The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  What Swan demonstrated in The Nest, and what she expounded on in her application to the Institute, is the strangeness—the surreality—of motherhood. Her representation of motherhood was not quotidian or banal or uninspired; it was groundbreaking, spiritual, unnerving. “I feel that a woman artist can derive enormous inspiration from her role as a wife and a mother,” Swan wrote in her application. “It is a profound, mystical experience and in every sense life-enhancing.” This line of thinking dovetailed perfectly with the animating spirit of the Institute: that motherhood and creative work can be mutually sustaining.

  Soon after submitting her full application, Swan learned that she had made the cut and that she would interview for a place in the Institute’s inaugural class. To win one of these spots, she would have to distinguish herself from the scores of other qualified women—lapsed medievalists, amateur philosophers, erstwhile chemists eager to serve their country—who hoped for nothing more than “a little help along the way.”

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  Meanwhile, at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 29, 1961, Sexton arrived for her interview at Fay House on Radcliffe’s campus. She was one of roughly a hundred women invited to interview; approximately twice as many had sent in formal applications. Hundreds more had sent in letters of inquiry, notes of congratulations, and gentle criticisms of a program that catered only to “extraordinary women” and ignored the rest: the stay-at-home mother with a college degree but with no hard proof of her intellectual potential; the working-class mother desperate for financial assistance or child care; the woman who had been discouraged from ever pursuing an education. Although Bunting’s Institute appealed to many of the twenty-two million women working outside the home, the program wasn’t for the average working woman. It was for a “special” woman, a woman who was educated, who had accomplished much despite the obstacles in front of her. Such women tended to have many things already working in their favor: money, racial privilege, some degree of social support. Sexton was thrilled to be seen as special. Part of her couldn’t believe she’d made the first cut; another part believed it was her due.

  She approached the building where she would interview. Fay House, at 10 Garden Street, looks more like a mansion than an administrative building. This is because it was once a family home: the Fay Mansion was purchased in 1885 to offer “permanent quarters” for Radcliffe College. In old photographs from the early twentieth century, women with ruffled bodices, trained skirts, and large, cantilevered hats gather just outside the building’s front door. A small widow’s walk sits above them; one can imagine a Bostonian matriarch pacing across its narrow expanse, looking out toward the Charles River. In the years since these photographs were taken, the house had been renovated and converted to administrative use. Through it all, the women of Radcliffe continued to pass through its doorway, some of them on their way to new lives.

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  Sexton made an entrance everywhere she went; this interview was no exception. Sexton always dressed carefully, applying the right lipstick and picking out the perfect jewelry. In the morning sunlight, she must have gleamed. Smith, the director, who had made an exception to the Institute’s policy by considering an application from someone without a college degree, opened the interview. Like a well-trained actress hearing her cue, Sexton began to perform.

  Sexton knew how to handle direct attention, even though she sometimes feared it. Her energy was up; she was lively and talkative. As confessional in person as she was on the page, Sexton spoke readily about how she had discovered poetry (that is, through her suicide attempts) and about her struggle to learn to write. She left out nothing: not her death wish, not her days at Glenside. In her application, she had sounded touchy about her academic background, but in the interview she expressed enthusiasm about the Institute’s educational opportunities. She wanted to audit classes and to read widely. Aware that her temperament, and her history, could make her seem an unreliable investment, Sexton assured Smith that she had her life in balance now and that she was committed to being a good mother no matter her professional obligations. In fact, she’d recently canceled a meeting with a very important publisher because she’d promised her daughters that they would go visit the pussy willows. “WOW! We’ll know she’s around,” Smith wrote in her notes afterward. “She has enormous vitality and zest!” She recommended acceptance.

  Kumin arrived at Fay House a few hours later, just before 2:00 p.m. She was on familiar ground. When she had first seen Radcliffe, in the fall of 1941, she had marveled at its beauty. The campus comprised Radcliffe Yard, where the administrative buildings were and where Fay House is located, and the Radcliffe Quadrangle, where the dormitories were located. Radcliffe Yard was just a few minutes’ walk from the center of Harvard Square, where the Harvard College campus was, and the Quad was a seven-minute walk up Garden Street. The Quad was isolated from the noise and bustle of the square; the tree-lined streets that bordered it were some of the most beautiful in the city.

  Kumin later described the transformation she experienced upon arriving at Radcliffe: “Epithets with which I had been branded—bookworm, greasy grind, brain trust—now became a badge of honor…At Radcliffe my life began anew. My parochial Jewishness fell away.” Her Radcliffe years had been happy ones: she had felt at ease around her fellow “Cliffies,” who had been quick, smart, and passionate about art and politics—nothing like the sorority sisters at her high school. She had had no idea there were other women like her in the world, women with the same “interests and attitudes and values.” She had thrown herself into undergraduate life. With like-minded classmates, Kumin had joined the Labor League (and had scandalized her father with her far-left politics). She had captained the swim team her senior year, written a satirical comic strip, and attended football games and dances. Swimming had long been a passion of Kumin’s, and at first she was disappointed by Radcliffe’s basement pool (as a high school senior visiting colleges, she had preferred the pool at Wellesley), but she ended up enjoying her first years swimming and even taught swim lessons to her fellow Cliffies who needed to pass a swim test to graduate. “I would say that the unhappiness of the years between 8th and 12th grades were totally dissipated,” she later said. “I was starting fresh and in a new country.” For the first time in her life, Kumin had felt “supremely and sublimely happy.”

  Kumin, whose own children were now in their preteen and teenage years, applied to the Institute for many reasons—she wanted time off from teaching at Tufts, the prestige associated with the “associate scholars” program, and to stay on the same path as her best friend—but surely one of them was a desire to recapitulate her happy college years.

  In some ways, it was more surprising that Kumin made it to the interview stage than that Sexton did. Neither a true scholar nor yet a dazzling artist (her first book had only just been published in March), Kumin closely resembled many of the Radcliffe alumnae whose letters of inquiry had gone into the Institute’s office wastebasket. Kumin was a woman who, in her words, had been “playing the triple role of part-time writer, part-time teacher and part-time homemaker.” Her supervisor at Tufts described her as a “fine teacher” as well as a “first-rate” scholar and noted how rare it was that someone could master both those tasks and also “do creative work of excellence.” She was clearly reliable, sensible, and, if not a case of female genius, then at least a compelling example of the Institute’s underlying theory: that motherhood and intellectual work might be seamlessly intertwined.

  As soon as Kumin began to speak, she revealed herself to be quite different from her fellow Newton poet. Whereas Sexton was vivacious and intense, passionate about her work and frank about her personal struggles, Kumin was at once breezier and more self-serious. She spoke enthusiastically about her teaching at Tufts and described how she would return armed with new knowledge, after a year of study at the Institute. She ran through her many interests�
�poetry, the creative process, Freudian psychology, existentialist philosophy—in a way that Smith found both impressive and a bit dizzying. Attractive, intelligent, and the author of a published collection of poetry, Kumin promised to make good use of an Institute year. To Smith, Kumin seemed a bit like an overeager first-year student, restlessly moving from one area of study to the next. “Has many interests and this may be a problem—she may not concentrate on any one,” Smith wrote in her notes. “Suspect she has more drive than real creative talent but that’s just a guess.” Still, Kumin was compelling, companionable, and overall a pleasing presence. More than that, she was a teacher, someone who might offer a community course or compel female undergraduates. Ultimately, Smith decided to recommend acceptance.

  She passed on her recommendations to Harvard faculty members—accomplished scholars in their fields of study—who would evaluate the applicants and decide whether they had potential. These experts—most of them male, in keeping with the typical gender breakdown of university faculty—would determine which women got the chance to pursue a dream.

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  Many eager applicants never made it to Fay House. Many didn’t even merit an application packet. Bunting had designed the Institute with what she thought of as the exceptional woman in mind: the brainy types, the ones who, as adolescents, had tested among the top 10 percent of high school students, the types of women who had caught her eye when she was on the NSF committee. But her project resonated with the most ordinary women in America: the clerical workers, the store owners, those with or without college degrees. These were women who had been discouraged from further study. They had dropped out of college; they had married young. They had failed to win this fellowship or had been fired from that lab. Gender discrimination was still legal, and in 1960 Title VII and the workplace protections it installed were still several years away. Unlike the impressive tenure-track professors whom Bunting had herself contacted to encourage them to apply, these women hadn’t had the luck to beat the odds and attain an impressive career. Now, as they made inquiries about their eligibility, they feared that no matter what kind of promise they had once shown in a college classroom, they would look, to a selection committee, as unremarkable as a Formica countertop.

  In the first few weeks after the Institute was announced, underqualified women wrote directly to Bunting, unaware that they were not the “talented” applicants that the Institute was looking for. Barbara L. Rozen (Mrs. Jerome G.), a woman from New Jersey who had received her college degree ten years earlier, wanted to undertake a study “of a little known family of spiders.” She was disappointed to learn from Bunting that her undergraduate achievements were insufficient for Institute membership. (She had hoped to use her stipend to hire a housekeeper.) Rose Pavone, a New York–based mother of two without any formal education, wrote to ask to be considered for the Institute; she wanted to “at long last somehow be able to continue my search for knowledge.” Pavone had filled four pages with cramped handwriting, describing her many and varied interests, broadly humanistic in nature. She must have written the letter in between watching her two preadolescent boys and working at the family general store, which she owned with her husband. Her excitement at the idea of study—real, formal study—animated each word. Bunting, seemingly unmoved by Pavone’s plight, wrote a crisp letter back explaining the Institute was not for undergraduate study. She encouraged her to find a college closer to home.

  Other women knew better than to even apply. Mary T. Blanchard (Mrs. John A.) of Dedham, Massachusetts, had a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe. She had long wanted to return to school for further study, she explained in her letter, but she had never found the time or the money. The family had five children and tons of bills. Even though she was cheered by the prospect of the Institute, she recognized that she, an educated woman but, ultimately, a housewife, would not benefit from the support it offered. “I hope that the present program will someday be expanded to include women in my position,” she wrote.

  Even highly accomplished women found themselves unable to meet the Institute’s specifications. Denise Levertov, a thirty-seven-year-old British poet, was desperate to find a source of income that wouldn’t force her to abandon her family. Levertov was distinguished in her field—she had published five books and won praise as a member of the American literary avant-garde—but literary fame didn’t translate into material comfort. Between her poetry and her husband’s magazine writing, the couple made just enough money to live in what she called “a simple style” in downtown Manhattan and to send their son to private school. (At the time she inquired about the Institute, Levertov and her family had just moved into a loft above a ham-canning factory at 277 Greenwich Street.) But when she learned that even the most accomplished grantees, called resident fellows, would need to be in residence in Cambridge, Levertov decided not to apply. She couldn’t move her young son for such a short period of time and force him to switch schools. She would wait another two years before deciding that the lure of the Institute was such that she was willing to leave New York.

  The influx of letters and applications demonstrated, as Bunting’s assistant put it, that the time “was ripe for such a conception as the Institute.” Women’s enrollment in college had rebounded from its low point in 1950; in 1957, 20 percent of women went to college. By 1960, 37 percent of all college students were women. Upon graduation, these women, degrees in hand, entered a world on the precipice of change. The 1950s might have been the decade of home and hearth, but throughout the decade more and more women were entering the workforce (women of the working class, of course, had never left it). It was not only accepted but expected that a woman would work outside the home for a portion of her life—either before she had children or, more likely, after her children were of school age. “Women are going back to work—a vast new army of them,” wrote Woman’s Home Companion in 1956. Nearly three-quarters of working women were married, and half of these married women had children in school. Some were armed with bachelor degrees and liberal arts educations, others with nothing but the desperation of the broke. They were typists and salespeople; they worked in factories and in retail. By the time the Institute was announced, nearly 40 percent of American women—twenty-two million total—were working outside the home.

  The promise of the Institute was the promise that the scholars’ lives could be, at once, more stimulating and less demanding. Bunting deliberately designed the program to be part-time so that women could enjoy time with their children. She offered a stipend so that women could get help with those troublesome chores. She promised community so that women could share their challenges and their ideas. The Institute opened doors to seminars and lecture halls so that the intellectually curious could put their bachelor degrees to use. To many working women, this novel Institute—with its prestige, its financial support, and its recognition of the challenges facing thirtysomething housewives—must have seemed tailor-made for them.

  What the average working woman didn’t recognize, however, as she wrote her letters of congratulations and appeal, was that the Institute was made for the unusual woman who had somehow managed to find many of these things already.

  Some were disappointed to realize this; others believed that the benefits awarded to the select few would trickle down to them. “It’s liberating to read about what you’re doing and I feel sure it will have an immensely positive effect on the country and on all college women,” wrote one Radcliffe alumna. “Whatever benefits the gifted few will have beneficial effect for the rest of us,” relayed another. One woman called the Institute “a gift from the gods”; another characterized her feelings about the announcement as “the most intense pride I have experienced since the birth of my first child.”

  Not everyone was so pleased. More than a few Radcliffe alumnae wrote nasty letters, accusing the Radcliffe president of “pulling woman-the-homemaker down from her pedestal.” One letter wri
ter reminded Bunting of all the things a working mother misses: “seeing her child take its first steps or hearing it speak its first words.” Another, a mother of four, wrote a scathing critique: rather than support women who abandoned their children, this woman said, a university should consider conferring “on those who have done an outstanding job a doctor of Domesticity degree which has never been done before.” (The letter closed with a twenty-three-line lyric poem, a paean to the ephemeral joys of motherhood.) These alums thought Bunting was asking women to give up or minimize their most important work.

  The critics wouldn’t apply. Neither would some of the aspirational applicants who realized they didn’t qualify. As the application cycle continued without them, both camps watched, either with envy or with contempt, curious to see who would be awarded the Institute’s inaugural fellowships.

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  On a Friday afternoon in late May, Kumin was looking through the mail when she discovered, amid the bills and personal correspondence, a letter from Radcliffe College. “Dear Mrs. Kumin,” she read. “I am pleased to notify you of your appointment as an Associate Scholar of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.” Smith, the author of the letter, would be in touch soon with further news; for now, she offered her congratulations and good wishes. This was not Kumin’s first high-stakes admission gauntlet, nor even her first time being admitted to this particular institution. Still, she had always found study soothing, and it would be nice to exchange her position at the front of the classroom for one behind a desk. She was ready to be a student again.