She then described the Institute, a solution to the problem her article outlined. The Institute would offer “a place to work free from the unpredictable distractions of family life, the compulsion to pursue the daily routine at the expense of a half-finished conception or dream, and the guilt over children rebuffed, or questions unanswered.” She ended with a clarion call to women to contribute to society, appealing to their typically feminine altruism. “It is not so much for women,” she wrote, “as for our heritage and our aspirations that America must assess again, thoughtfully and purposefully, their places in our society.” Don’t apply to the Institute for yourselves, she implied; do it for your country. It was only a happy accident that personal achievement and patriotic duty overlapped.
* * *
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In the months after the announcement, letters arrived at the Radcliffe offices from all over the country: from Staten Island, from San Francisco, from Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn, and from Gray Goose Farm in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Mail came from around the corner in Cambridge and from overseas. Most letters were written by married women, the kinds of women who were inclined to include their formal, married names under their signatures or on their stationery. Some included a small check for $5, for $10, or for as much as $300 (nearly $2,500 today). Jane M. Chamberlain (Mrs. David B.), a Radcliffe alumna from the class of 1950, sent along a $5 check and a brief note, inked in bright red: “Dear Radcliffe, I love you!”
Usually, though, the letters were more extensive. The women who wrote to the Radcliffe president’s office ranged in age, but they were almost all mothers. In their letters, they described the familiar challenges of domestic life (“children are sick, appliances break down”). In the same paragraph, they presented plans of study, both future and past. Their letters must have kindled Bunting’s memory: as she read their descriptions of busy households where children scurried underfoot, she must have thought of her home in Bethany, where she gardened in the warm sun while her children played in the yard. These years had been her happiest in fact; her second life, as a widow and as a university administrator, never quite matched the joy of her first. Pastoral Connecticut, however, had been only one part of Bunting’s life; there had always been the lab, and there had been Henry, her intellectual companion. The Bethany years were fixed in Bunting’s memory because they had not lasted. For the women writing to Bunting, though, domestic life was not a lost Eden but an inescapable quagmire. And the Institute, to them, signaled one possible way out.
Bunting had envisioned her small society of scholars as a test case, a stepping-stone on a path toward reforming women’s higher education. Whatever effect it might have on the scholars who attended would surely be temporary. But Sexton, hearing the news of the Institute, could see from her dining room table in Newton what Bunting, in the President’s House on Brattle Street, could not. In Sexton’s letter of interest, a letter she never sent, she proved prescient. The impact of the Institute would not be fleeting, she suspected; it would change some things—some people—for life. Excited, encouraged, Sexton did what she did every day: she picked up the phone, and she called her best friend.
CHAPTER 5
I Got It!
AS 1960 DREW TO A CLOSE, Connie Smith and Rene Bryant, Bunting’s assistant, sorted through their growing mail pile—manila envelopes, multicolored stationery—and unearthed the serious applicants. It was barely a month after the Institute’s announcement, but already 120 women had been classified as “preliminary applicants.” These were women who had the necessary qualifications to apply; they would receive the application blanks once those were ready. Some of them Bunting had recruited personally; she wrote to outstanding female scholars encouraging them to apply. According to Bryant, the “caliber of applicant has been astonishingly high.” Within the preliminary pool, forty-one held PhD degrees, three had MDs, and nineteen had some form of master’s degree. (This was at a time when women made up 33 percent of master’s degree holders and only 10.4 percent of those who earned PhDs.) The youngest of the potential applicants was twenty-eight, and the oldest was fifty-six; the average applicant was in her late thirties, just as Bunting had anticipated and highlighted in the press release. Just over half of these women were married, with anywhere between one and five children. (Nine were widowed or divorced; sixteen had never been married.) They were exactly the kinds of women that Bunting had imagined assisting: highly educated, ambitious, maternal, and ready for a second life. They were, in other words, women much like her younger self.
Sexton was one of these eager women. She received application blanks in February. Her application, submitted in early March, toggled between charming self-effacement and almost galling hubris. She listed the required personal information: in addition to their ages and addresses, the applicants were asked to list their husbands’ names, occupations, and the names and ages of their children and other dependents. The fellowship was not need-based, so a high-earning husband wouldn’t eliminate an applicant; neither would grown children who no longer required maternal care. Presumably, the Institute asked for this information as a way of identifying women who could serve as test cases for—or who best exemplified—Bunting’s theories about the life course of the American woman.
One of only a few applicants without a college degree, Sexton left bare the sections that requested education and languages. The only talent she listed was an ability to give poetry readings. She described her academic credentials as “anemic,” but she emphasized that she was a self-taught writer who had made a successful career for herself. To demonstrate her success, she alluded to ten good book reviews that she could send to the selection committee. (She also mentioned rather coyly “two poor reviews which I would rather not show you.”) But Sexton wanted to write for posterity. She claimed not to care much for sales or for the fleeting approval of contemporary audiences. She yearned to be more than a lady poet; she wanted to transcend what she called her “female role.” (She was also careful to praise the Institute for supporting the careers of women.) Like an awkward guest at her first literary party who laughs too loudly and talks too much about work, Sexton stressed her desire to secure a position among the nation’s literary greats. “I feel that I am already an accomplished poet,” she wrote. “What I ask now is for the opportunity to be a lasting one.” Here was a woman who wanted to be nothing less than extraordinary.
Prompted by Sexton, Kumin also applied to the Institute. In her application, she emphasized her scholarly credentials: her BA and MA from Radcliffe, her undergraduate prizes, her command of four languages. Where the application requested the name of a doctoral thesis, Kumin listed instead the title of her undergraduate honors thesis, “Amorality and the Protagonist in the Novels of Stendhal and Dostoievski.” Though she was at this point an accomplished poet—she’d published nearly forty poems in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker—she downplayed her creative achievements, as if she were afraid of seeming self-aggrandizing. Instead, she emphasized her role as a teacher: she was dedicated to her students at Tufts, where she taught part-time, and she believed that a year of reading and study at the Institute would make her a better instructor. “I am interested in contrasting Conrad’s journey into the pre-conscious with that of Saul Bellow,” she wrote in her research proposal. “I would like to read Sartre and Camus fully and to examine the impact of existentialist philosophy on the existing Freudian concepts in American literary criticism.” She wanted to translate French and Russian poets, to read essays on the creative process, and, possibly, to develop her own theories about how the creative mind works. Her one-page proposal could barely contain all the different intellectual avenues she wanted to pursue. She seemed eager to pick up her studies.
When Bunting had first conceived of the Institute, she imagined it as a place for female scholars. In her initial discussions with fund-raisers and trustees, she suggested that only women with doctorates would be admitted. The other prerequis
ite was geographic location: only those who could easily get themselves to Radcliffe Yard, or who could commit to living in Cambridge for the year, would be considered for a fellowship. It was a harsh but necessary barrier to entry: otherwise the Institute would be inundated with applications. But by the time of the November 1960 press release, the Institute administrators had decided artists with the “equivalent” of doctoral training would also be eligible for the Institute. As a result, they accepted applications from writers, composers, and visual artists—including one from a local painter named Barbara Swan Fink.
News of the Institute had reached Barbara Swan (her professional name) at 32 Webster Place in Brookline, a busy suburb just west of Boston. Like Sexton, Swan was a New England native: she’d been born in Newton, the same city where Sexton now made her home, in 1922. She had begun sketching as a small child and went on to take classes at the Massachusetts College of Art. With just a few strokes of a pencil, she could capture a person’s likeness: her Yankee mother, her Swedish father, and, later, the faces of fellow artists and friends. Years later, when asked to describe her introduction to art, she cited neither mentors nor books. Drawing was a skill she considered innate: becoming an artist, she claimed, was her inevitable fate.
Barbara Swan at work, 1960s
But at the mid-century, it wasn’t easy for a young woman to become a working artist (not that it is ever easy). Though she yearned to go to art school immediately after high school, her strict father insisted she pursue a liberal arts degree instead. He pestered her with worries about making a living and having a career and “also were you going to become bohemian and have some lifestyle that would be appalling.” To appease him, she attended Wellesley College and commuted from home in order to cut costs. The studio offerings at Wellesley disappointed her—she thought they were “for dilettantes”—so Swan changed her major to art history. She experienced everything a Seven Sisters school had to offer, and she was underwhelmed.
In between memorizing slides, she sketched portraits of her fellow female students. “I was running like a business where I had appointments for sitting in my dormitory room,” she later recalled, “and I was knocking off these pastels and there was a framer in Newton Corner who…would frame them for $3.98…and then they would be shipped and…some of mine went to California.” She charged $15 per portrait—“maybe that was a little expensive,” she later reflected—and she had a steady stream of customers. By this time, she’d gathered the funds and the courage to move out of her father’s house.
Swan wanted to be a serious artist, and at that time being serious meant studying among men. After graduating from Wellesley in 1943, she enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, known as the Museum School: the best art school in the city. Swan trained with Karl Zerbe, a portraitist and German exile; Zerbe had fled to Boston from Berlin in 1934 after the National Socialists labeled him one of the country’s “degenerate” artists. He headed up the painting department at the Museum School from 1937 until 1955. He demanded his students train rigorously, and he encouraged them to go beyond classicism, to communicate feeling, and to see paint as a fundamentally expressive medium. His students were “figurative expressionists,” painters interested in breaking with tradition—in following the modernist dictate to “make it new”—but sticking with the study of the human form. This made them paradoxical renegades. The 1940s and 1950s were an age of abstraction, a time when avant-garde painters in New York City—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns—experimented with color and texture and shape. Their art wasn’t representational or figurative. In the words of the art critic Clement Greenberg—who theorized the avant-garde—content, in the hands of these artists, was “to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art [could not] be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.” While all this was happening just a four-hour drive south, the artists in Boston continued to paint recognizable people and places.
Swan, called “one of the more gifted students” at the Museum School by The Christian Science Monitor in 1947, found her way into Zerbe’s inner circle. This was no small feat. Women were few and far between at the Museum School. The hallways were crowded with ex-GIs who stomped around in their fatigues and gave off an air of seriousness. (The year after the war ended, ninety-six veterans enrolled in the Museum School.) Women rarely won teaching assistantships, and even more rarely won traveling fellowships, a key resource for up-and-coming artists who wanted to study abroad. “They didn’t trust a woman to go to Paris and not have a love affair with a Frenchman,” Swan later explained. A fellow female student, Lois Tarlow, believed that Zerbe “absolutely categorized all women as not worthy of serious interest…Zerbe did have his favorites and they weren’t women.” But somehow, as Sexton did with Lowell, Swan won the master’s approval. Perhaps it was her excellent draftsmanship, something Zerbe emphasized to his students, that appealed to him; perhaps it was her quiet tenacity, her determination to become an artist by any means. “I was so determined to be an artist,” she later explained. “It was against my parents’ wishes.” In any event, during her later years at the school, she helped Zerbe teach his class. When he held court in the school’s basement cafeteria, she was the only woman seated at the big round table.
Improbably, Swan won a fellowship to Paris, where she rented a cheap hotel room with a friend and, in the winter, painted in the cold, poorly heated room until her hands turned blue. She met her future husband, Alan Fink, a former accountant who was now spending his savings traveling Europe, at a restaurant on the Left Bank. Swan—who was now the bohemian child her father had feared she would become—traveled with Fink and his friends to Provence, where she banished what she called the “somber tonalities” of Boston and painted with the bright blues and reds of Cézanne.
Swan and Fink returned to Boston in 1952, where they married (against her parents’ wishes—they worried about Fink’s “economic prospects”). Swan had her first solo show a year later, an event that announced her arrival on the arts scene. The show took place at the Boris Mirski Gallery on Newbury Street (later, Alan would become the gallery’s director). Mirski was the linchpin of the Boston art world—he represented Swan’s fellow Museum School graduates and other rising stars—and the show was a critical success. Dorothy Adlow, one of the city’s most respected critics, praised Swan in The Christian Science Monitor: “There is a quivering vitality in these drawings, an inner force, a discriminative distinction. In her portraits it is remarkable how searching a characterization can result from so few lineal indications.” Adlow concluded, “She has an uncommon gift for personal representation.”
But children soon paused Swan’s career. She had two children—Aaron, born in 1955, and Joanna, born in 1958—and though she was a happy and relaxed mother, she found it nearly impossible to paint with her children underfoot. Instead, she drew; mostly, she drew her children. It would be four years until she exhibited another solo show.
By the time the Institute was announced in the fall of 1960, Swan had found a rare and happy balance between raising children and making art. She had set up a home studio on the second floor of her Brookline house, and she had shifted her subject matter to her children. This change was more a matter of convenience than anything: her children were usually only steps away from her easel. “I was involved in the mother-child relationship simply because it was autobiographical,” she later reflected. She sketched her children lying on the floor together: Joanna prone and inquisitive, Aaron supine and small. She managed to do a few paintings of her children (when they would sit still, before they were at the crawling stage). In rich oils, she painted Aaron sitting in her husband’s outstretched hand, gazing down at the world below with fascinated, clouded eyes. These portraits demonstrated her technical skill, as all of her paintings and drawings did, but the slight distortions seen in earlier portraits—the too-loose limbs, the large eyes—had been banished. The family portraits
were warm, careful, and caring, though the bold color and composition kept them from being sentimental. When she exhibited some of this work in 1957, The Boston Globe called it a “humanistic shot in the arm”—a much-needed vaccine against Cold War despair.
Baby (Aaron at Four Months), by Barbara Swan, 1955
This was the work she placed in a portfolio and mailed off to Radcliffe. She had applied at the behest of a friend who knew she was feeling “bogged down” with household responsibilities. Her children were five and two; though Swan was finding ways to “be all”—mother, artist, and occasional art teacher—she still thought “it would be satisfying to have a little help along the way.” She applied to the Institute in late February 1961. A few months later, in April, she sent along a supplemental portfolio, which included two framed paintings, one framed and glazed drawing called Mother and Child, a portfolio of drawings, and an envelope with photographs of and information about her other work.
The Nest, one of the two framed paintings, exemplified how Swan combined motherhood and art. In the painting, a woman, supine, reclines in a reddish armchair; her head lies at the bottom-left corner of the frame, and her legs extend upward, into darkness. The red robe wrapped around her body seems to blend into the red of the armchair so that one can’t quite tell where her body ends and the furniture begins. An infant, swaddled in blue cloth, suckles at the woman’s bare breast, eyes wide and unseeing. It could be a sweet scene, but the painting is no Madonna with child. The work is bold, even a bit off-putting: the strong contrast between red and blue, the intense chiaroscuro, the bare breast, the bright child, unnaturally lit against the dark backdrop. The painting denaturalized maternity, rendering it almost unearthly.
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