E. M. Forster said it best: “only connect.” The context of this famous epigraph to Howard’s End has a sexual subtext. The imperative phrase occurs immediately after Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox share their first kiss. A kiss that joins “the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no more.”
“Only connect” could also serve as an apt thematic echo that resonates through Maggie Doherty’s rewarding literary history and group biography, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s.
It was microbiologist Mary Ingraham Bunting, president of Radcliffe College, who, in 1960, had the foresight and fortitude to create the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She recognized the need for women to invent themselves, to create a community that dealt with the affairs of the mind.
What she deemed a “messy experiment” was an “unprecedented fellowship program” that “targeted a ubiquitous and yet marginalized class of Americans: mothers.” It was “designed to combat the ‘climate of unexpectation’ … [of] the ‘intellectually displaced.’” Applicants were required to have either a doctorate or “the equivalent” of success in an artistic field.
Those selected would be given a fellowship stipend — up to $3,000, today worth nearly $25,000 — office space, and a seat in a female circle, “the likes of which had never been seen before in the country’s history.” Predicated on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the program gave each woman personal space in a “little yellow house at 78 Mount Auburn Street” not far from Harvard Yard. She wrote, “When the group connects, it does so as a coterie of like minds, of creative endeavors, and for a common cause.”
Doherty focuses on the first two years of the Institute and, from among the first 24 enrollees (there were originally supposed to be 20 but there were many more qualified applicants), she focuses on five representative individuals. Perhaps because much has already been written about the poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, they receive most of the attention. Doherty also reflects on Tillie Olsen, a fiction writer involved with communist organizations who aspired to write the great proletarian novel; Barbara Swan, a portraitist; and Marianna Pineda, a sculptor.
Sexton and Kumin were especially close friends. Although they lived “just a few miles away from each other” in Newton, Massachusetts, it took a poetry workshop taught by John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education to bring the women together. Both had children who leached hours away from their creative impulses. Encouraged by mutual aspirations, they phoned each other regularly, critiquing lines, discussing form and function. It wasn’t long before Kumin’s kids swam in Sexton’s pool and the two poets became “friend and confidante, collaborator and colleague.”
Sexton’s suicide on October 24, 1974 led to Kumin’s memorialization of their intimate friendship. Only a few months later, her poem “How It Is,” appeared in the New Yorker. Kumin evokes wearing Sexton’s “blue jacket”: “Shall I say how it is in your clothes.” She imagines arranging “together in a different collage,” the last day, “back from the death car idling in the garage, / back up the stairs.” The encomium ends with how her “Dear friend … excited crowds with your example,” and what it is like “leaning my ribs against this durable cloth / to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.”
One of Doherty’s achievements is her incisive explication of many of the friends’ poems, often placing the work in the context of their lives. From Sexton’s early “Music Swims Back to Me” with its “knack for image making” as it recalls vivid details from a mental institution, to Kumin’s first poem, sold for $5 to the Christian Science Monitor, a four-line snippet which introduces her lifelong embrace of the natural world. Kumin’s “tranquility” seems balanced against Sexton’s “tenseness.”
At the Institute, as in life, the poets seemed inseparable. Obligated to present seminars in which participants talked about their work, Sexton and Kumin gave a joint workshop. Kumin relied on “detailed, loving descriptions of the physical world,” blending “domestic and natural imagery.” Lightning bugs “sealed in a milk jar ‘winked and sulked.’” For 45 minutes, drawing on her teaching experiences at Tufts, Kumin spoke about “form being terribly important” to her; it granted her “control over her feelings.”
When Sexton took up her half of the evening, her reading skills as a “talented performer … belied her intense anxiety.” Not being a scholar, she “felt anxious about baring her soul … and she couldn’t hide behind discussions of the lyric tradition.” She apologized for not being “’awfully well-prepared,’” for not giving the kind of instruction her friend did because “she didn’t really understand what she called the ‘technical stuff.’” Her poems ranged from one set “’a thousand doors ago’” to one about her father’s funeral. She explained to her rapt audience that the “’I’ of a poem was not as simple or straightforward as they might think.” Her personal poetry often “used another character: ‘someone else that I wasn’t, or that I couldn’t have been, or that I imagined I was.’”
Tillie Olsen felt the most disconnected from the group, an outsider. While most of the other women were from the east coast, she was from San Francisco. But she had in common with them the primary prerequisite for all the candidates: she was a mother.
Once a literary celebrity in the 1930s, Olsen dropped out during the 1940s and 1950s to raise four children, “doing community organizing, and working a bunch of day jobs to support her family.” It was her political involvement, her revolutionary short stories, and her impassioned commitment to social injustice that placed her in the forefront of feminism working to liberate those hemmed in by a misogynistic system.
Sexton and Olsen met on paper through a publishing coincidence that put their writing in the same anthology, New World Writing (1960). Sexton’s short story, “Dancing the Jig” (drawn from her troubled relationship with her mother) appeared with Olsen’s “Tell Me A Riddle” (narrated from the last months of an old woman’s life). Olsen’s story struck Sexton as the “ideal representation of a difficult mother.” An inveterate letter writer, Sexton wrote to Olsen, praising the “human key” of the story. They struck up a correspondence which led the poet to encourage the activist to apply to the Institute. Once there, she made an indelible mark on the gathering. Later, teaching at Amherst, Olsen sought every effort to diversify the literary canon. Her syllabus for a course in “Literature of Poverty, Oppression, Revolution, and the Struggle for Freedom” included W. E. B. Dubois, Richard Wright, James Agee, and Agnes Smedley.
Olsen’s seminar presentation for the Institute was unlike any the fellows had heard before. She originally titled her speech “Women.” It morphed into an essay published by Harper’s (1965) titled “Silences: When Writers Don’t Write.”
Instead of a “friendly” delivery about “specific works in progress,” hers was a “wide-ranging, impassioned, and overtly political two-hour talk.” She “contrasted the words of silenced writers with reflections by artists who had found ways to sustain their creative work: “Conditions demanded by the creative process were elusive to “the working class, the uneducated, people of color, women.” If creative work demanded “solitude and immersion,” Olsen asserted that it was “no wonder” that “’no mother of children has written greatly.’” It was the Institute’s goal to change that.
Barbara Swan and Marianna Pineda were the non-writers of the group. Nevertheless, they forged friendships — personal and artistic — with the others. Swan’s distinctive drawings appear on many of Sexton’s covers (most notably the two faces turned towards each other on the Pulitzer Prize winning Live or Die), and as illustrations in Kumin’s Up Country. An expressive sketch of Sexton “crosshatched quickly” captured a “taut energy.” Kumin’s makes her appear “gentle.” What Swan delineated and underscored was how the “two poets complemented each other.”
(left: “Portentous”] Pineda’s sculptures reinforce the focus of the Institute. They identify a woman “at once a figure and an idea, a symbol and a person.” She saw the female body as a “vessel for knowledge,” an “oracle that was powerful but not menacing … she offered what help she could to those who wished to know more about the mysteries of the world.” Her Aspects of the Oracle series, produced while she was a fellow, each suggested different moods — “ecstatic, rapturous, jubilant, accusative, portentous, and exhausted.” “Portentous” may be found today in a corner of Radcliffe Yard. Another commissioned piece, The Spirit of Lili’uokalani, a bronze installed on the south side of the Hawai’i State Capitol, is her favorite for its embodiment of “women’s spiritual powers.”
Doherty’s research is exhaustive but not exhausting to absorb. Although her study is mainly devoted to the elite gang of five, she also introduces other figures and shapers of the zeitgeist of the 60’s and its various social, political, and literary aspects. There is an early appearance of Sylvia Plath and her exchanges with Sexton, and of Betty Friedan working with Olsen on the material that would eventually become the groundbreaking Feminine Mystique.
She takes note of the fact that there was “not a single woman of color in the Institute’s first class of scholars.” This changed by 1966 when Alice Childress, a playwright and novelist who adapted Langston Hughes for the stage, received a fellowship. By 1971, 27-year old Alice Walker became a member of the group. In 1978, the organization was renamed the Bunting Institute after its founder. Subsequently, Anna Deavere Smith, Kathleen Cleaver, Jayne Anne Phillips, and others carried on with the directive of the “Equivalents [who] had cleared the way for innovative, intimate writing by women.”
As a historian, Doherty brings the past to bear on the present state of activism. She observes resemblances between the then and the now, a “resurgent activism: Black Lives Matter protests; strikes and walkouts at universities and throughout the media industry, and more Women’s Marches.” She believes that “the most important insight” from that first “messy experiment” was 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.”
The Bunting legacy continues. Before her Institute, the Bunting women lived fractured lives; after the Institute, after they connected, they lived “in fragments no more.” Doherty concludes that it is “time for a new group of women to speak.” Even as they persist, they must connect. Doherty’s illuminating analysis of a time, a place, and a movement reifies the groundwork cemented by the original Equivalents, their lives, their ambitions, their aspirations and accomplishments.
[Published by A.A. Knopf on May 19, 2020, 375 pages, hardcover, $29.95]