The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  Lily Macrakis, the historian who had befriended Sexton and Kumin during the Institute’s first year, disagreed with Wilson’s statement. She fired off an angry note, lamenting the change to the Institute. Why did they have to bring men into this space? How could men possibly need more help? The doors were already open for them, but women, she argued, still needed to push—even at the turn of the twenty-first century. She joined a chorus of disgruntled former fellows, who had expressed their concerns to the Crimson before the decision was finalized. “It would be a completely different environment,” said one fellow, referring to the possibility of a coed institute. “You might as well stay at your home institution and feel like you’re one of the only women,” said another. Even Wilson, who approved of the change, acknowledged what had been lost. “It’s almost like magic,” she said, referring to the all-female institute. “It’s a comfortable community.”

  Today, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is dedicated to supporting “creative work in all disciplines—humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts,” performed by people of all identities.

  * * *

  —

  Seventeen years later, Macrakis was still angry about the end of the women-only institute. “Men have everything,” she fumed. It was the spring of 2016; Macrakis and I were sitting in her living room in Cambridge, just a few blocks from Harvard Square. Still an impeccable hostess, Macrakis had purchased Greek pastries from her favorite local bakery and prepared strong coffee. She insisted on refilling my cup nearly every time I took a sip.

  Macrakis felt passionately about the Institute because it had propelled her to a life that she loved. After her year as a fellow, she had taken a temporary teaching position at Regis College, a Catholic women’s college in Weston. It became a permanent job. She found she loved teaching. She stayed at Regis for forty years. From there, she became the dean of Hellenic College Holy Cross, a small Greek Orthodox college and seminary in Brookline. By the time we met, she was a professor emerita and a grandmother.

  Throughout our conversation, she emphasized how important the Institute had been for a woman like her, someone who was demure rather than demanding. She marveled at how timid she had been, at how much she’d been willing to accept. “I cannot say I was a fighter,” she confessed. It was the Institute that made her demand more from life, that gave her the confidence to accept challenging jobs and, when she was offered the deanship at Hellenic, to ask for a 40 percent raise. She felt like a changed woman.

  But she wasn’t sure the world itself had changed as much as we might think. “I think that we have to really talk a lot about men,” she said, speaking of the need for further gender equality. “In other words, how do you find good men to accept you?”

  “It’s a great question,” I responded, thinking of my own difficulties in that department.

  “Because I’m not sure at all,” she continued. “Men are not yet sure if this should happen. I can tell you that.”

  * * *

  —

  I’m not so sure, either.

  I started researching this book in the spring of 2016, during the final, frenzied months of the presidential campaign. I began writing it in the late fall of the same year, following the election of Donald Trump—a man who has been accused multiple times of sexual assault. I was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration: I had taken advantage of my university’s winter break to visit the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian, where I delved into the papers of Marianna Pineda and Barbara Swan. As I made the twenty-minute walk to and from the archives, I passed patriotic floats and protest signs. I overheard more than a few arguments between strangers on the street.

  The day after the inauguration, my archival research finished, I joined over 200,000 others in Washington, D.C., for the first Women’s March. It was both confusing and exhilarating. On the one hand, it seemed clear that the differences of race, class, and sexual orientation made the idea of a coherent “sisterhood” idealistic. On the other hand, I had never seen so many people concerned, at least superficially, with women’s equality. I couldn’t help but think of all the women’s marches I’d read about as I was researching: in New York City, in San Francisco, and right here in Washington, D.C. I had the sense that time was collapsing.

  I have had that same sense again and again over the last three years. As I worked, I felt that I had one eye on the sexism of the present and one on the sexism of the past, and yet my vision was remarkably unified. I wrote about how the Equivalents navigated male-dominated poetry workshops and art schools, while I read tweets about workplace sexual harassment, tagged with the hashtag #MeToo. I read about the depression and domestic violence that afflicted 1950s married mothers, while “public intellectuals” like Jordan Peterson argued for “enforced monogamy,” and self-styled “incels” (involuntary celibates) violently protested female sexual freedom. I revised my chapters on radical feminism while abortion access diminished across the country and Roe v. Wade came under threat.

  These similarities—across seventy years—make me wonder how much has changed since the founding of the Institute. To be sure, workplace discrimination and domestic violence are not nearly as prevalent as they were during the 1950s and 1960s—or at least not as prevalent for middle-class and upper-class white women. The formal equality granted by laws like Title VII and Title IX does mean something: for example, a person who loses a job on account of pregnancy can now sue (when this happened to Friedan, she had no legal recourse). But lawsuits are expensive and often lost. Sometimes, the risk of causing a fuss doesn’t seem worth it.

  As I watched women sharing stories of abuse and harassment in #MeToo posts, I thought about how the legal protections offered by Title VII and Title IX had allowed a lot of other suffering to go unnoticed. Were these industries—Hollywood, academia, the federal government, literary New York—truly open to women? Sure, we didn’t need our husbands’ approval to publish a piece of writing, as Kumin once did, but perhaps we still needed male benefactors or protectors who could vouch for our seriousness and keep the predators away? I scrolled through Twitter and read the news, thinking as I did of the women who had fought like hell to make our country much better than it currently is.

  Not all the resemblances I noticed between my era and the 1960s and 1970s were frightening; some were enlivening. The years during which I wrote this book have also been years of resurgent activism: Black Lives Matter protests, strikes and walkouts at universities and throughout the media industry, and more Women’s Marches, in the nation’s capital and elsewhere. As someone who grew up during the relative complacency of the Clinton presidency, I marveled at seeing people regularly take to the streets. The vibrant protest culture of the 1960s didn’t seem as unimaginable to me as it once had.

  More than that, over the course of the past few years, I noticed literature that built upon the work of Sexton, Kumin, and Olsen. Confessional writing was everywhere. I read memoirs, personal essays published on women’s websites, and works of “autofiction,” writing that deliberately blurred the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. In fact, confessional writing was so pervasive (and profitable for the sites that published it) that by the time I finished this book, the backlash had begun. (In 2017, two different critics declared the personal essay dead.) I also noticed that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the literature of motherhood took a new turn: female writers described the messiness of motherhood—both physical and emotional—with candor and complexity. Elena Ferrante, Rivka Galchen, Sheila Heti, Meaghan O’Connell, Maggie Nelson—these writers described pregnancy, labor, and child rearing in compelling works of fiction and nonfiction. Their stories were untraditional: Galchen’s book was epigrammatic and formally innovative, while Nelson’s narrative explored ideas about gender, heterosexuality, and family. These women weren’t the first writers to use motherhood as material for their art, but—unlike the Equivalents
—they were critically acclaimed, successful, and rarely scolded for being too “personal,” as Sexton had once been. It seemed to me that the Equivalents had cleared the way for innovative, intimate writing by women—the kind of writing now in the critical spotlight.

  * * *

  —

  As a historian, I have tried to get as close as I could to the 1960s and 1970s, decades of literary innovation and civil unrest. I read books; I sifted through archives; I watched documentaries. I visited Joanna Fink, Swan’s daughter, at Alpha Gallery, the gallery founded by Alan Fink. It used to be on Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay, close to the building in which Sexton took that first poetry class. I arrived at its new location in Boston’s South End on a cold January afternoon, and I sat for hours talking with Joanna about her mother’s career while admiring paintings by Swan and her Museum School friends.

  In the winter of 2017, a friend and I visited Olsen’s daughter Julie and her husband, Robert, in Soquel, California. They live in the same small house where Olsen in her later years had lived and worked. My friend—a labor historian and union organizer—and I fell into an easy conversation with the older couple about labor history and leftist politics. We drank herbal tea and tried to glimpse the ocean from the west-facing window. I felt a kinship with Julie, who also taught undergraduates. I hoped that in my own small way—as a teacher, a writer, and a union organizer myself—I could be part of a long tradition of feminism in this country.

  I knew that the women who had gone before me—Polly Bunting, Betty Friedan, Alice Walker, and each of the five Equivalents—had fought hard, and under difficult conditions, to change their lives and the lives of the women they knew and loved. Their most important insight, to my mind, is that women’s creative and intellectual lives are shaped by their material conditions and that those conditions must change if women are to be the artists, the writers, the mothers, and the minds that they want to be. Those who dedicated themselves to the feminist cause, Olsen among them, refused to give up even when factionalism and cultural backlash pushed the feminist movement from the mainstream.

  This work continues today. It demands new strategies and tactics, befitting a different historical moment. A women-only space like the Institute might not be right for the twenty-first century, a time when the gender binary is being increasingly challenged. And, as the theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw has argued, women who occupy different racial and class positions experience sexism differently; it is thus hard to imagine how a single policy solution could serve all women equally (though state-sponsored child care comes close). But this isn’t a reason to repudiate institutions like the Institute; it is instead a reason to understand them and to adapt their ideas and approaches to our own time. How could institutions—educational and otherwise—better support women? How could universities work to eradicate ongoing gender disparities? How can we, as writers and thinkers, be bold, creative—even revolutionary?

  When Polly Bunting was later asked why so many women responded to her “messy experiment”—why they called the office nonstop, sent letter after letter, applied year after year—she responded modestly: “We spoke to their condition.” Women today live under new conditions. It is time for another messy experiment and for a new group of women to speak.

  Acknowledgments

  The Radcliffe Institute was founded on an idea: when provided with institutional support and intellectual community, artists, writers, and scholars will produce better work than they would on their own. I can attest to this idea’s validity. Over the course of the four years I worked on The Equivalents, I benefitted from the support of so many people and institutions. The book that resulted is infinitely better thanks to their help; any errors are my own.

  First, thank you to LuAnn Walther, whose insightful editing made this book truer, smarter, and more engaging. Thanks to Catherine Tung for wonderful, thorough editing and patient assistance with book production. Thanks to Anna Kaufman and Ellie Pritchett for stepping in to see this book toward its conclusion. I cannot thank Elias Altman enough for his faith in me and in this project since its earliest days. He has guided me through some challenging times, and I am very grateful.

  Rena Cohen has been a wonderful research assistant and has helped with so many different parts of the book. Jeanie Reiss fact-checked the manuscript carefully and saved me from errors. Dan Novak offered invaluable legal counsel.

  This book would not exist without the librarians and archivists who catalogue archival sources and help researchers use them. I am grateful to librarians and archivists at the following places: the Harry Ransom Center, the Schlesinger Library, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Stanford’s Special Collections and University Archives, and the Archives of American Art. Special thanks to Diana Carey, Tim Noakes, and Ellen Shea for their help.

  I was honored to speak with people with first-hand and second-hand knowledge of the Institute. I am especially grateful to relatives of the Equivalents who spoke with me. Thank you to Julie Olsen Edwards, Joanna Fink, Daniel Kumin, Lily Macrakis, Kathie Olsen, Linda Gray Sexton, and Nina Tovish. I am especially grateful to Julie for granting me permission to quote at length from Olsen’s unpublished writing.

  Anastatia Curley, Merve Emre, Andrew Martin, Charles Petersen, Gabriel Winant, and Stephen Squibb all read parts of the manuscript. They are smart and dear friends, and their suggestions made the book much better.

  This book builds on the work of many scholars, critics, and historians. They are all credited in the notes, but a few deserve special mention here: Stephanie Coontz, Alice Echols, Paula Giddings, Elaine Tyler May, Panthea Reid, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Ruth Rosen. The work of Diane Middlebrook inspired me to pursue this project. There are also some feminist thinkers and writers who have influenced me greatly, though they are not discussed extensively in the book. They include Kimberlé Crenshaw, Nancy Fraser, Silvia Federici, and Arlie Hochschild.

  There are very many people at Harvard University who deserve my gratitude. I have taught in the Harvard Writing Program since 2014; in that time, the Program has supported my work in many ways. Thanks to Karen Heath, Tom Jehn, and Rebecca Skolnik. This project was supported by a Fuerbringer Grant for professional development as well as a grant for manuscript preparation.

  Thank you to Harvard’s History and Literature, an ideal place for a young scholar to work and teach. Particular thanks to Kevin Birmingham, Jordan Brower, Jenni Brady, Caitlin Casey, Alex Corey, Thomas Dichter, Lauren Kaminsky, Lynne Feeley, Tim McCarthy, Kristen Roupenian, and Duncan White. Thank you to my students and advisees, who made sharp observations about the past and future of feminism. I have learned much from them, especially from Megan Jones, who introduced me to the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in her outstanding senior thesis.

  Thanks to the faculty and graduate students of the Harvard University Department of English, where I learned many of the skills needed to research and write this book. Thanks especially to Lawrence Buell, Glenda Carpio, Philip Fisher, and Luke Menand, the last of whom taught me how storytelling could be its own form of scholarly argument. Thanks as well to members of the American Colloquium, especially Nick Donofrio, and to participants in the New England Americanists Workshop, especially David Hollingshead and Jennifer Schnepf. Alison Chapman and Kathryn Roberts have supported me in infinite ways since our earliest days in graduate school together.

  I’m lucky to live among many thoughtful, brilliant, passionate people in Cambridge. Tim Barker, James Brandt, Jon Connolly, Katrina Forrester, Laura Kolbe, Jamie Martin, Rachel Nolan, Ben Tarnoff, Kirsten Weld, and Moira Weigel all offered intellectual inspiration. Anya Kaplan-Seem, who was also part of this community, improvised a writing retreat for me on a farm in upstate New York.

  Ming-Qi Chu, Jessica Loudis, Rachel Mannheimer, Hannah Rosefield, and Annie Wyman have all provided me with the female community that the women in this book sought and found. I am lucky to know them.


  My parents, Diane and Jay, encouraged my love of books and taught me, from a young age, about gender equality. My sister, Ana, and my brother, Jack, have filled my life with humor, affection, and a lot of fun.

  Max Larkin, a brilliant thinker and a gifted writer, read every page of this book—many of them multiple times—and told me how each page could be better. His enthusiasm for the project, and for the art of storytelling itself, kept me going when I was flagging. With him, I have thought more deeply, talked more passionately, and laughed more joyfully than I ever thought possible. I am so grateful for him, and for the life we have made together.

  Notes

  Introduction

  golf course: Linda Gray Sexton, interview by author, 12 Feb. 2019.

  work at home: Sexton to Brother Dennis Farrell, 16 July 1962, in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. Lois Ames and Linda Gray Sexton (Boston: Mariner Books, 2004), 142.

  “wooden tower”: Ibid.