The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s

"First, that sly, smart title. Radcliffe College President Mary Bunting had the brilliant idea to support “intellectually displaced women.” By that, she meant women whose ambitions as artists and intellectuals had been thwarted by gender expectations and the demands of domesticity, marriage and motherhood. The College’s Institute for Independent Study would provide hefty stipends, private offices and its resources to a group of women who had “either a doctorate or its equivalent” in creative achievement. Bunting described it as her “messy experiment.” In The Equivalents , Maggie Doherty captures that glorious mess. She focuses on five women artists: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, sculptor Marianna Pineda, painter Barbara Swann from the East Coast and fiction writer Tillie Olsen, mother of four from San Francisco who had been a community organizer and aspired to write the great proletarian novel. None of them had PhDs; they nicknamed themselves ‘the Equivalents’. The Equivalents is magnificent social history, a collective snapshot of an overlooked moment in American feminism; we meet these women crossing the bridge between first and second wave feminism. The institute provided them with the rooms of their own to which Virginia Woolf had aspired, but it turned out they needed more of E M Forster’s edict to “only connect.” With insight and subtlety, Doherty explains the alchemy of solitude and community as “ideal conditions for artistic growth.” They read one another’s work and collaborated on projects. The deep creative bond between the charismatic poets—Sexton and Kumin—provides a narrative backbone. Their friendships revealed the importance of the collective, and how they really did give and draw strength from one another. The idea of five women artists being freed—receiving money and office space and affiliation from Radcliffe was really radical and groundbreaking. Olsen was, in many ways, the outlier of the group. In a crowd of upper-class Boston and New England women, Olsen was from the West Coast, not at all part of the eastern intelligentsia. While others used stipends to pay for nannies and domestic help, Olsen often had to borrow money. She was sort of a Marxist and emphasized that women—and all people—could be creative and fulfil their promise. A very important corrective. I suspect that the women of The Equivalents found Radcliffe a turning point where they could do that. But, knowing that Betty Friedan was an early visitor, they also talked about equity – and the “problem that had no name.” This was a space where a woman could discover that the wandering, absent husband, or the imperious male colleague was not her problem alone. As Doherty writes, these shared confidences could lead a woman to realize that “there was nothing wrong with her, but there might be something wrong with the world.” I would just raise the ante on the Bechdel test and suggest that a book must contain a scene in which mothers talk to one another about anything other than their children! Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Doherty captures so well the intensity and vicissitudes of these relationships. One can feel moments when Sexton’s needs are too much for Kumin, for instance. Then there’s the electricity of collaboration between mediums, for instance Swann’s artwork appears on the poets’ book covers. The Equivalents arrived as “well-behaved women” and may not have thought of themselves as feminists, but their determined efforts at self-expression radiated out into the world and laid the groundwork for revolution. In closing her sublime book, Doherty relates that when Bunting was asked why her “messy experiment” was so successful, she modestly responded: “We spoke to their condition.” Doherty closes her marvellous book with a call to arms: “Women today live under new conditions. It is time for another messy experiment and for a new group of women to speak.”"