The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Whatever the reason, Sexton started to take a firmer stance on sexism in the literary scene. In her interview with Ryerson, she stated that she had been at a disadvantage in her profession, not because of her lack of education or any other deficiencies, but simply because she was a woman. She thought that her male peers scorned “lady poets,” and she felt pressure to be especially firm and controlled in her writing—to be twice as good, in other words. “You’ve got to be hard,” she explained. “You’ve got to be kind of cruel with the language.” She said that her husband and her mother-in-law hadn’t taken her poetry seriously; they had wanted her to dabble in it, as if it were a hobby. It wasn’t until she received the Institute grant that she felt that she commanded their respect. She felt that the worst problem of her life was “being a woman who does something like write poetry.”

  At the same time, though, Sexton was starting to see how fulfilling her creative desires could improve her life and the lives of her children. When asked if she thought she was a better mother since she started writing poetry, she responded, “Yes. Much better. Because I’m not asking them to create a life for me and a reason.” Though she still longed to hear the praise “she writes like a man,” she was also beginning to see the advantages of “being a woman who does something like write poetry.” Maybe writing was the only way she could be a good mother and sustain her marriage. Maybe, as Bunting kept insisting, a woman needed to combine the domestic and the professional, or at least find a way of alternating between the two.

  By late 1961, Sexton, like the other Institute fellows, had become convinced of the merits of this approach. The next step was to convince the rest of the world.

  * * *

  —

  “I don’t think that many of us…at the Institute were revolutionaries,” Lily Macrakis, the Greek historian in the Institute’s first class, remembered decades later. The Institute had been founded on a political premise: that American women were at a disadvantage intellectually and professionally, and that educational and social institutions needed to be reformed. And yet, the atmosphere at the Institute was neither combative nor politically charged. If anything, Macrakis recalled, the women simply felt lucky to be there. They walked around affirming their gratitude; “what a nice thing,” they said to each other, “what an exceptional thing.” It was only later that Macrakis and her peers began to question why places like the Institute weren’t more common. But even during the Institute years, they began raising other questions with each other. Why was it so hard for women to do intellectual work? Why did female academics have so much trouble finding institutional positions? Why had it taken until now for something like the Institute to form? “And slowly we started thinking…‘Why don’t we push it more?’ ”

  The women Macrakis met during her year at Radcliffe were neither political agitators nor cultural rebels. They were not part of the 1950s counterculture, the precursor to the hippies of the 1960s. They did not line their eyes in kohl; they did not wear blue jeans. They avoided Sarah Lawrence, the school for rebel women. They did not declare, along with the writer Anne Roiphe, that they were “opposed to country clubs everywhere.”

  The women who gathered at Radcliffe in September 1961 had, for the most part, embraced everything that a woman like Roiphe had rejected. Roiphe, who considered herself the “anti-Smith girl,” the “enemy of suburban lawns and gold bracelets, fraternities, Fascists, and stockbrokers,” was a perfect foil. The average Institute scholar had married the stockbroker (or the salesman, or the engineer, or the banker). She had purchased the nice house in the suburbs. She had applied for and been granted membership in the country club. Many Institute fellows had spent their early adult lives following the path that had been laid out before them by the culture at large. Before they came to Radcliffe, they spent their days caring for their children and their nights waiting for their husbands to finish their work. They often wondered, as one of them put it, “Is that going to be my life?”

  Macrakis was one woman preoccupied with just this question. In the fall of 1960, she was living in the town of Belmont, a pleasant suburb just west of Cambridge, with her husband, Michael, and their three young children, and fretting about her future as a “Belmont matron.” This would have been a sad fate for an unconventional woman who had demonstrated such brilliance all her life. Born in Athens in 1928, Macrakis was an intelligent, independent young woman who went to college to study history and archaeology at a time when most Athenian girls married right after high school. She bucked convention again when she followed her husband-to-be to America before they were even married, arriving in New York in the fall of 1953. In America, the couple pursued their academic interests. Michael Macrakis began a PhD program in mathematics at MIT and eventually transferred to and graduated from Harvard. Lily, meanwhile, had been accepted into a master’s program at Radcliffe. A timid young woman, she nonetheless impressed her professors with her multiple languages—French, German, Italian, and modern and ancient Greek—and her elegant bearing. During the first week of classes, she found herself confessing to a particularly intimidating Byzantine history professor that she would miss the first session of his seminar. She had a prior engagement: she was getting married.

  Macrakis received her master’s degree in history in 1955. She was pregnant with her first child, a son, while studying for her degree. She had her twin daughters a few years later. The family was doing well financially, and she had domestic help. What she didn’t have was any kind of outlet for her intelligent mind. She played tennis; she read mystery novels. She watched her husband work on his scholarship late into the night; she accepted that he would take his work seriously, because he was a man. Bored and listless, she thought of her Athenian mother, with her beautiful dresses and her styled hair, and she tried to become the same kind of woman. “There were certain things you were doing that you had accepted,” she said later, looking back on her housebound years. “I mean, that was life.”

  Her life changed in November 1960. “You know, I read a very interesting thing today,” Michael said to her one day. He was an avid New York Times reader, and he’d seen the announcement of the new program for female scholars. He explained the program to his wife: money, an office, time and space to think. “So what?” Macrakis replied. “I don’t have a PhD. I have three children that are under five.” But Michael was adamant that she apply. He always pushed her; while she was finishing her master’s thesis, he would send her upstairs to work while he finished the dinner dishes. (“My husband was the most pro-female person I have ever met,” she later said.) Macrakis relented, though she was sure they wouldn’t accept her. When she got a phone call from Connie Smith, informing her that she’d made it to the round of a hundred interviewees, she relaxed, because she was even more convinced: How could she win one of twenty spots? She didn’t even have a scholarly publication to her name. What she did have, as Smith later told her, were the best recommendation letters the selection committee had ever seen. She was accepted into the inaugural class of twenty-four Institute scholars (more women had been admitted than planned), along with Sexton, Kumin, and Swan. Years later, she called the Institute “my salvation.”

  Unlike some of the Institute scholars—unlike hundreds of thousands of women all over America—Macrakis already had domestic help when she applied for the Institute. What the Institute offered her was a sense of direction, a way back into her scholarly work. Each morning, her children bade her goodbye—“you’re going to the big school; we’re going to the small school,” they said—and she drove into Cambridge, where she sequestered herself in the stacks of Widener Library. The stacks were dim and labyrinthine, with innumerable rows of books. The space was dusty and a bit foreboding, but Macrakis loved working there. She would sit in one of the carrels that lined the perimeter of the floor and work for four uninterrupted hours on her study of the Greek politician Eleftherios Venizelos. She was loath to leave her hard-won work space, even
for the few minutes it would take to put another nickel in the parking meter. In what seemed to some like a wanton display of wealth, she used part of her Institute stipend to pay the parking tickets she accrued while her car languished on the streets of Cambridge.

  That first semester, Macrakis fell into a friendship with Sexton and Kumin, whom she referred to as “the poets.” An excellent cook, Macrakis regularly hosted Kumin and Sexton at her house in Belmont. They’d enjoy her Greek cooking and chat about their work. As the evening drew on, and the wine continued to flow, the three women would begin to talk about their private frustrations and fears. All three had tried to live the lives expected of them. Macrakis had been proud of herself for what she thought of as “doing my duty”: cooking, loving her husband and children. Kumin had willed herself to participate in all the rituals and practices of suburban life: the carpools, the dinner parties. It was as if, at long last, she had caved to those sorority girls who pestered her throughout her senior year of high school. Sexton had pursued the dream of domestic bliss fervently. “I thought that before I had children the answer was to have a home and children,” she once said. “I was always all my life striving for something I wanted. It was just that I never knew what it was I wanted.” Since thirteen, she had known she wanted to be married. She was so grateful to meet a suitable man, and she believed that having children would cure all her problems: “This feeling or frustration or whatever it is then would be gone.”

  Now, among each other, each confessed to her irritation with her children, her occasional disinterest in her husband. The friends admitted to their boredom with bridge parties and similar social offerings. “So you felt the same as me?” they would ask each other, reflecting on their lives before Radcliffe. “Because I felt like a prisoner.”

  The three friends swore that things would be different for their daughters. Just as the speaker of “The Fortress” worries that her daughter’s life will recapitulate her own, these women feared that their daughters would face the same oppressive expectations, the same pressure to conform. Would their daughters end up like caged creatures, stalking back and forth across the small plots allotted to them? Kumin worried about her middle daughter, Judith, then nine, who seemed like an “exact carbon copy of myself.” Unlike her own mother, Kumin wanted Judith to be different, to escape the pressure of social convention. She began to contemplate fleeing from the suburbs, perhaps to a farm somewhere. Sexton expressed similar fears. “I would just as soon they didn’t become writers,” she said once of her daughters. “I don’t want them to just try to become me.”

  The Institute hadn’t eliminated the conflict each woman occasionally felt between caring for her children and honing her craft. Sexton experienced this conflict most acutely. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, she watched her daughters at home, and they pestered her with requests typical of children under ten: “Can we play?” “Mommy, can I have 5 more kids in?” “Can you give them something to eat?” “Can I go here?” With lingering guilt about having been absent during their early years, Sexton did her best to meet her daughters’ needs. Sometimes, she stopped her work to play with them, or she read a story, or she talked with them about the progress they were making with the violin. She let them invite over friends, if only to stop the incessant ringing of the telephone. The Sexton backyard, improved by the pool, became a gathering place for the neighborhood kids.

  On other days, though, her frustration boiled over. “There are times when I shriek at them,” she confessed. “Get out of here. I’m working. No, I won’t talk to you. No. Mommy’s busy.” She could run into her study, but the odds were good that they would tap their small fists on the closed door. By November, a malaise had set in, and she again contemplated ending her life. One evening, she took an overdose of sleeping pills—more a gesture toward suicide than a deliberate act—and made notes on her forthcoming poetry manuscript for those who would publish it posthumously. She survived, though unhappily. “My writing, Bah, is terrible now,” she wrote to Olsen around this time. “Bah, I am a commonplace, or if not then why are the objects of my life not worth noting.”

  Sexton might have carved out a space for herself, but she was still surrounded by the objects of her prior life: her husband’s briefcase, glassware, her children’s dirty socks and shoes. Even her book-lined fortress was not impregnable.

  * * *

  —

  Well-to-do women weren’t supposed to complain. Prior to the Institute, the fellows, many of them reserved New Englanders, would never have spoken against the limitations the culture had placed on their lives; they might not have even acknowledged such restrictions to themselves. American women were supposedly the luckiest on the planet, content in their conformity. A 1962 issue of Harper’s described the American woman, approvingly, as “not very different from her mother or grandmother. She is equally attached to the classic feminine values—sexual attractiveness, motherly devotion, and the nurturing role in home and community affairs. She is no great figure in public life or the professions. And like most men, she is repelled by the slogans of old-fashioned feminism.”

  But soon enough, as they experienced what Kumin called the “instant sympathy” of the Institute, they began to speak more boldly about all they didn’t yet have.

  Not everyone wanted to hear their complaints. Educated women, and especially Radcliffe alumnae, proved to be a surprisingly hostile audience. One day during her first year at the Institute, Smith asked Macrakis to accompany her to a lunch at a local Junior League; she was hoping to do some fund-raising, and she needed a representative from the Institute, someone who could give the program a face. The two women were in a taxi on their way to the event when Smith, usually so sensitive to the fellows’ fears and needs, sprang on Macrakis that she, Macrakis, would need to give some remarks about her Institute experience. The young historian panicked. She hated public speaking—she was already dreading giving her seminar talk in the spring—but her companion soothed her. All you have to do, Smith said, is tell your story: say who you are, and how you got here. Macrakis nervously agreed.

  Just a few minutes later, Macrakis was standing in front of a crowd of fifty or so well-heeled women, trembling. She didn’t know any of them, but she knew that you had to have a “good name” to get into the Junior League. Their families must have been among the most powerful in Boston. Haltingly, she started to talk about the Institute, about her work and her household help and her husband’s support. She had barely finished when the attacks began. “You leave your children?” they asked incredulously. “Don’t you think that you are sacrificing the well-being of your children to your own ambition?” Never mind that Michael was supportive, or that the Macrakis children were perfectly happy to see their mother off in the mornings and come home to her in the afternoons. The women of the Junior League expressed skepticism that there was anything more important than a woman’s domestic responsibilities, or that the part-time program at the Institute offered a workable solution for all parties involved. They continued with their critical, cruel questions. Macrakis found herself largely caving to their objections, though she snuck in a few moments of self-defense. “This is war here,” she thought to herself. She was relieved when she was finally able to step out of view. She never forgot the event, nor did she forgive the women who so rudely questioned her commitment to her family and her children. Looking back on that lunch decades later, she expressed an antipathy untempered by time: “They were horrid…I hate them. I hate them.”

  The complaints of the Junior League women echoed earlier criticisms of the Institute, the kind that alumnae and others had written to Bunting upon the Institute’s announcement. These women felt personally slighted by Bunting’s project. They had thought they were doing everything right: they had fulfilled the homemaking mission that the culture had set out for them. And now here was this woman—odd, overeducated, and, in their eyes, unfeminine—suggesting that if they dedicated the
ir lives to their children, they were somehow worse mothers than if they’d pursued a career. The equation was absurd, and their anger was real. Despite Bunting’s repeated insistence that homemaking was important—she herself had loved her years at home—some women never softened their stance toward the Institute. Like communism and homosexuality, the Institute was yet another threat to the American family.

  During that first year, the fellows found themselves surveilled. As they strutted out their doors, books under their arms, lunches packed, they felt their neighbors’ eyes upon them. Kumin had dealt with this kind of opprobrium before; some of the women in her neighborhood had openly criticized her for working during the early years of her marriage. (It was not a choice, Kumin reflected later. They’d needed the money.) Now she felt guilty about her admission to the Institute, and she worried that she wouldn’t be able to write enough to justify receiving the grant. “There were friends and neighbors who acted sincerely pleased,” Kumin recalled, years later. “And there were acquaintances who spoke quite venomously about how lucky I was to have such a patient, longsuffering [sic] martyred husband and how nice it would be for the children who might not see more of their already parttime [sic] mother since it meant a year off from teaching.” Her neighbors were far more concerned about Kumin’s absences than her children were: now older, her kids were often out of the house. Like Macrakis, she was being charged with crimes against the American home.

  Macrakis knew how lucky she was to have an encouraging husband and how different her life would have been if she’d married badly, or too soon. A year after the Institute, while at her first teaching job, Macrakis would shock her students by refusing to admire their engagement rings. “Too early,” she would tell them. “You’re twenty-two!” She told graduating seniors they needed to see the world first, before they settled down and had children. “You never know if your husband will allow you to do certain things you want to do,” she warned them, “so you better be free.” For the rest of her life, Macrakis received letters from her former students in which they thanked her for steering them away from early marriage and showing them how a fulfilling life could be lived. “You saved me,” they wrote. Just as Radcliffe had been her salvation, she had been theirs.