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

"The Equivalents is such an exciting, engaging, and important book that I loathed doing anything but reading it. With great psychological acumen, and ever-mindful of the nuances of class, race, and gender, Maggie Doherty brings these women vividly to life, allowing us to hear them speak, to feel their conflicts and their triumphs. By the end, I was electric with insights into my own relationships and work, and, perhaps surprisingly, I felt very optimistic about the future. Being creative while female has never been easy, and our best hope for resolution is this variety of historical excavation, one that shows us how people have tried to resolve it before, so we may learn and keep pushing forward, newly enlightened." --Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own

"Maggie Doherty's revelatory history of female artists and their influential friendships stands as triumphant testament to the powerhouse first known as Radcliffe's Institute for Independent Study. Later known as the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, this multi-disciplinary fellowship program continued to rescue, support, inspire and strengthen women scholars and artists for nearly forty years. When Harvard swallowed Radcliffe in 1999, Radcliffe College ceased to exist, and the resulting quid pro quo endowment admitted men to what had been "a room of one's own" for Sexton, Kumin, Olsen, Swan, Pineda, and many women after them. Maggie Doherty's The Equivalents reminds us that generative "women's work" can literally light up the darkness that discourages women's voices - just when we need them the most." --Jayne Anne Phillips, Bunting Institute Fellow, 1980-81, author of Black Tickets and Lark and Termite

"In her thrilling book, Maggie Doherty brings to vivid life the long-hidden history of a glorious American experiment that gathered creative women for a year of community in the shelter of a great university. The emotional power of The Equivalents lies in its revelation of the incremental impact of community on each of these formerly isolated women, prophetic of what would happen two years later with the publication of The Feminine Mystique and the arrival of Second Wave feminism." --Honor Moore, author of Our Revolution

"Harvard University lecturer Doherty debuts with an elegant, novelistic history of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study and its influence on the lives and careers of five female artists and the women's movement at large. Founded by the president of Radcliffe College in 1960, the institute accepted women with PhDs or "the equivalent," providing them with a stipend, library access, a private office, and "a community of the like-minded." Doherty centers her account on a group of friends and collaborators who attended the institute from 1961 to 1963: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer and communist organizer Tillie Olsen, painter Barbara Swan, and sculptor Marianna Pineda. Though the complex yet creatively fruitful relationship between Sexton and Kumin takes center stage, Olsen emerges as "the most politically conscious" member of the group, a forceful critic of the institute's premise that motherhood and intellectual work were mutually sustaining, who anticipated emerging fault lines within the women's movement at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Doherty's prose dazzles, and she skillfully integrates her copious research into the narrative while toggling between biographical, creative, and political matters. This empathetic, wide-angled portrait will resonate with fans of the individual artists as well as feminists and readers of women's history." --Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"Superb. . . . A welcome spotlight on an overdue 'experiment.'" --Kirkus Reviews