Despite all these differences, Olsen saw what she and this faraway poet had in common. In her response, she called Sexton “dear related to me” and expressed her desire to talk more. She also informed Sexton she’d cut out the latter’s author photo from a copy of Bedlam and hung it above her crowded writing desk, among portraits of Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, and Walt Whitman—“writers who help,” Olsen called them. In a subsequent letter, she chided Sexton for being overly self-critical: “That was your first one, remarkable and asks pride, not harshness.” Olsen was generous and humble in ways that belied her own insecurities. She invited Sexton to write to her again sometime. Sexton did so almost immediately, and a vibrant correspondence took shape.
Their exchanges were remarkable for their generosity and their candor. Each writer was willing to confess to fears and errors. Each noticed the specific talents that the other possessed. In 1961, Sexton might have been the more famous of the two writers, but she didn’t have Olsen’s quiet confidence. “As a writer, I am jealous of your talent,” Sexton wrote once to Olsen, “but then, as a writer-human-woman, I am so glad of it and for it.” She managed to push aside any competitive feelings to participate in what would become a symbiotic relationship. Each had something the other wanted. Olsen had hard-earned wisdom, accrued through years of experience as a writer and as a worker. In her letters, she would reassure Sexton, offer book suggestions, and, simply by writing about her own struggles, give her a dose of perspective. Sexton, meanwhile, offered Olsen something the older writer desperately needed: access to the literary networks of the East Coast.
Olsen occasionally described how hard it was to find time to write, given all her obligations, including her need to work outside the home. In a letter written in May 1961, just before the publication of Tell Me a Riddle, she described how she must “leave writing (for a job, to earn money).” Sexton, self-conscious about her own economic privilege, wrote a sympathetic letter in response. She tried to imagine a way that Olsen’s loss could become a gain and suggested that maybe hardship and work experience could be inspiring. But she realized she was being naive: “It takes such time to build your stories and without the time…how can you write?”
Unknowingly, Sexton had tapped into one of Olsen’s major social justice issues. To Olsen, one of the great tragedies of social and economic inequality was that art became inaccessible to many people. Working people couldn’t afford to buy books or see plays, nor could they scrape together the time to make art of their own (and certainly the wages they’d receive for any artistic labor wouldn’t be enough to support a family). So many stories remained untold. She knew that it didn’t have to be this way. During the 1930s, Olsen had glimpsed another world, one in which the federal government provided financial support with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), propping up the art world—theater, music, drama, writing, photography—in a time of economic crisis. Olsen imagined a time when everyone would have access to art and culture and everyone would have a chance at producing the same. Sexton knew nothing about this dream; she struggled when she had too much free time, with only her thoughts to fill it. She had never had to balance writing and wage earning. Through their correspondence, each learned that there were other hells quite different from her own.
Rarely did a friendship from mid-century America cut across class and political divisions, as Sexton and Olsen’s did. During the 1950s, the height of anticommunism in America, working-class activists like Olsen lived in states of acute paranoia, and rightly so. Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a witch hunt, and J. Edgar Hoover kept files on anyone who expressed a hint of leftist thinking. The Hollywood Ten—prominent screenwriters and directors persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee—made national news. After World War II, one-third of Americans believed that Communist Party members should be killed or imprisoned; by 1950, only 1 percent of Americans thought that communists were entitled to freedom of thought. Twenty percent of American workers faced some kind of loyalty test from their employers. And yet Sexton was open to Olsen, to her different and unusual life. Likewise, Olsen, who grappled with her own fears of inquisition and arrest, opened up to a woman from the other side of the country, even though she could not be sure of her correspondent’s allegiances.
This was more than an act of sympathy; it was an act of trust.
* * *
—
Slowly, letter by letter and poem by poem, a network of women writers was starting to form. It stretched from the Bay Area to the suburbs of Boston. It extended over the Atlantic, to London, where Plath waited for news from Sexton and others in the States. They’d approached each other tentatively, these women, with a mix of formality and fear; they’d waited for signs before revealing too much of themselves. They were deploying a timeworn strategy: seek out the other woman in the room and assess whether she is a foe or a friend.
A woman can be an ally—a shoulder to cry on, a sympathetic ear—or she can be a turncoat, a double agent, someone who will smile at you and then exploit your insecurities. In a literary world where women competed viciously—with men and with other women—relationships formed slowly, over the course of years. It took months before these friendships held firmly. Sexton and Kumin, alike in status and age, cemented a friendship in person, while Sexton and Olsen had to transcend distance and differences in order to become friends. They eventually learned a lot from each other—what books to read, what kind of literature to write—but first they had to learn to trust. This was no easy task in the late 1950s, a time when suspicions ran high. The writer Janet Malcolm remembers this as an era of “duplicity,” a time when women in particular became so used to lying—about their desires and about their actions—that deception became integral to their identities. “We were an uneasy, shifty-eyed generation,” Malcolm recalled. “We lied to our parents and we lied to each other and we lied to ourselves, so addicted to deception had we become.” To bare one’s true struggles—one’s true self—was to run counter to all the edicts and habits of the time.
Sexton and Olsen spoke their truths to each other, becoming confidantes and friends. But they remained separated by an insurmountable geographic distance—at least, for the time being. As the 1960s dawned, another woman was moving forward with a plan to bring together a group of women she suspected were out in the world, hiding away in suburban homes: highly educated, creative, intellectual women who had paused their careers while they raised their children. She wouldn’t offer them friendship, exactly: she would grant them something more—a place where they could come together and could speak aloud, to each other, the thoughts currently trapped in their minds. It would be a great experiment, she decided. An intellectual community of advanced scholars and writers and artists, made up entirely of female minds. One could only imagine the conversations that it would start.
CHAPTER 4
A Messy Experiment
ON NOVEMBER 20, 1960, Sexton opened the Sunday papers to read of a revolutionary program, the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a place for “intellectually displaced women.” Such women, she came to understand, were highly educated, women who had begun careers as scholars and artists but who had gotten off track. Like so many brilliant women of the age, they had let their research projects lie fallow while they birthed and reared the next generation of Americans.
The article described a prototypical displaced woman as someone in her mid-thirties who had gone to graduate school and done some promising scholarship but had been unable to follow up on her initial discovery. Another version: the displaced woman was a painter who had trained with the best but who had borne children before she could secure her first one-woman show. Women like these, the New York Times education reporter explained, find it “difficult, if not impossible, without incentive to return to sustained intellectual creativity.” Sexton read with a mix of recognition and awe. She was a woman in her thirties, and she had creative promise, but she did not h
ave a doctorate or any academic publications to her name. It wasn’t clear whether she was qualified for such a program, nor that it would be a good fit for a socially anxious person like herself. She read on.
The Radcliffe Institute, she learned, would give “a group of gifted but not necessarily widely recognized women” just the incentive they needed. Starting in September 1961, twenty women, with doctorates or “the equivalent” of success in an artistic field, would be named associate scholars. They would receive work space, access to Harvard’s vast resources, and an annual stipend of $3,000—not enough money to strike out on their own, but just enough to make a practical difference in their lives and to be taken seriously. The program was open to any college graduate living in the Greater Boston area, not just those with degrees from Radcliffe. If you wanted to win one of the twenty spots, you had to show evidence of past achievement and a plan for future work.
Within twenty-four hours of reading the announcement, Sexton was on the phone to Radcliffe. She wanted to know more information about this curious institute and to express her keen interest in applying. She wasn’t alone. The phone in the office of the Radcliffe president had been ringing incessantly since the start of the workday, forcing the staff to hire an extra person just to handle the calls. Many callers were women like Sexton, requesting information and applications. Others were simply calling to express their gratitude for the idea and their good luck wishes. Half of the callers had a baby crying in the background.
Sexton’s children were no longer at the tears-and-diapers stage—Linda was seven, and Joy was five. Her mother-in-law, Billie, was a great help with the children: she took them to their extracurricular activities, cooked dinner, and generally mothered during the times that Sexton was incapable of mothering herself. As Linda later wrote in her 1994 memoir, Searching for Mercy Street, “it was she [Billie] who provided the freedom that enabled the poet to do what she did so well.” But the Institute nonetheless held a particular allure. Though she had published a book of poems, and had wedged her way into Boston’s poetry circles, Sexton still felt like an outsider in a city that prized academic prestige. She didn’t have Kumin’s scholarly pedigree (the latter had both a BA and an MA from Radcliffe); she didn’t have a college diploma at all. To be sure, the Institute wasn’t a degree-granting program, but it still offered association with one of the best universities in the country. Acceptance by the Radcliffe Institute would mean, in some sense, acceptance by Boston’s intellectual elite.
On January 13, not even two weeks after applications to the Institute officially opened, Sexton drafted a tentative letter requesting a formal application. Sitting at her dining room table, she typed out a letter that expressed her excitement about the Institute and her intention to apply. “My qualifications are unique—uniquely wrong,” she typed. Such self-deprecation wouldn’t do; she tried again, with more neutral language. “I think my application will be one of the most unorthodox you will receive because I have only a high school diploma but have achieved status in the field of creative writing,” she explained, hedging and qualifying in her typical way. She promised to make a better request in her formal application.
In the meantime, she wanted to offer her opinion on the Institute’s role in restarting the gifted woman’s intellectual or creative career. In the press release, the Institute had been careful not to make any firm promises; the document implied that lucky associate scholars might only restart their work “temporarily.” Sexton didn’t agree. To Sexton at age thirty-two, the Institute represented something powerful, lasting. It seemed like a program that might quell her insecurity and give her permanent status in the competitive poetry scene. It might show Kayo, who still resented his wife’s absorption in her wordplay, that this was a career that deserved respect. It might give her a community, a way of getting through the bouts of loneliness without leaning too much on Kumin. It might save her marriage; it might even save her life.
* * *
—
The plan to build this lifesaving institute originated in the unlikeliest of places: a national war room populated almost entirely by men. On December 6, 1957—the same day as a failed satellite launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida—the National Science Foundation (NSF) assembled a committee to study the nation’s schools. Committee members began looking at studies on American education, seeking ways to bolster resources and to encourage more students to take up science and engineering. It convened for the first time in January 1958. The mood was anxious; as one committee member later recalled, “We were scared stiff.”
The Soviet Union had successfully launched the satellite Sputnik the prior October, and the United States and the rest of the Western world were afraid of falling behind. Within months of Sputnik’s launch—a watershed event likened to Pearl Harbor—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was formed. Federal money poured into research and development coffers. (From 1957 to 1967, federal R&D spending increased by more than 100 percent.) In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which aimed to strengthen education in fields that would prove useful to national defense. The act claimed that “the security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women.” America needed to develop more scientists, and it needed to develop them quickly. The task of the NSF committee was to figure out how.
The lone woman in the room was Mary Ingraham Bunting, known to her friends and family as Polly. A stoical, bespectacled woman of forty-seven, with cropped gray hair and a penchant for sweaters, Bunting was the dean of Douglass College, the women’s college of Rutgers University. A microbiologist by training and the widowed mother of four children, she had ended up in university administration by accident, following the sudden death of her husband, Henry, from a brain tumor in 1954. As dean, Bunting had made important changes to Douglass. She abolished formal lunches and “hats required” affairs, both of which smacked of finishing school etiquette. She invited famous speakers—including Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, and Martha Graham—in the hopes that they would inspire her students to dream big. But her undergraduates remained completely preoccupied with the search for husbands, so much so that they barely seemed to notice the intellectual opportunities around them. The student newspaper announced recent “pinnings” (when a woman received her boyfriend’s varsity pin as a sign of commitment) and engagements, as if the college were a marketplace and its women commodities waiting to be claimed.
Bunting suggested that the NSF committee begin their research by identifying the smartest kids who weren’t going on to college, those who were, somehow, being dissuaded from fulfilling their potential. To answer her own question, she looked up a study done by Donald Bridgman, an education researcher who had broken down his data by gender. Bridgman was studying extremely bright students whose IQs put them in the top 10 percent, and he identified the students in this percentile who had not pursued a college education. Of these bright students who didn’t go on to college, at least 90 percent were women.
As Bunting later explained to her biographer Elaine Yaffe, the study showed that nearly “all of the males with that kind of identified ability were continuing their education; practically none of the females were.” She was stunned.
It wasn’t just that America was losing so many brilliant female high school students—women who might have gone on to study the atom or to crack a new code. It was also that her fellow committee members were largely unmoved by the data. She knew that these were “nice men—not sexist people,” and yet they demonstrated little interest in stanching the female brain drain. They seemed a bit embarrassed by the data, and they were willing to set it aside, even to conceal it.
“I was deeply puzzled,” she recalled later. “I felt that I was looking into a great dark cave that had been right beneath my feet all of my life without my knowing it. Beneath their feet too.”
Years later, she would desc
ribe her experience on the NSF committee as “her awakening.” Bunting had “never been interested in women as such,” as she confessed in a 1957 speech, in part because she had felt her own life had been relatively free from sexism. She was the unusual woman who had seamlessly melded personal and professional fulfillment at a historical moment when women were told, time and again, that they had to choose.
Passionately interested in science since her high school days, Mary Ingraham studied bacteriology at Vassar College, one of the elite Seven Sisters schools. After graduating in 1932, she pursued a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, where she met Henry, a second-year medical student. The couple married and spent twenty happy years living all over the Eastern Seaboard—from Baltimore, Maryland, to Bethany, Connecticut—pursuing their respective careers and raising their growing family. Bunting taught at Bennington College and Goucher College. When Henry went to Yale for a medical residency, she took a part-time job in a laboratory at the university. They fixed up houses together and raised goats and chickens and bees. On warm days, Bunting gardened topless, with bandages covering her nipples. She took evident pride in her cooking and housekeeping—“Well this housekeeping game is a push-over,” she wrote to her mother, a woman who used to send her unwanted evening gowns in the mail—but she never felt that homemaking defined her more than, say, her research on Serratia marcescens bacteria.
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