For years, Swan was primarily a portraitist; this is how she’d put herself through college. Now she again turned to portraiture as she attempted to navigate her new academic environment. She commenced sketching her fellow Institute scholars, varying her pencil strokes in an effort to capture the unique vibrations of each woman’s mind, the exact shade of her soul. (She always spoke in mystic terms about her work.) With her portraits, Swan showed that each woman was distinctive, despite any surface similarities.
Elizabeth Barker sat for a portrait. Barker, then a fifty-year-old PhD student in English at Boston University, was a high-energy, intensely verbal woman. She smoked as much as she spoke; her cigarette seemed like a sixth finger. In the portrait, a headband draws Barker’s hair back in a severe manner; her hand, curled into a loose fist, grasps at the air in front of her. She seems caught mid-gesture, and probably mid-speech. Using nervous pencil lines, Swan captured Barker’s intellectual dynamism. A fellow artist, the painter Lois Swirnoff, also sat before Swan. Swirnoff was from Wellesley, and her paintings were elegant and clean (later, she would be internationally recognized for her work on color). Swan feared producing a portrait that was fussy and overworked (what would her subject, a fellow painter, think?) and stuck to pure, simple lines. Ursula Niebuhr, an intimidating presence at the Institute, sat for her portrait well. Swan was in awe of Niebuhr, in part because of the theologian’s intelligence and in part because she was attached to such a famous man. The portrait she produced of Niebuhr’s lovely English face, with its strong bone structure, has a great deal of cross-hatching, reflecting Swan’s intimidation and uncertainty. Try as she might, she couldn’t quite figure out what this esteemed woman was all about.
But Swan took special delight in her drawings of the poets Kumin and Sexton.
They looked so similar at first, these two attractive, dark-haired women: it would take an astute eye to tell them apart. Swan looked beyond their coiffed hair and their collared dresses and sought out their temperaments. Kumin was tranquil, she decided, while Sexton was riddled with tension. There was a nervous air about Sexton; she was charged, electrified. When Swan drew Sexton, she used sharp pencil strokes. She pressed down firmly, making the folds of Sexton’s dress stand out. She crosshatched quickly, such that Sexton’s skin took on a darker shade and provided a sharp contrast to the white dress. Though Sexton sat for her portrait in a position of repose—her left hand propping up her head, her bright eyes gazing out into the distance—in the drawing she is all taut energy. She looks as if she could spring into motion in an instant. Kumin’s portrait, by contrast, makes the poet appear gentle. Swan softened her lines; her pencil seems to have brushed the page more than imprinted it. Kumin’s face, in three-quarter profile, emerges from what looks like a cloud of smoke. A cigarette between her fingers, she seems lost in thought, and content to be so. The portrait is a bit too relaxed; Swan seems to have missed Kumin’s self-discipline, mistaking the poet’s calm for a natural state, rather than a deliberate achievement. But what Swan recognized was how the two poets complemented each other.
Portrait of Anne Sexton by Barbara Swan, 1961
One woman at the Institute deserved a special portrait. Swan decided that Smith, the miracle worker who always found a way to get her fellows the help they needed, should have a professional portrait, something she could hang on her office wall. Though Swan planned to execute it on her own, she wanted it to be a gift from the “Premier Cru,” her nickname for this first group of Institute fellows.
One evening, Swan invited Smith over to dinner at 32 Webster Place—a one-on-one dinner was far closer to her ideal evening than a group cocktail party—and planned to sketch her portrait that same night. But Smith was so convivial, such wonderful company, that the two women got distracted during cocktail hour: it turns out that Irish whiskey does not produce portraits for posterity. They tried again, not long after, and this time banned alcohol from what was to be a serious portrait sitting. Swan took care to pose Smith appropriately and paid special attention to the folds of her dress. Her aim, as always, was to render the eyes perfectly; she wanted to put a certain glint in them, the sense of humor for which Smith was known and loved. She couldn’t quite get it, in the end; one eye was good, the other not so much. The mouth was flawed, too. Swan hung on to the portrait, thinking she would improve it in years to come—a new line here, a bit of shading there. She couldn’t have known then, in the exuberant fall of 1961, how few years Smith had left.
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Swan was not the only one closely studying the Institute scholars. When the women began their year at the Institute, they knew they were being watched. The media couldn’t take its collective eyes off this groundbreaking program, which one paper called “Radcliffe’s new baby.” Throughout the summer of 1961 and into the academic year, newspapers and magazines reported on the Institute, its founder, and the women who were taking advantage of this incredible opportunity. National magazines used the Radcliffe Institute as a case study to report on new trends in women’s education. Local papers profiled some of the more photogenic fellows, asking them to re-create sweet domestic scenes. In one photo, Sexton, wearing a sleeveless top and striped skirt, appears with her daughters, Joy and Linda. In another, Kumin sits with her arm around Daniel, her youngest child, and a book open in her lap; she looks a bit stunned, as if the click of the camera had frozen her in place. (Swan’s chance in the local media spotlight came later: her profile appeared in 1963, under the headline “Do Dishes? No, Rather Paint.”) “We were pioneers and guinea pigs,” Kumin reflected later. “We were questioned and photographed in our natural habitats until my kids got so they said cheese! if you merely glanced their way.” In November, in the biggest media coup for the Institute thus far, Time magazine placed Polly Bunting on its cover. In an accompanying profile—“One Woman, Two Lives”—Bunting was praised for her “reasonable, constructive, moderate, and just slightly outraged stand” on women’s issues. Mild, humble Bunting, just a few years out from her low-profile life at Douglass, had become a national symbol of a bright future for American women.
The popularity of Bunting’s ideas reflected a major change in the way Americans thought about women, and in particular about women’s roles in the family home. In the early 1960s, the gendered division of labor remained largely intact—men were the breadwinners, while women took care of home and hearth—but the expectations for women had shifted. (Only 11 percent of families included a woman who was the primary or sole breadwinner, compared with 42 percent in 2015.) In the aftermath of World War II, experts and advertisers placed new emphasis on mothering. They encouraged white middle-class women to spend more time nurturing children and less time doing laundry (there were now machines for that!) and mopping the floors. (Credit the influential Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, had become a staple in middle-class homes.) Even middle-class women who didn’t work outside the home hired part-time household help; untroubled by empty pantries or dirty bedsheets, they could be more present for their children. By the time the Institute scholars received their first checks from Smith, household help was no longer seen as a luxury or taken to be a sign of one’s superior class status. Instead, it was framed as a necessity: something middle-class women deserved, something they should demand.
Bolstered by this broad cultural change, almost all of the Institute women spent their stipends on help with housework. Some bought time-saving household devices. Swan bought a dishwasher; she’d calculated the number of labor hours it would save her and decided it was a worthy investment. Kumin went in a slightly different direction, spending hers on a file cabinet, a tape recorder, and a typewriter with an international key—“which is more of a status symbol to me than a Mercedes Benz,” she said. Two fellows used the money to pay for their children’s extracurricular activities, thus arranging a few more hours of child-free time. Others hired ho
usekeepers or babysitters, usually women of color. At the time, black women provided the bulk of domestic labor in America. In 1960, one-third of all employed black women were domestic workers. (Although the economy and labor force have changed greatly since this date, black women remain overrepresented in low-paying and low-prestige jobs. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “Black and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely to work in ‘service’ occupations as White women”; these jobs tend to be low paying, irregular, and precarious.)
The fact that the women of the Institute used their stipends to hire domestic workers tells us something about how Radcliffe imagined what one article called “women of talent,” both who such women were and what they deserved. A woman of talent would have a college degree; a woman of talent could hire another woman to sweep her floors and care for her children. Radcliffe had yet to reckon with the idea that a domestic worker could also be a “woman of talent,” a creative mind. The Institute didn’t consider the lives of talented, working-class women until later, when Olsen used her seminar talk to lament the loss of so many brilliant careers to hard labor. It didn’t begin to address long-standing racial inequality, inside and outside academia, until Radcliffe undergrads began agitating for improvements to admissions. In this first year, laboring women were forgotten, and white women, both middle-class and wealthy, benefited from the work done by those less privileged.
Sexton, white and relatively wealthy, found her life vastly improved by her stipend. Like the other fellows, she hired extra household help. Her mother-in-law was already paying for someone to come in once a week, but Sexton increased it to twice and hired a monthly cleaning service, for Kayo’s sake. (“He doesn’t like a messy house,” she explained. “He’s kind of a perfectionist.”) But the bulk of the money went to home renovations. She turned their porch into a study, and she installed a swimming pool in her backyard. The pool became something of a local scandal: for decades, literary Boston gossiped about the Newton poet who had used Radcliffe’s money to build a private pool. When Bunting heard that one of her scholars had used funds in this fashion, she was dismayed. This was frivolousness; this was not how someone lived a serious, moderate life.
To Sexton, though, the pool was an invaluable, therapeutic addition to her daily routine. It became a daily ritual. She swam her laps languidly, her long body slicing through the water. With her eyes closed, listening to birdsong, she could reimagine the stultifying suburbs as a kind of pastoral idyll.
Thanks to the Radcliffe stipend, the house at 40 Clearwater Road became a kind of sanctuary. Sexton hated going out into what she called “the frightening world”; she could overcome any number of creative obstacles, but her anxiety made even the brief trips into Cambridge seem daunting. Now she had a proper, pleasing workplace. No longer would she have to work at the dining room table, her papers and books strewn about, her husband chastising her for the mess. Never again would she have to climb over Kayo to adjust the record player as she tried to pull a poem from the depths of her mind. She could shut out Linda and Joy if she needed a moment alone at the typewriter or on the phone with Kumin. Counting the office on Mount Auburn Street, she now had not one but two rooms of her own.
Photograph of Anne Sexton in her home office, October 1961
There is a photo of Sexton from this first fall, sitting in the new home office. She rocks back in her chair, with her long legs propped up against one of the office’s bookshelves, her feet shod in dark flats, her slim ankles crossed. A book sits open on her lap, and a cigarette dangles from her hand. She has turned away from her typewriter to look in the direction of the photographer. She is smiling broadly, her mouth open, her entire being relaxed and radiant. She looks as if she has been caught in a moment of learning. She looks delighted.
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The camera didn’t lie: Sexton was unusually happy that fall, as well as newly confident. She was hard at work on her new book of poems and had been very productive: by November, she had written twenty pages of a new book. She had also taken up a teaching position, teaching creative writing to Harvard and Radcliffe students. “It is more work than I had planned,” she wrote to a friend, “but enjoyable in a way.” Things were also going well at home: Kayo, who had been prone to fits of anger and physical violence, had entered therapy. A couple infatuations on Sexton’s end had attenuated. The couple fought less, and they enjoyed more outings with their daughters.
For Sexton, admission to the Institute had eased the conflict she felt between her family and her work. The Institute was a “status symbol,” she told Alice Ryerson, an education researcher who conducted extensive interviews with every member of the “Premier Cru.” “It’s like I just graduated.” She felt that the Institute proved her worth to the poetry world—as well as to her family. “Since I started to make money and get status…I don’t feel so guilty because I’m contributing…And I have people approving of me and thinking it’s good when I’m doing this.” She upped her speaking fees to $250—at the time, very few poets commanded more—and she signed a “first reading” agreement with The New Yorker (in other words, the magazine had right of first refusal), which gave her a ready market for new work. She was soaring to the next stage of her career.
One day that fall, Sexton lay down indoors to take a nap with Linda, then eight, the child who often prompted her to reflect on her own life. Outside, the leaves were turning. Mother and daughter dozed and reminisced. (It was still early evening, but there had been wine with dinner.) Sexton gently corrected Linda’s memories, as mothers often do: no, that event you remember wasn’t yesterday; that was a long time ago. Outside, the trees swayed in the fall wind, and birds moved across the grass. There was something about this moment of reflection and repose that inspired Sexton. She asked Linda to get a pencil and paper and started writing a poem right there in bed, writing down what Linda said and then recording her own responses. Within two days, she had assembled these notes and fragments into a poem, one that she eventually called “The Fortress.”
In many ways, “The Fortress” resembles “The Double Image,” the poem featuring twinned, mother-daughter portraits that Sexton composed while in Lowell’s seminar. Like its predecessor, “The Fortress” is a poem about generational continuity and about what mothers pass down to their daughters. In the poem, a mother and daughter are lying on a square bed under a pink quilt; outside, the woods display leaves left over from summer. The mother, the speaker of the poem, explains seasonal change and natural phenomena. Her lines are half-serious but entirely elegant: “the leaves have been fed / secretly from a pool of beet-red dye,” she says. The speaker, “half in jest, half in dread,” presses her finger on the brown mole on her daughter’s face. It is a mark “inherited / from my right cheek: a spot of danger.” Will the daughter inherit her mother’s instability, along with her beauty? Were the two bound up in each other? Will the daughter become a writer, too, and suffer for it? The mother, who so confidently corrects her daughter’s impressions of the external world, finds herself incapable of explaining the future, let alone protecting her daughter from it.
Soon enough, the speaker suggests, the daughter will find herself providing comfort and care—“your own child / at your breast”—and her struggles—inherited though they may be—will be her own. “The Fortress” ends with the speaker’s assurance of timeless and constant love, whatever the season. The poem is at once a promise and a prophecy, a way of reckoning with one’s inescapable womanhood.
Sexton had never shied away from addressing her female identity. After all, her first collection had included poems about mothers and maternity wards. But the poems in her second collection, which she was in the process of arranging that fall, were even more open about female experience. “With Mercy for the Greedy” proposes poetry as a way to heal after an abortion. (In 1960, Sexton had opted for an illegal abortion rather than bear a third child, in part
because she was not sure her husband was the father.) “Woman with Girdle” is a kind of blazon; it describes a woman with a sagging midriff and thick thighs removing her undergarments, revealing herself to be at once soft and strong, imperfect and beautiful. “The Operation,” a poem in three parts, combines images of Mary Gray’s cancer with images of Sexton’s own medical trial, the removal of an ovarian cyst; “woman’s dying / must come in seasons,” the speaker muses. “The Fortress” thus represented a concentration and intensification of her great poetic subjects: motherhood, the female body, and love, romantic and otherwise. Like Swan, who painted her babies, and Kumin, who wanted to write the kind of children’s verse that she could read to her young son, Sexton was attempting to ease the conflict between her life as an artist and her life as a mother by letting the second inspire the first.
More than that, Sexton was beginning to think more carefully about what it meant to write as a woman. In Lowell’s seminar, she had fretted about her female identity, worrying that she would always seem inferior to serious male poets. At Radcliffe, though, her views about women and art started to shift. Perhaps it was the explicitly political mission of the Institute, a mission reiterated in promotional pamphlets and press releases. Perhaps it was the media frenzy, the profiles in the press, the approving attitude shown by the American public. Perhaps it was simply being surrounded by women: even though Sexton worked most days from home, when she did drive into Cambridge, she found herself enmeshed within an all-female society of fellows. At 78 Mount Auburn Street, there was no condescending John Holmes, no enigmatic Robert Lowell. There were only women like her. Sexton had replaced the sexually tense workshop setting with a supportive female community.
The Equivalents Page 13