Pleased and satisfied, Kumin did what she always did when she had career news to share: she called Sexton, who lived just a few miles away. She must have gotten the day’s mail by now, and her acceptance letter would also be waiting. It was strange that Sexton hadn’t called yet; perhaps she was busy with a poem or tied up with one of her children. Sexton answered and celebrated Kumin’s good news. Then, anxious and wary, she went to check the mail. There was no letter.
Assuming the worst, Sexton was crushed. As she later recounted, she had wanted this desperately, more than she had wanted anything else in her life. She had been denied many things in the past—publication, the attentions of an editor, her mother’s affection—but this seeming rejection stung acutely. She had longed for the validation that the title of “scholar” would have provided. A Radcliffe grant would have disproven all the teachers and family members who had discouraged her and doubted her intelligence. But it seemed that the scholarship had gone to the real scholar: bookish, credentialed Kumin, the woman with multiple languages and a master’s degree. To Sexton, this was a predictable outcome, and all the more disappointing for being so. If Sexton felt a twinge of jealousy, if she felt even momentarily resentful of her closest friend, she would have been quick to recall all the times Kumin had helped her over the course of the last few years: the times she’d listened to a line of poetry, the afternoons she’d told Sexton that yes, this was a promising poem, and yes, Sexton did have talent. Kumin was her creative partner and her true intimate. A rivalry with her must have been too dangerous to contemplate.
Sexton resolved to be pleased for her friend, but she allowed herself a period of mourning. She called her husband and told him to pick up the girls (they were at a neighbor’s house); she was going straight to bed. Lying in her upstairs bedroom, Sexton turned over the failure in her mind. To be sure, she had learned much since her boarding school days at Rogers Hall, and she had worked hard, but perhaps she simply did not have the talent to become a lasting poet. (Had those two negative reviewers been right, after all?) She would never be the student that Kumin was; she had studied at Brandeis University during the summer of 1960, but she feared that these few months couldn’t compensate for all those missed years in her youth. She felt ordinary.
But surely to Sexton, an ordinary life was no tragedy. It would certainly have felt better than the haunted days and nights at the mental institution. Her life now might be conventional and unexciting, but it had its benefits. She had both her daughters back. She had a firm routine with Dr. Orne. She had the practice of her poetry. Life was much better in 1961 than it had been in 1956. Calmer, if not entirely pacified, Sexton went downstairs to face Joy and Linda. Eager to put the day’s disappointment behind them, the Sexton family went out for dinner.
The following Monday, at home at 40 Clearwater Road, Sexton collected the day’s mail. To her shock, she saw that she’d received a letter from Radcliffe. Perhaps they’d sent out rejection notices? Her heartbeat quickened; she slit the envelope. Stunned, she read over the same words of congratulations that had greeted Kumin three days earlier. College degree or no college degree, she had done it: she had gotten the fellowship.
Ecstatic, Sexton rushed out of her house and ran through her quiet Newton neighborhood, knocking on her neighbors’ doors and demanding immediate entry. “I got it!” she yelled to anyone who would listen. “I got it!” (“I think everyone must have thought I had gotten my period,” she later joked.) That evening, exuberant, she penned a letter to her therapist Dr. Orne; she included some lines of verse, written just for this occasion: “Hark Hark the lark / Gadzooks Hear Hear / My I.Q.’s OK this year.” The announcement of the selection went out with the Friday papers on June 2. Her family celebrated her achievements: Kayo’s parents bought copies of the local papers and cut out the announcement of her award. Kayo himself was proud of her (and grateful that she would soon have a work space that wasn’t the dining room table). Her neighbors enjoyed the publicity her achievement brought to Newton. She had earned admittance to the nation’s most august educational institution—not even her mother, with her impressive IQ, had won Radcliffe’s approval.
And, to Sexton’s comfort and delight, her best friend would be with her. The two poets would not be parted; they would embark on this new adventure together. That December, feeling “flush and important,” as Kumin later put it, the women finally installed a second phone line. Their husbands would no longer complain about their tying up the line or about the bills. After all, with their stipends, the women were now, as Sexton saw it, “contributing.” The Institute granted up to $3,000 for each fellow, nearly $25,000 in today’s currency. Sexton and Kumin received $2,000 each; the money was theirs, to use as they wished.
* * *
—
For the rest of the month of May, the offices at Fay House were comparatively quiet. The phone rang a handful of times—far less frequently than it had during those exciting weeks in the winter of 1960—as the future Institute scholars called to accept their awards. Swan, the portrait painter, called on May 31 to say she’d be happy to attend. She was delighted at the prospect of a year’s support. Perhaps she could now experiment with lithography, a medium she longed to explore. Sexton and Kumin each wrote brief notes of acceptance. They too looked forward to the year to come. It doesn’t appear that anyone admitted turned down her chance at an intellectual adventure.
Sexton, Kumin, and Swan were among the first twenty-four women chosen as Radcliffe Institute fellows. It was a huge achievement: the admission rate was under 10 percent. The fellows’ backgrounds were remarkably similar—they were white, well-off, and, except Sexton, highly educated—but their disciplines were diverse: the women specialized in everything from children’s poetry to endocrinology. The vast majority of the women had children, ranging in age from ten months to twenty-six years. Nine of them were married to other academics, including members of the Harvard faculty. Nearly all were admitted as associate scholars. Ursula Niebuhr, wife of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and a theologian herself, was appointed a more senior research fellow, a distinction that reflected her academic standing. The fellows included a lawyer from Greenwich, Connecticut; a musician from Arlington, Massachusetts; three historians from the Greater Boston area; and three scholars—in political science, Spanish literature, and theology—all from Cambridge. In addition to Swan, there was another painter, Lois Swirnoff, who held a BFA and an MFA from Yale and who taught at Wellesley, Swan’s alma mater. In the first class of fellows, there were five artists whom the selection committee had deemed the scholars’ “equivalents.”
The married women looked forward to mingling and to introducing their husbands to women who would be their new friends. There was one woman, however, who throughout the next academic year would be attending the Institute’s special events alone. Alma Wittlin, an educational psychologist from Albuquerque, was the only single woman in the first class of fellows. It was a rare thing to be a single woman in 1960—only 8 percent of women over twenty-five had never been married—and it was not easy. Birth control for unmarried women was elusive, if not illegal. Banks could reject a single woman’s application for a credit card (some banks required a husband’s signature). And then there were the social slights: the “missing” invitations, the invasive questions, the pitying whispers that started up, like radio static, when you passed from one room into the next. Beryl Pfizer, writing in McCall’s, encouraged single women to arm themselves with “six rude answers to one rude question”—that is, “Why aren’t you married?” The next time a married woman asks you why you’re single, Pfizer suggested, say sotto voce that you prefer affairs, then cast your gaze hungrily over her husband. (Other strategies included dragging out the story for hours or spilling your coffee on your interrogator.) To be a “spinster” in 1960 was to do battle with social convention each time you stepped out into the world.
And yet Wittlin had persevered, buildin
g a career for herself in the field of educational psychology. In consultation with Connie Smith, Bunting awarded a special grant to bring her east, where she would live in graduate student housing at 6 Ash Street. Whereas many of her fellow scholars would have to rush back to the suburbs in time for dinner, Wittlin could simply stroll from the library to the dining hall, then retire to her separate room. She would lead a contained but convenient life, perfectly sized for the solitary woman.
By July, plans for the following academic year were mostly in place. The names of the Institute fellows were sent to the Harvard Corporation, one of Harvard University’s two governing boards, and office space was secured. Bunting had hoped to use Byerly Hall, where science labs met, for the Institute, but science faculty had objected; instead, she worked out a temporary arrangement with a space in Harvard Square that had once held the Harvard Health Center. All told, the first year of the Institute would cost about $150,000 (roughly $1.2 million today). To Bunting’s mind, it was a worthwhile investment; what the deans and teachers would learn from her experiment was beyond financial calculation.
As for what the fellows themselves would learn, that could not be predicted. Would they produce great work? Make good friends? Would a year or two at the Institute allow a woman to shift course, or would it amount to nothing more than an interlude, a brief moment of freedom in an otherwise bounded life?
These questions weren’t always at the forefront of Bunting’s mind—she was more concerned with producing a scalable model for those who wished to enact similar education reforms—but they did capture the imaginations of the fellows themselves.
That summer, twenty-four women from Greater Boston and beyond prepared to undertake a shared social and intellectual journey. Come September, they would pack up their books, kiss their kids, and commute to Cambridge. For many, it was a short distance to travel, but really they would be entering an entirely new world.
PART TWO
1961–1963
CHAPTER 6
The Premier Cru
IT WAS JUST BEFORE 6:00 P.M. on September 13, 1961, and Barbara Swan, finished with painting for the day, was walking down a narrow, tree-lined street in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. The summer heat had dissipated, and the air was cool and pleasant. As she walked, young men weaved in and out of the Harvard College dormitories along the Charles River; they were heading to the boathouse, the dining hall, the undergraduate library a few blocks north of the river. It was the beginning of a new academic year, a time of first encounters and fresh starts.
Swan and her husband, Alan, were on their way to 6 Ash Street, the Graduate Center of Radcliffe College, a recently constructed building designed to resemble the old brick ones found elsewhere on campus. The building was located a block from Radcliffe Yard just a few blocks down Brattle Street from the center of Harvard Square. Connie Smith, their host for the evening, was waiting for them inside. Smith had planned an informal dinner for the inaugural class of Institute scholars and their husbands. She wanted the fellows to get a chance to meet each other in a social setting before settling down to business the following week. There were twenty-three other women on the guest list, and Swan knew none of them.
The couples approached the front entrance. The dress code for the dinner was informal, but the guests still looked sharp. Women in heels, wearing dresses with nipped waists, walked carefully over the uneven sidewalks. The men sported casual suits. There was at least one strand of pearls.
Swan had made this kind of pilgrimage once before. She had been just a teenager then, a doggedly determined young artist, biding her time until she could go to the art school of her dreams. At her father’s insistence, she had driven daily to Wellesley College. She had introduced herself to other women—many in heels, a few in pearls—and had prepared for nine months of learning alongside them. On the whole, she had found her time among the women of Wellesley uninspiring. The Museum School had been a better learning environment, and her time with vagabond boys in France had inspired her art.
More than twenty years later, in the fall of 1961, Swan was not sure what an all-female community had to offer her, but seeker that she was, she was willing to find out.
She stepped inside. Though a sociable, charming woman, Swan didn’t love a large party; she preferred to host intimate dinners of six to eight people so everyone could really talk. She made the best of it, winding her way among the scholars as sunlight streamed in through the building’s many windows. At the end of the evening, she still wasn’t sure who was who: Which poet lived in Newton? How many historians were there? Was she going to like anyone? She longed for a more leisurely gathering so that she could match faces with names.
Several weeks later, she found herself back at the Graduate Center for just such an event. Smith had called the first official meeting of the Institute for Tuesday, October 3, at 3:00 p.m. She had already distributed the first installment of each fellow’s stipend in the mail ($1,000, worth $8,165 today). That Tuesday afternoon, the women of the Institute came together without their male chaperones. Smith introduced them to the Institute’s policies and went over logistics. The situation was simple: each fellow was granted office space and access to Widener Library, the university’s main library, located in Harvard Yard and home to a staggering number of books (today, the library holds 3.5 million volumes). They also had access to other Harvard University resources—although not to Harvard College’s Lamont Library, primarily for undergraduates, which barred women from entry. Each woman also received a stipend to use as she pleased.
The Institute was headquartered at an old yellow house at 78 Mount Auburn Street, which contained a veritable labyrinth of offices and a big, open downstairs living room. There was a small garden out back, perfect for a cigarette break. Fellows could tuck themselves away in the gabled attic, far out of reach of their families. All this was familiar to the fellows—the Institute had advertised these features from the beginning—but there was one new element to be discussed: Smith wanted to arrange seminars at which fellows would share their works in progress. Starting in February, seminars would be held every other Tuesday, from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., in the living room at 78 Mount Auburn. The fellows would have to bring their own lunches, but there would be tea and coffee and, if Smith had the time and energy, some homemade baked goods. The seminars should be warm and friendly; the point was to learn from each other, rather than to pass judgment on the work being displayed.
Swan left this first meeting with better face recognition—the older woman with the narrow eyes was the Austrian educational researcher Alma Wittlin; and the striking, sophisticated Greek woman, with the deep-set eyes and full lips, was the historian Lily Macrakis—but there had been too little time to talk. Swan was eager to engage these women: they would be her audience, and maybe even her collaborators, in the months to come. The other fellows felt similarly: at a tea held later in the week, the women “pounced on each other,” as Swan later put it. They exchanged essential information—phone numbers, fields of study, names and ages of children—as they searched for kindred spirits.
Swan spent part of the tea chatting with Lilian Randall, an art historian from Brookline. Like Swan, Randall had a bachelor’s degree from a Seven Sisters school (Mount Holyoke). And like Swan, she had two children. The women chatted about early manuscripts—Randall had been working for many years on an index of Gothic marginal decoration from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—and Swan, with her art history background, knew enough to keep up. Almost twenty years after her undergraduate study ended, Swan now participated readily in the kinds of academic discussions that had bored her when she was young.
At some point during the gathering, Swan looked up to see two dark-haired women approaching her: Sexton and Kumin. They were a striking pair; one Institute fellow later remembered them as “exotic birds…both dressed in red, with black hair and shining eyes.” The two frequently traded clothing; they fought
over a red-and-white polyester dress that looked great on both of them, though they were built slightly differently. Swan, with her straight, cropped hair and plain style, might have felt intimidated by their elegance. But it soon became clear that these glamorous women had sought her out deliberately and that they were excited to meet her. They were both poets, they told her, but they also painted and sketched. They found drawing helped loosen them up. Kumin had taken watercolor classes when she was first married, and now that she had the grant, she resolved to draw more. She planned to reserve every Tuesday morning for art.
Rather than feeling slighted, as professionals often do when faced with amateur enthusiasm, Swan welcomed the poets’ interest. She looked forward to reading their work, and they looked forward to seeing hers. They promised to visit her in her home studio, and she asked to hear their poetry sometime. All three artists had decided to work most of the time at home, rather than tuck themselves away in the “rabbit warren” that was 78 Mount Auburn.
A few days after the tea, Swan related the encounter to Smith, who must have been pleased to see that relationships were already being formed. Swan, for her part, was relieved: it looked as if her second pass at women’s education might go better than the first.
* * *
—
When Swan was ten years old, she drew a picture of her grandmother. “It looked just like her and everyone was astounded by that,” she later recalled. This child, who could barely sit still for piano lessons, had the patience to get a portrait perfectly right. Her father, who taught mechanical drawing at Newton High, was impressed: he knew how hard it was to capture a likeness.
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