The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s
By Maggie Doherty
Knopf, 2020

As the 1960s began, Radcliffe College (the women’s college associated with Harvard University) considered ways to support female scholars and artists whose careers had been derailed by mid-century expectations that women would devote their time to caring for their children rather than working towards academic or creative achievements. Radcliffe president Mary Ingraham Bunting argued that most such women wanted to combine family commitments and intellectual endeavors. Adopting Virginia Woolf’s idea that women needed both a private space conducive to work as well as a bit of financial independence, Bunting created a fellowship for women whose careers had been disrupted by the demands of marriage and motherhood. In 1960, Radcliffe’s new Institute for Independent Study offered twenty-four women their own offices on campus, gave them access to the extensive resources of Harvard University, and provided them with small stipends. Perhaps most importantly, the fellowship created a community of life-minded thinkers—a community that many of the women had never before experienced.

In her stunning debut The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960, Maggie Doherty outlines how the Institute for Independent Study worked during its first few years and how it contributed to a larger discussion about the liberation of women in America. Doherty focusses on the stories of five women in the Institute’s first cohort: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olson, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and painter Barbara Swann. The Institute required applicants to have advanced degrees or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement. Since these five women came in without PhDs, they nicknamed their group The Equivalents. Their experiences at Radcliffe brought them together as friends, as colleagues, and even as collaborators whose work suggested the shape of the coming wave of feminism.

Doherty points out the each of the women at the Institute “had come seeking solitude. She thrilled to the idea of a quiet, book-lined carrel; she eagerly imagined occupying a room of her own.” But what the women found at the Institute was “not quiet but community.” As Doherty says, each scholar had come “hoping to be Virginia Woolf” with her private workspace, but “wound up in a Bloomsbury group” and an experience similar to the camaraderie Woolf found in her own community of intellectual peers.

The Equivalents maps out how the combined experience of financial independence and intellectual community allowed the fellows to begin to move from the first-wave feminism of Virginia Woolf’s era to the beginnings of the second-wave feminism about to explode on the scene just as the Institute began. These five writers and artists produced work that explicitly explored their bodily experiences as women. Some of the women, perhaps especially the sculptor Pineda, celebrated the joy of a woman’s sexual pleasure and the strength of the female body giving birth. Others found the physical experiences of motherhood oppressive and limiting. Discussions similar to the ones held at the Institute soon began to emerge in the national culture, shown by the publication of major feminist texts such as Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique.

The fellows in the Institute’s first cohort--and most of the people at the helm of the women’s movement of the 1960s--were middle-class white women who often did not recognize that their experiences of gender oppression were at odds with the varying gendered experiences of women of color and women who lived in poverty. A twenty-first-century writer might find it easy to condemn the whole Radcliffe project as merely an expression of privilege, but Maggie Doherty has created a far more nuanced account. She uses her own lens of third-generation feminism to explore the historical transformation from first-generation to second-generation feminism, by (for example) acknowledging that many of the Institute fellows used their stipends to pay black women to do childcare and housekeeping while they themselves engaged in intellectual pursuits. In a later chapter, the author compares the experiences of the first cohort to the experiences Alice Walker had during her time at the Institute, a decade after the Equivalents were in residence. Doherty ends her book with a call that we find revolutionary ways to “eradicate ongoing gender disparities” and “better support women” while recognizing how racial and class positions shape the experience of sexism and while refusing to reinforce a gender binary. The author insists that a lack of intersectional thinking is no reason to discard or condemn the progressive steps the women of the Institute did take. Instead she argues that scholars should seek “to understand them and to adapt their ideas and approaches to our own time.” Doherty’s study is a wonderful example of how historical scholarship should neither erase nor fully condemn the limitations of the social justice movements of the past. Instead, we need to consider how such movements developed in their contexts and imagine how we can take their work into the future. The Equivalents is beautifully written, well researched, and inspiring.

—Hannah Joyner is an independent scholar living in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.