Eventually, Kumin opened up to the public about her friendship with Sexton. She wrote an introduction for The Awful Rowing Toward God. Before her death, Sexton had asked for the book jacket to feature a Pineda statue. The statue was one of Pineda’s more abstract ones, a curved, life-sized sculpture that had looked, to Sexton, like a woman bent over as if rowing. (There are a couple of Pineda’s works that fit this description: Figure Bending over Another Figure and Sculpture of a Woman Bending to Embrace a Reclining Figure.) This would have been Sexton’s first collaboration with Pineda, another instance of the Equivalents inspiring each other across artistic media. But after Sexton’s death, the Houghton Mifflin design team refused to abide by her wishes. They pointed out that the sculpture would look like an unidentifiable lump on a book jacket. They proposed a text-only cover design, something quite different from the rest of Sexton’s books. Linda—who, as her mother’s literary executor, was in charge of making decisions about the publication of posthumous works—persuaded the design team to go with a sketch of Sexton done by Swan. It was Swan’s final gift to her friend.
Several years later, Kumin wrote a touching remembrance of Sexton, called “How It Was,” a foreword to Sexton’s Complete Poems, published in 1981. In the essay, she reminisced about their first meeting, discussed the transformations in Sexton’s poetry, and touched on Sexton’s troubles at the end of her life. She concluded by placing her friend in the canon of groundbreaking female poets—those who had paved the way for the radical writing and organizing of the 1970s. “Before there was a Women’s Movement, the underground river was already flowing, carrying such diverse cargoes as the poems of Bogan, Levertov, Rukeyser, Swenson, Plath, Rich, and Sexton.”
In early 1976, nearly two years after Sexton’s death, Kumin and Vic left the Boston suburbs for good. “We left the comforts of central heating for woodstoves, dependable wattage for frequent power outages due to storms, and shades in every window, as well as downstairs curtains, for a wide-open lifestyle,” Kumin wrote in a later memoir. They were now permanent residents of the state of New Hampshire. Kumin felt free. She was done with social niceties, with dinner parties and guest lists and gossip. She was done, too, with a life that had required being on call at all hours, with reading the signs of suicidal desires and responding to Sexton’s alarms. In a poem written after Sexton’s March 1973 suicide attempt, Kumin described the awful responsibility of keeping her friend alive. “I stopped you a dozen times, I was / the linebacker prying the pills out of your hand / calmly ordering the ambulance / teaching your classes / covering up and angry every time / furious you’d want to leave me behind.” She had always known that Sexton would “one more time come unglued.”
Kumin missed so much about Sexton—“the instant criticism…the kind of ongoing complete encouragement of whatever piece I pick up”—but she also recognized the ways that the loss of her friend had enabled her to start a new phase of life.
“It would be blinking the truth if I didn’t say that Annie’s death freed me at last to move to the country,” Kumin wrote to a friend the fall after she had moved north. “The lifestyle seems to agree with us—we both immediately lost ten lbs & got brown and tough from the outdoor work—our horses are thriving & we are very insular.” Kumin would remain on PoBiz Farm, happily picking berries and birthing foals, until her death in 2014.
* * *
—
“We have had enough suicidal women poets, enough suicidal women, enough of self-destructiveness as the sole form of violence permitted to women,” wrote Adrienne Rich in 1974, in a eulogy for Sexton. Rich was living in New York City and teaching at City College when she heard the news. Some of her students and friends wanted to hold a memorial for Sexton, and Rich wanted to “try to speak to the question of identification which a suicide always arouses”; in other words, she wanted to speak to women who might identify with Sexton’s self-destructive impulses.
Though Sexton and Rich had come up in the same Boston poetry scene, they had not been close. They had met once or twice; they congratulated each other on publications and prizes. Rich once asked Sexton to help her translate some poems by a South African poet (they were written in Afrikaans), and Sexton asked Rich for a Guggenheim recommendation. While Sexton’s close friends like Kumin and Swan wrote personal remembrances, Rich wrote a remembrance that treated Sexton as a representative of feminist consciousness—which, sort of despite herself, she had indeed come to be. “She wrote poems alluding to abortion, masturbation, menopause, and the painful love of a powerless mother for her daughters, long before such themes became validated by a collective consciousness of women, and while writing and publishing under the scrutiny of the male literary establishment,” she wrote of Sexton. (Rich remembered the old masters well.) “Her head was often patriarchal, but in her blood and her bones, Anne Sexton knew.”
Now Sexton, like Plath, was dead. But Rich argued that suicide was not the only way that women destroyed themselves. “Self-trivialization is one. Believing the lie that women are not capable of major creations.” “Horizontal hostility” was another, by which Rich meant “the fear and mistrust of other women, because other women are ourselves.” The list went on: “misplaced compassion,” and addiction—to sacrificial love, to sex, to drugs, and to depression, which Rich called “the most acceptable way of living out a female existence.” Rich named these self-destructive impulses in order to encourage other women to purge themselves of “this quadruple poison” so that they would have “minds and bodies more poised for the act of survival and rebuilding.” What Sexton’s poetry offered, Rich wrote, was work that “tells us what we have to fight, in ourselves and in the images patriarchy has held up to us. Her poetry is a guide to the ruins, from which we learn what women have lived and what we must refuse to live any longer.”
Rich’s remembrance signaled that a kind of militant feminism had infiltrated the literary world, both its theory and its practice. Whereas Sexton had once been maligned for her poems about birth and body parts (recall Dickey’s criticism of “the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience”), she was now celebrated for her prescience and her guidance. As Kumin explained in a private letter, Sexton was writing truths about women’s lives long before there was a women’s movement. Poems like “Menstruation at Forty” and “Abortion” “came not out of any sense of herself as iconoclast, ground-breaker, exhibitionist, but from a direct need to say them,” Kumin explained to a friend. “She was the most honest person I ever knew.” By 1974, it was not only acceptable to write poetry out of personal experience but also, as Rich argued, politically necessary. One way women could thwart their self-destructive impulses was by reading work, like Sexton’s, that presented “images patriarchy has held up to us,” in all their fixed perfection, and then, line by line, undid them. For women, writing was more than self-expression, more than therapy. It was a matter of life or death. As Olsen once said, “Every woman who writes is a survivor.”
Rich used Sexton’s work to ground her argument about poetry as feminist practice, but she might equally well have used her own. Like many women in America, Rich had spent the 1960s undergoing a personal and political transformation. She had begun as the proper Boston poet, a formalist whose work was praised for its quietness and modesty. In 1963—a year after Sexton published All My Pretty Ones, a collection that is in large part about her relationship with her parents—Rich published Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, a much more personal collection than her earlier work, much of it written in blank verse. “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters,” she declared in the title poem, a crusade against chivalry as well as male standards of art and thought. In step with other women of her generation, and arguably a year or so ahead of them, Rich was becoming a feminist.
Rich started to become politically active when she moved to New York with her family, started teaching, got involved in antiracist and antiwar organizing in the city, and soon started sp
outing the “Women’s Lib rap” to close friends. She separated from her husband in 1970. In the years immediately following her separation, 1971–1972, Rich composed the poems that would solidify her reputation as a forceful feminist poet. They were later collected in Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972. The poems, especially the title poem, cracked something open in many women readers: when the writer Margaret Atwood first heard Rich read the poems aloud, she “felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer.” Rich won the National Book Award for the collection. She insisted that Alice Walker and Audre Lorde accompany her to the ceremony and help her accept the prize on behalf of all women. It was a resonant action that symbolized, among other things, a changing of the guard.
* * *
—
In February 1977, Rich wrote a letter to Olsen about one of their shared favorite writers, Virginia Woolf. Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary scholar who had spoken at the MLA conference and who had interviewed Kumin and Sexton several months before the latter’s death, had just published a new work on British women novelists, A Literature of Their Own. Rich wondered if Showalter would have written the book slightly differently if she hadn’t been haunted by “the academic version of the ‘Angel in the House,’ ” a nineteenth-century ideal of self-sacrificing womanhood. (In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf suggests that the woman writer must kill off this angel in order to write.) The book’s conclusion, as Rich paraphrased it, explained “that the ‘room of our own’ is not enough: we must find community, collectivity.” Rich agreed:
I believe profoundly that the woman artist, even if she can find the space and support herself in it, must not fall into the trap of working, or trying to work, in isolation. But even Woolf implies…that a female community must come into being.
For several years in the 1960s, Olsen had immersed herself in this kind of female community. Though she found other creative communities over the course of her life—at MacDowell, in San Francisco, at academic conferences across the nation—she never found any quite like the community of the Radcliffe Institute. In fact, Olsen returned there for a second fellowship in the mid-1980s, but it produced neither the work nor the friendships that the first one had inspired. Few relationships in Olsen’s life ever rivaled those she had with the Equivalents.
For thirty-nine years, from 1960 to 1999, female community thrived at the Institute. In 1978, the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study was renamed the Bunting Institute after its founder. Bunting herself had left Radcliffe by that point; she’d served as president until 1972, then had worked for several years as a special assistant to the president of Princeton, William Bowen, who, like Bunting, was interested in enacting coeducation. Bunting had hoped to merge Radcliffe and Harvard during her presidency, and though Harvard’s president, Nathan Pusey, was sympathetic to the cause, alumni of both colleges resisted the change. The result was something called the “non-merger merger,” enacted in June 1971, that merged many aspects of the two institutions while preserving Radcliffe’s control of its property and endowment. Harvard College took control of the undergraduate educations of all Radcliffe students, feeding, housing, and educating the female undergraduates alongside their male classmates, even though these same women applied to and graduated from Radcliffe. It was an imperfect solution, but one that satisfied many current and prospective students at both Radcliffe and Harvard, who wanted a coeducational experience. The non-merger merger, like the Institute, became a part of Bunting’s legacy.
Always energetic, Bunting continued to pursue new life experiences. In 1979, she married Dr. Clement A. Smith, a pediatrician who had been a friend of hers for the past eighteen years. Sixty-eight at the time of her second marriage, Bunting found her life with “Clem” to be “quite wonderful.” They split time between Cambridge and Vermont, and as they both aged, gardening and bird-watching began to supplant formal dinners and academic events. Bunting died on January 21, 1998. She had witnessed and brought about so much change.
By the time Bunting left academia, at the beginning of the 1980s, American higher education was quite different than it had been when she started her deanship at Douglass. The majority of Ivy League colleges were coed, Title IX had passed, and—partly as a result of the first of these events—the Seven Sisters declined in prestige. Soon enough, there were no longer separate schools or separate spheres for women; they fought their way into the Gothic buildings of Yale and Princeton and into the halls of power.
But the Institute endured as a place where women could think and work together. In Radcliffe Yard, women came out of isolation to collaborate, complain, and exchange work and affection both. Over the course of its existence as a women-only space, the Institute hosted many important scholars and artists, including the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, the activist Kathleen Cleaver, the novelist Jayne Anne Phillips, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and the psychologist Carol Gilligan, who wrote her groundbreaking theory of gender difference, In a Different Voice, while there. What had started as a “messy experiment” with twenty-four mostly local women had become an established institution of national renown.
* * *
—
In October 1976, two years after Sexton’s death, Kumin wrote a letter to Rich, whose groundbreaking book Of Woman Born, about the “institution of motherhood,” had just been excerpted in Ms. magazine. In this radical work, Rich distinguished the patriarchal vision of motherhood—its depiction of motherhood as a kind of “sacred calling”—from the actual caretaking of children. “The institution of motherhood is not identical with bearing and caring for children,” Rich explained, “any more than the institution of heterosexuality is identical with intimacy and sexual love. Both create the prescriptions and the conditions in which choices are made or blocked; they are not ‘reality’ but they have shaped the circumstances of our lives.” Rich aimed to deconstruct the ideology of motherhood so that women could love and live more freely.
Of Woman Born was groundbreaking, but its path had been laid by those who wrote about motherhood before Rich did: by Sexton and Olsen, and by Kumin herself. Though Kumin had been the least disclosing of the Equivalents, the least inclined to use her personal experience as material for her poetry, she too had broken taboos, and she had been part of a female community that enabled writers and artists to do the same. Rich’s words resonated with Kumin, who wrote one of the relatively few fan letters that can be found in Kumin’s archives. “How lucid and exact and fair this is!” she wrote to Rich. She spared Rich her memories of her own thwarted mother, but she said that she understood why Rich had taken up this project, and that she celebrated both the book and the woman who had written it.
Her letter indicated how much had changed in Boston since the days of Lowell and Holmes. Men no longer dominated the poetry scene, and women no longer felt unfeminine competing in it, as Rich had complained decades earlier. More and more, female solidarity was replacing female anxiety. Now there was a community of creative women who came together, broke apart, and then reconnected, through letters and love. Kumin closed her letter with words that captured the gratitude that the Equivalents and the women of the Radcliffe Institute felt for each other, and that we, in turn, might feel for them: “I just wanted to say hooray for what you’ve written.”
Epilogue
ONE MINUTE AFTER MIDNIGHT on October 1, 1999, Harvard and Radcliffe formally merged. The Harvard Crimson explained how “a greater acceptance of educated women in society and the unusual circumstances of history required Radcliffe to continuously redefine its role.” Since the “non-merger merger,” undergraduates at Radcliffe had enjoyed a sort of “dual citizenship” status at the university: they applied to Radcliffe College, but they were educated in Harvard classrooms, by Harvard faculty, and with Harvard students. They lived in coed dormitories; before the “non-merger merger,” all Radclif
fe undergraduates had lived in the Radcliffe Quadrangle. Upon graduation, Radcliffe seniors received two diplomas, one from each college. But once the merger went into effect, all 3,071 Radcliffe undergraduates became Harvard College students. Radcliffe ceased to exist as an independent college. As The Washington Post, which covered the merger, put it, “Because Radcliffe long ago abdicated its role in undergraduate life, the emotional fallout from sentimental ‘Cliffies’ is likely to be more dramatic than any actual changes on this Ivy League campus.”
But there was one major change: Radcliffe College became the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, an institution that was open to men as well as women and that replaced the all-female Bunting Institute. Once Radcliffe merged with Harvard, it could no longer, under Title IX, support a single-sex institution; if it did so, it would forgo federal funding. In an interesting twist, the merger ended up flooding the Institute with money: Radcliffe transferred all of its $200 million assets to Harvard upon merging, but it then received $150 million back—with a matching amount from Harvard’s endowment—in order to fund the coed Institute for Advanced Study. Linda S. Wilson, Radcliffe’s seventh president, affirmed that all this was “cause for celebration.” President of Radcliffe for ten years, Wilson stepped down from her position after the merger took place. She was the last president of Radcliffe; from there on out, the Radcliffe Institute, like Harvard University’s professional schools, has been headed by a dean.
The Equivalents Page 34