorian brownstones, statues of local luminaries, and large, stately trees. She soon arrived at her destination, a large stone building on the boulevard’s north side.

  She passed through the building’s imposing gray facade and walked through the opulent ballroom hidden inside. This was one of her first trips out of her home in Newton in recent memory; to accomplish it, she had requested the company of a kind neighbor named Sandy Robart. Sexton had always been a nervous woman, but these days she was something more: anxious, fearful, choked by self-doubt. Public places of any kind produced intense discomfort; most days she didn’t leave her house. She had recently attempted suicide; she would make a second attempt in just a few months.

  She walked through the building’s foyer and wondered what she was doing there. She wasn’t cowed by the signs of old money. Wealth was familiar to her. It was what the building concealed that frightened her: a small poetry workshop, run by the Boston Center for Adult Education. Sexton, who had been writing poetry seriously for only several months, who had no college degree, who had a bad history in classroom settings, had uncharacteristically decided to enroll in the course. Until that winter evening, only two people had read her poetry: Dr. Martin Orne, her psychoanalyst; and her mother, Mary Gray Harvey. The idea of showing her poems to other people—other poets—was terrifying. And yet here she was, in matching lipstick and heels, with flowers in her dark hair, about to enter a classroom for the first time in a decade.

  She stepped into the room; heads turned. The workshop had been in session for some weeks, and newcomers weren’t common. The instructor, John Holmes, sat at the head of a long oak table. A man with thinning hair and a long, hangdog face, he was the personification of dour New England. Holmes was a fixture in the Boston poetry scene: teaching workshops, reviewing books, and working as a professor at Tufts. Many of Holmes’s students had published poems, including a thirty-one-year-old mother of three who was also present that evening. Her name was Maxine Kumin.

  Sexton and Kumin regarded each other: it was a bit like looking into a mirror. Both women were thin, dark-haired, and attractive. Unlike Sexton, Kumin was not a native New Englander, though by the time the two women met, Boston had become her home. Kumin was an assimilated Jewish woman from Philadelphia whose pawnbroker father had earned enough to send his daughter first to parochial school, then to Radcliffe College. For Kumin, education had been a way of becoming an individual, someone who could escape from her mother’s expectations. Sexton, by contrast, came from New England wealth. She relied on her parents for financial support and on her husband for emotional caretaking. Sexton was emotionally volatile, plagued by anxiety, depression, and suicidal urges. Kumin kept her temper in check and steered away from instability. She was immediately wary of this nervous, glamorous stranger—a woman who somehow fascinated and repelled. Both were there to do something that felt uncertain, even untoward: to establish themselves as poets. Each had to gather her courage to attempt this, an obviously solitary effort. What did it mean for them to encounter each other in this terrifying space?

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  —

  Sexton once summed up her life prior to 1957 as follows: “I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic break and tried to kill myself.”

  For much of her life, Sexton had believed she was dumb. She believed this because many people in her life told her so. Born in 1928 to a wealthy family in the comfortable Boston suburb of Newton, the youngest of three daughters, Anne Harvey was a skinny and fidgety child in a household that prided itself on grace and decorum. She couldn’t sit still. She often refused to eat. She tugged and twisted her hair until it tangled. As an adolescent, she showed up at the dinner table speckled with acne; her father, disgusted, refused to eat in her presence. Unlike her two sisters, who attended elite private schools, Anne attended public school for most of her youth (she was kicked out of a Waldorf school because she failed at naptime). By the time she got to high school, the boarding school Rogers Hall, she had been held back three times by teachers who considered her unintelligent, a “terrible nervous wreck,” and “high-strung.”

  If Anne was dumb, her mother was smart. Mary Gray Harvey, who came from a wealthy family in Maine, was
a petite, attractive woman, a true lady. She had been raised like a princess by her doting father, the editor and publisher of a newspaper, and she thrived on being the “brilliant” one in the family. Her husband, Ralph Harvey, a businessman who drank too much, held Mary Gray in high esteem, constantly reminding his daughters, “Oh, your mother is smart; mother is brilliant.” “She was the ‘writer,’ the cultured, brilliant one,” Sexton told an interviewer in the early 1960s. “She kind of over-powered us, I think, at times.” (The only thing Mary Gray actually wrote was her husband’s business correspondence, but Ralph Harvey lauded each letter as a “masterpiece.”) Mary Gray had a cultured air: she read a book a day, and she’d attended the prestigious Wellesley College. Although she never graduated, she let it be known that she had the highest IQ of all the girls on campus. To her, there was something admirable about simply being intelligent, as opposed to deliberately educating oneself. Mary Gray presented knowledge as something you simply picked up, as you would a canapé, when it suited you.