The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Silences was a surprise success. In the late 1970s, with Marxist and feminist criticism already making inroads in the academy, the time was right for an argument like Olsen’s, one that showed how inequality shaped the literary canon. The writer Margaret Atwood praised the book in The New York Times Book Review. “It may be comforting to believe that garrets are good for geniuses, that artists are made in Heaven and God will take care of them,” she wrote. “But if you believe, as Tillie Olsen does, that writers are nurtured on Earth and nobody necessarily takes care of them, society cannot be absolved from the responsibility for what it produces or fails to produce in the way of literature.” The young writer Sandra Cisneros called Silences “the Bible.” The text was added to syllabi and continued to be used in college classrooms for decades (it’s less frequently assigned now). As the scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin put it in the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, “Silences changed what we read in the academy, what we write, and what we count; it also gave us some important tools to understand and address many of the literary, social, economic and political silencings of the present and the potential silencings of the future.”

  This was not the life, or the career, that Olsen had envisioned—not when she was an eager young writer covering the San Francisco strikes, nor when she first set out for Radcliffe, a middle-aged woman with one book under her belt. She had wanted to write novels; indeed, throughout her teaching years, she continued to apply for writing grants. She also revised some old fiction, including a manuscript from the 1930s about the struggles of working-class people in a Wyoming mining town. That manuscript was published as Yonnondio: From the Thirties in 1974. She then published a novella, Requa, later republished as Requa I, to indicate that the narrative remained incomplete. But for the most part, she spent her time talking and teaching, not writing. She became a revered feminist scholar and critic at a time when feminist criticism was sweeping through the academy. This wasn’t always easy on her family, and it wasn’t always easy on Olsen, who did not travel well. “She was gone a lot,” Julie remembered. “She was not around for my kids…She was just gone.” Jack missed his wife during her absences, too. But like Julie, he was “damn proud” of Olsen, who was making a name for herself as an intellectual and who was finally getting the recognition that she deserved.

  CHAPTER 17

  Springs of Creativity

  OLSEN WAS THE MOST POLITICALLY CONSCIOUS—and politically active—of the five Equivalents. She was not in her lifetime the most successful, nor the kindest, nor necessarily the most talented. But she saw the world differently from the other four women: she saw how creativity arises from material circumstances, how power is wielded against the vulnerable, and—crucially—how class, gender, and race intersect. Each of the others had her political insights—Pineda especially, who, along with her husband, helped plan the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam from her Brookline living room—but none rivaled Olsen’s.

  Olsen was clearly unnerved by the whiteness of the Radcliffe Institute. It’s possible that some of the other Equivalents noticed the racial problem as well: Pineda cared about the civil rights movement, and Kumin went on to champion writers of color, both publicly and privately, in years to come. But Olsen left the clearest record of her observations. There was not a single woman of color in the Institute’s first class of scholars. Race—like material circumstance—was not something the selection committee had considered, and none of the celebratory media coverage of the Institute mentioned its racial composition. Nor did anyone remark on the way that the Institute stipends—a crucial part of its plan to facilitate female creativity—often passed from the white women receiving Radcliffe’s largesse to women of color, who provided child care and household help so the scholars could work.

  Olsen had tried to address racism in her second Radcliffe Institute seminar talk in 1964, but she ended up talking around the issue. She noted that in contradistinction to her years in San Francisco, she was living in an “all-white community, a community where almost everyone I knew worked in professions that had some respect attached to it.” She called the Institute a “ghetto” and suggested that it would do the fellows well to get “outside of themselves.” But her critique wasn’t especially clear or forceful. Perhaps she was worried about seeming churlish and ungrateful; the Institute had given her so much, more than most of the other fellows received, and she might have hesitated before offering criticism. She might also have simply been characteristically shy and underprepared.

  Luckily, others spoke more loudly. On December 10, 1968, two dozen black female Radcliffe undergraduates occupied Fay House, where Bunting had her office and where, eight years before, Sexton, Kumin, and Swan had interviewed for admission to the Institute for Independent Study. The undergraduates were protesting for improvements in admissions. From 1955 to 1964, the college had only one black student, if that, per graduating class of roughly three hundred. The Radcliffe students wanted increased racial representation, black admissions officers, and the coordinated admission of black students. They had made a sign: “Radcliffe Commit Yourself NOW.” The college responded: the next year’s freshman class had thirty black students—a record high.

  By 1971, when the class of 1975 was admitted, the percentage of black students at the university had increased to 8.68 percent (in 1968, black students made up 4.24 percent of the undergraduate student body). Though activists past and present celebrated the victory, current student activists kept pushing for change. In April 1969, Harvard and Radcliffe students took over University Hall and demanded that the university, with the aid of students, recruit faculty for an African American studies department. Ultimately, they sought proportional representation of black students in both Radcliffe and Harvard Colleges.

  Keeping in step with the university, the Institute diversified its group of associate scholars. Though black women were never formally barred from admission, the Institute had not made any concerted effort to recruit or to admit them. This changed in the second half of the 1960s. In 1966, Alice Childress, a black playwright and novelist who had previously adapted Langston Hughes for the stage, won a fellowship at the Institute. During her two years there, she wrote Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, a play that described a forbidden interracial love affair in Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of World War I. In 1970, the Institute admitted at least one black woman, Florence Ladd, an environmental psychologist. The following year, it awarded a fellowship to a twenty-seven-year-old writer and teacher named Alice Walker. She would be at the Institute from the fall of 1971 through the spring of 1973.

  Walker came to the Institute for a few different reasons, but a big one was to get away from Jackson, Mississippi, where she had been living with her husband, the civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal, and their young daughter. Walker had found it difficult to write there. Her writing career had taken off in 1967, when an essay she wrote on the civil rights movement was published in the fall issue of The American Scholar. That same year, she received the first of two fellowships at the MacDowell Colony. Her first book followed soon after, in 1968. Many of the poems in Once, her debut poetry collection, were written while Walker was still at Sarah Lawrence College; she had transferred there from Spelman College, where she had studied with Howard Zinn. The Third Life of Grange Copeland—a novel begun in New York City, where Walker lived after college, and finished in Mississippi—described how white oppression produces domestic violence within the black community. It was published in 1970 to mixed reviews, some of which Walker found racist.

  Her career stalled in Mississippi. Walker was black, Leventhal was white, and though both were committed to the civil rights struggle, Walker suffered more from the intimidations and threats of violence that that they encountered in Mississippi. Interviewed on the occasion of the publication of her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Walker explained, “It’s very intimidating in Jackson. Living in
a hostile community can dry up your creativity.”

  Alice Walker, 1970s

  She applied to the Radcliffe Institute shortly after the novel’s publication, in the fall of 1970. In her application, she sketched out a plan for a novel about a young black woman at a black college much like Spelman who travels to East Africa (Walker visited Kenya during her undergraduate years) and falls in love with a man. She described the novel as “a love story in which the beloved is both a man and a continent.” The following March she learned that she had received a $5,000 fellowship, much of which would go to rent—she and her daughter, Rebecca, who was not yet two, moved into an apartment on Linnaean Street, near the Radcliffe Quadrangle—and child care. Though she would not be entirely free from mothering duties, the Radcliffe grant offered Walker a more peaceful atmosphere for her writing. In Cambridge, she wouldn’t have to monitor the windows for fear that a brick would come flying through one of them. She would instead struggle with language and literary history.

  But when she came to Radcliffe, she also found it hard to write in Cambridge. Her first year was marked by sickness—both she and Rebecca suffered from the flu—and writing frustrations. She requested a second year to finish her second novel, explaining that a “renewed fellowship would give me a much needed sense of freedom and possibility.” Meanwhile, she taught a course at Wellesley College on black women writers. She told an interviewer, “Though it’s often lonely without my family, I can do a lot of work with intensive time.”

  * * *

  —

  Walker’s presence at the Institute heralded the enduring strength and the new visibility of black feminists. Black feminism did not begin in the 1970s; to the contrary, black women’s organizing has a long history, with points of heightened visibility during abolitionism and the long civil rights movement. The fact that black women gained mainstream attention in the 1970s should not suggest that this was an initial or inaugural moment of black feminism.

  But questions of race and representation were attracting the attention of governmental and educational institutions, as well as feminist organizations. Around the time that Walker entered the Institute, rifts were forming in the women’s movement along racial lines. “As far as many Blacks were concerned, the emergence of the women’s movement couldn’t have been more untimely or irrelevant,” writes the historian Paula Giddings, whose book When and Where I Enter traces the history of black women’s activism in America. In the early 1960s, when sex discrimination and unequal wages first became national issues, black women—who, in contrast to the women portrayed in The Feminine Mystique, had long worked outside the home—were earning just over half of what their white counterparts did (at least when it came to full-time employment). When Friedan published her polemic against suburban domesticity, many black women were unmoved: they couldn’t recognize the problem (Friedan’s work “seemed to come from another planet,” Giddings writes), nor could they bring themselves to care much about a lack of personal fulfillment when their material problems were much more pressing. This isn’t to say women of color were entirely absent from the nascent women’s movement—Friedan’s friend Pauli Murray, the union organizer Aileen Hernandez, and the politician Shirley Chisholm were all among the founding members of NOW—but many of them regarded their white “sisters” with skepticism, even suspicion. “What do black women feel about Women’s Lib? Distrust,” concluded the novelist Toni Morrison in 1971. “Black women are not convinced that Women’s Lib serves their best interest or that it can cope with the uniqueness of their experience.” When asked in May 1971 by the poet Nikki Giovanni what she thought of women’s liberation, Ida Lewis, the former editor in chief of Essence, characterized it as “a family quarrel between white women and white men. And on general principles, it’s not good to get involved in family disputes.”

  Nonetheless, black women mobilized alongside and adjacent to white women throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Conflict was inevitable. One emblematic moment of strife occurred on August 26, 1970, when the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA)—a socialist feminist organization for women of color—arrived at a Women’s Liberation Day March in New York City, held in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage. The group wanted to use the occasion of the march to protest the prosecution of the radical black activist Angela Davis, who had gone underground to avoid arrest for her alleged assistance in a prison uprising; the TWWA members held a banner that read “Hands Off Angela Davis.” According to Frances Beal, a leader of TWWA, an angry leader of Friedan’s NOW told them, “Angela Davis has nothing to do with the women’s liberation.” Beal responded, “It has nothing to do with the kind of liberation you’re talking about but it has everything to do with the kind of liberation we’re talking about.”

  In addition to being active in the women’s movement, black women continued to work for civil rights and, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, for black liberation, a movement led by the Black Panthers that advocated for black self-determination. Their organizing during this period—most significantly for the right to benefit from state welfare programs, without being subjected to burdensome stipulations—represents but one chapter in the long history of black women’s activism, stretching back to the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, who documented lynchings in the 1890s, and including such women as the civil rights organizer Ella Baker and Mary McLeod Bethune, head of the National Association of Colored Women, both of whom were active in the 1940s and 1950s. As an activist, Walker was part of a long tradition of black female organizers.

  At the turn of the 1970s, however, black women found themselves in something of a bind when it came to gender politics. While white women fled the civil rights movement to start working for women’s liberation, black women were torn between their commitment to black liberation and their desire for gender equality, both in the movement and in the world at large. Unlike some of their white peers, who demonized white men as the oppressors, black women did not resent black men but rather hoped for their empowerment. They also didn’t feel the same way about abortion as many white women did, given that the movement for birth control had overlapped historically with eugenics; Margaret Sanger, who founded the first birth control clinic, held some eugenicist views. Both as enslaved people and as free citizens, black women had been forced to undergo sterilizations and abortions. At the same time, black women bristled at some of the edicts coming from prominent black men, such as Imamu Amiri Baraka, who instructed black women to be submissive, feminine, and fertile; as Giddings puts it, if certain Black Power leaders had gotten their way, black women would have been “politically barefoot and literally pregnant.” Black women needed their own institutions and manifestos that could speak to their position.

  In 1970, the black writer Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara) published an anthology titled The Black Woman. A collection of poems, stories, and essays by black women, the anthology both illustrated and articulated the roles black women could play in the liberation movements of the era. In “On the Issue of Roles,” Cade argued that the usual “sexual differentiation in roles is an obstacle to political consciousness” and that the revolutionary individual must have “total self-autonomy.” In her essay for the collection, Frances Beal articulated the unique and interlocking kind of oppression facing black women, calling it “double jeopardy.” (Hers was a theory of intersectionality avant la lettre.) Walker contributed a short story, “The Diary of an African Nun,” that critiqued religion and the oppression it encouraged. “If you really examine that book, you have to wonder why the black nationalists didn’t drop an atomic bomb on Toni,” reflected the poet Hattie Gossett, a friend of Bambara’s. The book demonstrated that black women would no longer play secondary roles in revolutionary movements. They had served others for long enough. Their moment was now.

  The anthology was the first in a series of revolutionary publications for black feminists. In the 1970s and 1980s, theorists such as Audre
Lorde (who contributed to The Black Woman), bell hooks, and Barbara Smith emerged as leading voices in the black feminist movement. In 1974, Toni Morrison collaborated with editors and collectors on The Black Book, a collection of photographs, articles, sketches, and other forms of African American material culture. These decades also saw the publication of more radical anthologies, such as All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (1982), and the founding of the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, a publishing organization by and for women of color. In the early 1980s, the Kitchen Table would publish two significant anthologies: Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; and Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. For many black women activists, print culture was politics: to write about the lives of black women, to represent these experiences, to create space for these stories, was itself a form of political work.

  Walker exemplified this ethic as much as anyone. During her years at the Institute, she committed herself to advancing black feminist politics in three different ways. The first was her literary writing. In addition to a handful of short stories and poems, later collected in In Love and Trouble and Revolutionary Petunias, respectively, Walker used her time at the Institute to work on her novel. She wrote much of the novel—published as Meridian in 1976—during her second year at the Institute. Meridian, set within the civil rights movement, turns on a love triangle between a black woman, a white woman, and a white man. Meridian is a “black woman who cannot lie and for whom ideas are simply real and to be acted upon with her life.” Like Walker, she commits herself to the civil rights movement, and—also like the author—she gets unexpectedly pregnant and struggles to balance her commitment to family with her commitment to the cause (she later voluntarily has her tubes tied). The novel ultimately sides with politics over motherhood and womanhood, though it warns that martyring oneself in the name of activism is a foolish and costly act. Meridian was well received; it merited a positive review from the novelist Marge Piercy, who, writing in The New York Times, called it a “fine, taut novel that accomplishes a remarkable amount.” With this novel, Walker had gained a firmer foothold in the American literary scene, transforming it as she did so.