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

by Maggie Doherty Narrated by Rebecca Lowman

Overview

The timely, never-before-told story of five brilliant, passionate women who, in the early 1960s, converged at the newly founded Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study and became friends as well as artistic collaborators, and who went on to shape the course of feminism in ways that are still felt today.

In 1960, Harvard's sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, a "messy experiment" in women's education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or "the equivalent" in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships--poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen--quickly formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves "the Equivalents." Drawing from notebooks, letters, recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie Doherty weaves a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and activism, love and heartbreak, and shows how the institute spoke to the condition of women on the cusp of liberation.


Cover photographs: Anne Sexton, 1961 by Rollie McKenna © Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography. Print: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rollie McKenna; Women's liberation demonstration © Freda Leinwand (detail). Print: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Edge of cover image: Red, White and Gray, 1971 by Barbara Swan (detail). Used with permission from the Alpha Gallery, Boston.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile

Rebecca Lowman gives a masterful narration of this audiobook about art, friendship, and feminism. The work focuses on five women who were part of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1960: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen. Together, the women explore their personal ambitions and navigate the balance between work and home. The work provides an intimate look at the Institute and those involved while also addressing the challenges faced by these women and the changing social landscape of the time. Lowman's conversational tone provides the perfect match for the mix of personal stories and engaging profiles of the artists. Her passionate narration enhances the reflections on the feminist movement and the historically significant milestones addressed in the audiobook. K.S.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/17/2020

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. (May)

From the Publisher

“Brilliant. . . . It has been 60 years since the institute started its “messy experiment,” which continues today and is open to “people of all identities,” even as most of the obstacles faced by the Equivalents persist….Why hasn’t more been accomplished? One might ask today’s protesters against racial violence. Doherty’s rigorous history is an empowering reminder that to change ourselves, we must have systemic support outside ourselves—institutional structures that reinforce the belief that all people are created equal, not just equivalent.” 
—Los Angeles Times
   
“Sadly, there is no group photograph of the Equivalents, whose last time together was in 1963. But they, and the hundreds of women who followed them over the decades, have in Maggie Doherty a dedicated biographer. The Equivalents is a story long overdue. In this age of #MeToo and a president who brags about groping women, it’s important to look at the moment when modern, talented women saw in Radcliffe an open door, and walked right in.” 
—Air Mail
“The book reads like a novel, and an intense one at that. . . . Doherty closes with a comparison of that era with ours. What has changed for women over 60 years, what remains the same and what is worse? Was all that struggle and angst and creative turmoil for nothing? She doesn't think so, and neither do I. I once lived in that distant country, and I'm grateful to the author of The Equivalents for reminding me that I have no wish to return.” 
—Margaret Atwood, The Globe and Mail (Canada)
 
“The Equivalents, Ms. Doherty’s first book, is written with panache. She adroitly weaves vivid, empathetic portraits of these talented women, focusing on their artistic accomplishments, their impact on the women’s movement and its impact on them. Her nuanced depiction of deep, supportive female friendships provides a welcome contrast to the fractious competitiveness and infighting that has so often tarnished the history of feminism.” 
—The Wall Street Journal
 
“This deft history charts the relationships among five of the earliest fellows. . . . Doherty relates their often fraught intimacies in detail, emphasizing how these dynamics prefigured currents in American feminism and culture. The women’s shared story shows both the potential and the limitations of a “room of one’s own” as a liberating force.” 
—The New Yorker
 
“The Equivalents, Maggie Doherty’s group portrait of Olsen and four other women artists, is a story of neither collective liberation nor midcentury repression. Doherty has instead recovered a neglected “hinge” between the two, lingering on an early-1960s transitional moment between one stark period and the next. . . . Doherty is a confident, perceptive critic, and her biographical sketches are expertly interwoven with well-deployed – if too infrequent —readings of the poems themselves.” 
—Bookforum
 
“Why tell this story now? Doherty’s narrative depicts what displacement felt like for this small group of women in the 1960s, the fight against the “brutal impulse to shove [her daughter] away from [her] typewriter,” in Olsen’s words, or the feeling that her love for her children did not always “surpass [her] desire to be free of their demands,” in Sexton’s. But it also prompts us to consider the systems of marginalization that continue to reproduce the psychic division that agonized these women. . . . Doherty asks us to consider how the structure of education might not only be tailored to “fit the pattern” of people’s lives, as Bunting wrote in 1961, but be mobilized to change the very patterning of society. . . . It is the story of what these women needed from and gave to one another.” 
—The Nation

“Rich and powerful. . . . Electricity is palpable in Doherty’s pages. I have rarely, if ever, read a work of non-fiction that chronicled relationships like these, with women in conversation about everything except men. . . . Her book is a love story about art and female friendship. . . . [Reading The Equivalents] prompted me to reach out to half a dozen women I hadn’t spoken to recently, asking them about their relationships, their ideas. We have only just begun to understand how important are the stories of how women live. . . . I consumed [The Equivalents] at a furious speed, scrawling notes in the margins with greater-than-usual intensity.” 
—Ruth Franklin, Harper's Magazine
 
“[An] engaging work of cultural biography. . . . Doherty, who teaches writing at Harvard, provides lively glimpses of the individual trajectories and projects of these artists, both in the years leading up to and after their time at Radcliffe. . . . An illuminating contribution to our history.” 
—Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review
 
“[Maggie Doherty] presents the institute as a crucial bridge between first- and second-wave feminism — between, roughly, Virginia Woolf and Betty Friedan. Through examining the five ‘Equivalents,’ she illustrates the institute’s role in midcentury feminism and explores the ways in which both fell short. The result is a vivid, captivating, and excellently argued work that makes a compelling case for the importance of ‘intellectual communit[ies]… made up entirely of female minds.’” 
—Hyperallergic
 
“Rich with insight into the challenges faced by midcentury women as they struggled to pursue their work. . . . With The Equivalents, Doherty sheds light on an important story, one that takes place at the fraught intersection of gender, race and class.” 
—WBUR, “The ARTery”
   
“The Equivalents is an important, illuminating work. Fortunately, it is also a splendidly written page-turner to read for joy.” 
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Elegantly composed. . . . The Equivalents also serves as something of a prehistory of second-wave feminism. Doherty describes the writers and artists she profiles as ‘a hinge between the 1950s and the 1960s, between a decade of female confinement and a decade of female liberation.’ They were women in transition, in a similarly transitional time. . . . Doherty writes most passionately about the texture of the women's friendships. . . . merging history, group biography, and literary criticism. . . . In a nod to Bunting’s phraseology, Doherty ends with an amorphous challenge: What about ‘another messy experiment,’ geared to the distinct problems women face today?” 
—The Boston Globe
  
“Opposites attract in Doherty’s exuberant account of women artists in the 1960s and ’70s that especially probes the fierce connection between poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, a ‘dance of sameness and separateness . . . something like a song.” 
—O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Think of this nonfiction work as Mona Lisa Smile meets Mrs. America. It tells of the founding students in Radcliffe's Independent Study program, which helped women to receive an education and raise a family.” 
—Entertainment Weekly
  
“The exciting debut of Maggie Doherty brings together the important yet untold stories of five women that came together in the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. The institute, at Radcliffe College in Harvard, offered women postgraduate study opportunities at a time when women were expected not to step out of the domestic sphere. Doherty, a lecturer at Harvard, traces the history-making steps and lives of painter Barbara Swan, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin. It’s a rich tapestry brought to life by Doherty’s access to their personal notes, recordings, letters and works, weaving her own strong voice in with the individual women to tell stories of art, radical politics, relationships, and unfettered ambition. Though her eye is on the past, it’s most certainly a story to inspire our futures.” 
—Dazed
 
“Doherty’s overall galvanizing look at a little-explored conjunction of critical feminist voices should incite provocative historical context to current-day discussions around the need for more support of women’s intellectual work.” 
—Library Journal
  
“The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study opened in 1960 with 24 women fellows, each receiving a stipend (which some used for child care) and office space. Historian Doherty profiles Bunting and five of the inaugural participants: poets Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton, writer and activist Tillie Olsen, painter Barbara Swan, and sculptor Marianna Pineda. . . . Doherty sets all of her magnetic subjects within a fresh assessment of the sexism of postwar and Cold War America, and celebrates the Equivalents for breaking ground for ‘innovative, intimate’ creations by women. Doherty’s vibrant curiosity and many-faceted expertise infuse this dynamic group biography with light and warmth.” 
—Booklist (starred review)
 
“In 1960, Mary Ingraham Bunting, the founder of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, recognized that too many promising women undergraduates sidelined their academic or creative careers. Thus, a wholly unique fellowship was created to support the work of ‘intellectually displaced women’ who possessed a doctorate or ‘the equivalent.’ Maggie Doherty draws from primary documents of five of those women—poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen—to write The Equivalents. Their work helped forge a path to women’s liberation in the second half of the twentieth century, and this phenomenal book captures the tensions, ambitions, activism, friendship and yearning for community found in this incredible place and time.” 
—Observer, “Best Books to Read in Spring 2020”

“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

Library Journal

04/01/2020

In 1960, Radcliffe College president Mary Ingraham Bunting established the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, offering paid fellowships to women looking to restart stalled scholarly or artistic careers. Historian Doherty's study of the early years of the institute generally centers on a group of women who called themselves the "Equivalents"—poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olson, painter Barbara Swan, and sculptor Marianna Pineda—as each had been accepted into the school's program for possessing the "equivalent" of a doctorate in creative achievement. The work also alternates between facets of the institute and its fellows: the difficulties of women seeking creative careers in the mid-20th century; the fellows' responses to the beginnings of second-wave feminism; the institute's complex relationship to underprivileged women and women of color; and the benefit of providing a supportive community for women's scholarly pursuits. VERDICT Doherty's overall galvanizing look at a little-explored conjunction of critical feminist voices should incite provocative historical context to current-day discussions around the need for more support of women's intellectual work.—Kathleen McCallister, William & Mary Libs., Williamsburg, VA

OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile

Rebecca Lowman gives a masterful narration of this audiobook about art, friendship, and feminism. The work focuses on five women who were part of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1960: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen. Together, the women explore their personal ambitions and navigate the balance between work and home. The work provides an intimate look at the Institute and those involved while also addressing the challenges faced by these women and the changing social landscape of the time. Lowman's conversational tone provides the perfect match for the mix of personal stories and engaging profiles of the artists. Her passionate narration enhances the reflections on the feminist movement and the historically significant milestones addressed in the audiobook. K.S.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2020-01-15
The story of the first scholars to participate in a “messy experiment” at Harvard’s Radcliffe college.

The 1950s and ’60s were tough for educated women, especially those who wanted to be writers or artists. Men dominated academia and literature, and women were expected to stay home and care for their husbands and children. So in 1960, microbiologist Mary Ingraham Bunting, Radcliffe president and mother of four, created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a fellowship program to provide a stipend and office space to help “intellectually displaced women” become scholars and artists while also caring for a family. In her debut, Doherty, who teaches writing at Harvard, tells the story of several of the Institute’s first scholars, women who called themselves the Equivalents because the Institute “required that applicants have either a doctorate or ‘the equivalent’ in creative achievement.” The author focuses on three of them: Anne Sexton, who “came from New England wealth” yet endured demons that precipitated several suicide attempts; fellow poet Maxine Kumin, with whom Sexton forged an enduring friendship even though Kumin came from a less privileged background; and writer Tillie Olsen, “a first-generation, working-class American, an itinerant, and an agitator” who named her first daughter Karla after Karl Marx and was the first among her cohort to note that “the true struggle was the class struggle”—i.e., not every woman “had the time, resources, and education” to immerse themselves in creative endeavors. Other Institute scholars, such as sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan, are also mentioned. Digressions about women peripherally connected to the scholars may have been an attempt to place the graduates’ post-Institute work in a broader perspective, but it feels as if Doherty didn’t have enough material about these scholars to fill an entire volume. When she sticks to her subject, the book is superb, especially when she recounts Sexton’s personal struggles and offers close analyses of each author’s works.

A welcome spotlight on an overdue “experiment.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177563459
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/19/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
 
Little White Picket Fences
 
The sun was already setting one evening late in the winter of 1957 when twenty-nine-year-old Anne Sexton, shaking with nerves and clutching a cardboard folder, walked down Commonwealth Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Boston’s Back Bay. She passed Victorian brownstones, statues of local luminaries, and large, stately trees. She soon arrived at her destination, a large stone building on the boulevard’s north side.
 
She passed through the building’s imposing gray facade and walked through the opulent ballroom hidden inside. This was one of her first trips out of her home in Newton in recent memory; to accomplish it, she had requested the company of a kind neighbor named Sandy Robart. Sexton had always been a nervous woman, but these days she was something more: anxious, fearful, choked by self-doubt. Public places of any kind produced intense discomfort; most days she didn’t leave her house. She had recently attempted suicide; she would make a second attempt in just a few months.
 
She walked through the building’s foyer and wondered what she was doing there. She wasn’t cowed by the signs of old money. Wealth was familiar to her. It was what the building concealed that frightened her: a small poetry workshop, run by the Boston Center for Adult Education. Sexton, who had been writing poetry seriously for only several months, who had no college degree, who had a bad history in classroom settings, had uncharacteristically decided to enroll in the course. Until that winter evening, only two people had read her poetry: Dr. Martin Orne, her psychoanalyst; and her mother, Mary Gray Harvey. The idea of showing her poems to other people—other poets—was terrifying. And yet here she was, in matching lipstick and heels, with flowers in her dark hair, about to enter a classroom for the first time in a decade.
 
She stepped into the room; heads turned. The workshop had been in session for some weeks, and newcomers weren’t common. The instructor, John Holmes, sat at the head of a long oak table. A man with thinning hair and a long, hangdog face, he was the personification of dour New England. Holmes was a fixture in the Boston poetry scene: teaching workshops, reviewing books, and working as a professor at Tufts. Many of Holmes’s students had published poems, including a thirty-one-year-old mother of three who was also present that evening. Her name was Maxine Kumin.
 
Sexton and Kumin regarded each other: it was a bit like looking into a mirror. Both women were thin, dark-haired, and attractive. Unlike Sexton, Kumin was not a native New Englander, though by the time the two women met, Boston had become her home. Kumin was an assimilated Jewish woman from Philadelphia whose pawn-broker father had earned enough to send his daughter first to parochial school, then to Radcliffe College. For Kumin, education had been a way of becoming an individual, someone who could escape from her mother’s expectations. Sexton, by contrast, came from New England wealth. She relied on her parents for financial support and on her husband for emotional caretaking. Sexton was emotionally volatile, plagued by anxiety, depression, and suicidal urges. Kumin kept her temper in check and steered away from instability. She was immediately wary of this nervous, glamorous stranger—a woman who somehow fascinated and repelled. Both were there to do some thing that felt uncertain, even untoward: to establish themselves as poets. Each had to gather her courage to attempt this, an obviously solitary effort. What did it mean for them to encounter each other in this terrifying space?
 
 
Sexton once summed up her life prior to 1957 as follows: “I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic break and tried to kill myself.”
 
For much of her life, Sexton had believed she was dumb. She believed this because many people in her life told her so. Born in 1928 to a wealthy family in the comfortable Boston suburb of Newton, the youngest of three daughters, Anne Harvey was a skinny and fidgety child in a household that prided itself on grace and decorum. She couldn’t sit still. She often refused to eat. She tugged and twisted her hair until it tangled. As an adolescent, she showed up at the dinner table speckled with acne; her father, disgusted, refused to eat in her presence. Unlike her two sisters, who attended elite private schools, Anne attended public school for most of her youth (she was kicked out of a Waldorf school because she failed at naptime). By the time she got to high school, the boarding school Rogers Hall, she had been held back three times by teachers who considered her unintelligent, a “terrible nervous wreck,” and “high-strung.”
 
If Anne was dumb, her mother was smart. Mary Gray Harvey, who came from a wealthy family in Maine, was a petite, attractive woman, a true lady. She had been raised like a princess by her doting father, the editor and publisher of a newspaper, and she thrived on being the “brilliant” one in the family. Her husband, Ralph Harvey, a businessman who drank too much, held Mary Gray in high esteem, constantly reminding his daughters, “Oh, your mother is smart; mother is brilliant.” “She was the ‘writer,’ the cultured, brilliant one,” Sexton told an interviewer in the early 1960s. “She kind of over-powered us, I think, at times.” (The only thing Mary Gray actually wrote was her husband’s business correspondence, but Ralph Harvey lauded each letter as a “masterpiece.”) Mary Gray had a cultured air: she read a book a day, and she’d attended the prestigious Wellesley College. Although she never graduated, she let it be known that she had the highest IQ of all the girls on campus. To her, there was something admirable about simply being intelligent, as opposed to deliberately educating oneself. Mary Gray presented knowledge as something you simply picked up, as you would a canapé, when it suited you.
 
Anne tried and failed to impress her mother. When she was a teenager, she presented Mary Gray with a poem she’d written that had been accepted into the school yearbook. Mary Gray read over her daughter’s work, paused, and then launched an investigation. Surely this was not her daughter’s original work; surely she had copied it from somewhere. She sent this poem and others Anne had written to a family friend, a professor in New York, and asked him to find the source from which her daughter had plagiarized. (The professor wrote back: the poems were original, and they were promising.) Anne, chastened by the experience, didn’t show her mother any more poems. Soon, she stopped writing them altogether.
 
Foiled in her creative pursuits, Anne tried to emulate her mother’s stable, high-status domestic life, and she succeeded—but only with lots of help from Mary Gray herself. When she was nineteen, Anne was dating an upper-class boy from the Boston suburbs, Alfred Muller Sexton II, known to friends and family as Kayo, and she feared she was pregnant. On the advice of Mary Gray, the couple drove south, to North Carolina, where the legal age of marriage was eighteen for both men and women. (In Massachusetts, it was eighteen for women and twenty-one for men.) They married, and Anne Harvey became Anne Sexton. The pregnancy was a false alarm—Sexton had started menstruating on the trip south—but the marriage stuck. The young couple bounced back and forth between their respective parents’ households before finally finding an apartment in Cochituate, a town just ten minutes from the Harveys in Weston. (The Harveys had moved there in 1941; their house, built from scratch, included seven bathrooms and five garages.) While Kayo served in the Korean War, Mary Gray steered her daughter away from tempting flirtations and encouraged her to recommit to her marriage. When Sexton did eventually become pregnant—she’d flown out to San Francisco to meet her husband during his leave—Mary Gray tended to her, took her shopping for maternity clothes, took her on vacation to Florida, and allowed her to move back into the Weston family home. With Mary Gray’s financial help, the young Sextons paid for a house in the comfortable suburb of Newton. They started to carve out something like an independent adult life, though Kayo—who had dropped out of Colgate University, where he had been pursuing medicine— worked in the wool business under his father-in-law.
 
As long as Mary Gray was alive, Sexton never stopped craving her mother’s praise and fearing her criticisms. A harsh word from Mary Gray stung more than any of the insults Ralph had flung at young Anne when he was drunk. Sexton thought that if she could raise a family and run a household as her mother did, she would finally earn approval from this cold, elusive woman who always seemed to know what was best—the best dress, the best drink, the best book to demonstrate that you were cultured. As she later put it, “I had to be just awful or as good as my mother.”
 
By August 1955, with her mother’s assistance, Sexton had put together an admirable life: she owned a house in the suburbs, she was tall and beautiful and well-off, and she was mother to two daughters, Linda, age two, and a newborn, Joy.
 
But she struggled with the responsibilities of motherhood. She found herself reacting with anger and violence to her children’s needs. She once threw her older child across a room in frustration. She was eventually diagnosed with postpartum depression. “My heart pounds and it’s all I can hear—my feeling for my children does not surpass my desire to be free of their demands on my emotions,” she once wrote to a therapist. As the months ticked by and Joy approached her first birthday, Sexton’s symptoms lingered and deepened. Worried she would hurt her children, she contemplated using her sleeping pills to end her life. One dark night, she stayed awake for hours, fighting her worst impulses, and then, on a therapist’s recommendation, checked herself into Westwood Lodge—the same institution her father had gone to when he needed to dry out. Mary Gray cared for Linda, while Kayo’s mother, Billie, took in Joy. Sexton was released from Westwood Lodge after a couple of weeks, but her mental health continued to decline. She took an overdose of barbiturates in November 1956, one day before her twenty-eighth birthday. Her new therapist, Dr. Martin Orne, sent her to Glenside, a grim institution that put her at a safe distance from her family. “Her family was not very sympathetic about her problems,” Dr. Orne later recalled. He diagnosed Sexton with hysteria in the Freudian sense.
 
Sexton was released from Glenside after several weeks. It was a hard winter. Linda returned to her, but Joy stayed with Billie. Sexton was lonely and listless. “I walk from room to room trying to think of something to do,” she wrote to Dr. Orne. “I have this almost terrible energy in me,” she explained, and “nothing seems to help.” All that she’d learned about homemaking eluded her; she found herself incapable of baking a potato. She relied on Kayo as a child depends on a parent, and she feared his absences. He was often quite patient with her, but at times he exploded into rage. He was sometimes physically violent with Sexton (more often in the later years of their marriage). She loved her daughters, but she resented the way they circumscribed her life. “Who would want to live feeling that way?” she wrote to Dr. Orne in February 1957. It was a question that reverberated daily through her mind.
 
Desperate, Sexton searched for a reason to go on living. She found it somewhere she never expected: lyric poetry.
 
On Dr. Orne’s recommendation, Sexton began watching educational television; her analyst thought it would stimulate her mind and distract her from her emotional troubles. One Thursday evening in late 1956, just a month after her suicide attempt, Sexton tuned in to the local public television station WGBH and watched a program called Sense of Poetry. A Harvard English professor appeared on-screen; he looked every bit the academic, with his bald head and spectacles. His name was I. A. Richards, and he was one of the most influential scholars of English literature on either side of the Atlantic. While teaching at Cambridge in the 1920s, he had developed a practice of closely reading poetry without recourse to historical or biographical context. Richards called this “practical criticism”; by the time this practice spread to American universities, in the 1940s and 1950s, it was called New Criticism. This style of literary criticism appealed to university English departments at the mid-century because it made the study of literature seem scientific rather than dilettantish. It was also a very teachable method, perfect for educating undergraduates—or viewers of public television.
 
In truth, Sense of Poetry was a bit boring. Richards wasn’t particularly dynamic, though he hosted several different educational programs throughout his career (despite his professed distaste for mass media). He read out famous poems, such as Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” enunciating precisely so viewers could hear the scansion and rhythm of the work. Sometimes, a poem scrolled down the screen, or a helpful chart appeared, but otherwise the camera fixed on this austere man, who seemed better suited for radio than for the screen.
 
The program was dry and purely educational, and Sexton was rapt. She watched as Richards described the structure of a sonnet— fourteen lines, three quatrains and a couplet, ABABA CDCD EFEF GG—and took careful notes. “I could do that,” she thought to herself. The show over, the night dark, she wrote a sonnet of her own. Like an approval-seeking high school student, she showed the sonnet to Mary Gray. This time, Mary Gray believed the poem was original; she even suggested a better image to capture the poem’s sentiment. Sexton was grateful: she’d finally earned her mother’s approval, and she’d found a new way of managing her distress. She would order her disorder in verse.
 
Suddenly poetry flowed from Sexton faster than tears. Between January 1957 and December of the same year, she wrote more than sixty poems—a remarkable output. Most of them marched out messages and morals in regular rhythm, like the poems one would find in The Saturday Evening Post, the leading middlebrow magazine. Many referred to therapy or to Freudianism, and some addressed Dr. Orne himself: “Appointment Hour,” “The Psychosomatic Stomach,” “A Foggy Adjustment.” She typed up her poems carefully and presented them to Dr. Orne, who offered her the approval she craved. Untutored in the craft, unburdened by a traditional literary education, Sexton proceeded by instinct, learning “unconsciously,” a word she used frequently to describe her method. She set herself little challenges—write a poem in syllabic rhyme, write a double acrostic—just to see if she could succeed. When she made a second suicide attempt in late May 1957, Dr. Orne pointed to her poetry as her reason to live. “You can’t kill yourself,” he told her. “You have something to give.”
 
Sexton didn’t fully understand what she was doing as a poet; for years to come, she would describe poetic technique as “trickery.” She was an unpublished amateur. She submitted a few poems to publications, signing them “Mrs. A. M. Sexton,” but she heard nothing back. She considered finding a classroom of some sort, somewhere, and trying to learn as she had never done before. Dr. Orne recommended enrolling at Boston University or Newton Junior College. A return to school was a gamble for the girl who had been kept back and kicked out, undermined by teachers and family both. With her mental health still precarious, she weighed the risks against the possible rewards. She would have to leave the house and meet strangers; that would be terrifying. But perhaps some of these strangers would understand her in ways her family never did. Maybe, if she could push through her fear, she would find those she called “my people.”

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