The Equivalents

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 on

America. [The Equivalents] tells of the founding students in Radcliffe's Independent Study program, which helped women to receive an education and raise a family.  
Entertainment Weekly
 
[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. . . . A vivid, captivating, and excellently argued work.  
Hyperallergic
 
Rich with insight into the challenges faced by midcentury women as they struggled to pursue their work. . . .  Doherty sheds light on an important story, one that takes place at the fraught intersection of gender, race and class.  
WBUR, The ARTery
 
[An] exciting debut. . . .  A rich tapestry brought to life by Doherty s access to [her subjects ] 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
 
This phenomenal book captures the tensions, ambitions, activism, friendship and yearning for community found in this incredible place and time.  
Observer
 
[The Equivalents], 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
    
A story of neither collective liberation nor midcentury repression. . . . Doherty is a confident, perceptive critic, and her biographical sketches are expertly interwoven with well-deployed . . . readings of the poems themselves.  
Bookforum
 
An exciting, engaging, and important book. With great psychological acumen, Maggie Doherty brings these women vividly to life. 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
 
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 Advanced Study. 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 history long hidden of a glorious American experiment that gathered creative women for a year of community in the shelter of a great university. The emotional power 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
 
An elegant, novelistic history. . . . Doherty s prose dazzles, and she skillfully integrates her copious research into the narrative while toggling between biographical, creative, and political matters.  
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
[A] galvanizing look at a little-explored conjunction of critical feminist voices.   Library Journal
 
Doherty s vibrant curiosity and many-faceted expertise infuse this dynamic group biography with light and warmth.  
Booklist (starred review)
 
Superb. . . . A welcome spotlight on an overdue experiment.
Kirkus Reviews