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

Product Description
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
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 Marianna 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.
“Rich and powerful. . . . A love story about art and female friendship.”
—Harper’s Magazine
“Reads like a novel, and an intense one at that. . . . The Equivalents is an observant, thoughtful and energetic account.”
—Margaret Atwood, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Review
“
The Equivalents is written with panache. [Maggie Doherty] 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.”
—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
“Brilliant. . . . 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
“[
The Equivalents] prompts us to consider the systems of marginalization that continue to reproduce the psychic division that agonized these women. . . . It is the story of what these women needed from and gave to one another.”
—The Nation
“
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.”
—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
“
Mona Lisa Smile meets
Mrs. 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,