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The Equivalents: The Untold Story of the Five Friends Who Started a Personal, Political, and Artistic Revolution
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About This Book
An important new work of narrative nonfiction: 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, stepping outside the domestic sphere and shaping the course of feminism in ways that still resonate today. In 1960, at the height of an era that expected women to focus solely on raising families, Radcliffe College announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, offering fellowships to women with a Ph.D. or "the equivalent" in artistic success. Acclaimed writer and Harvard lecturer Maggie Doherty introduces us to five brilliant friends--poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen--who came together at the Institute and would go on to make history. Drawing from their notebooks, letters, lecture recordings, journals, and finished works, Doherty weaves from these women's own voices a moving narrative of friendship, ambition, activism, and art. Beautifully written and urgently told, The Equivalents shows us where we've been--and inspires us to go forward.
Reviews
"Doherty, despite suggesting that bridging the two spheres is doable with some financial assistance and mutual goodwill, sidesteps the possibility of happy compromise right in her introduction, even before she starts laying out her argument."
"an elegant, novelistic history ..."
"As in life, Anne Sexton tends to commandeer center stage in this book, sometimes overshadowing its other subjects ..."
"Maggie Doherty's brilliant new book, The Equivalents, tells the story of the institute by focusing on the five fellows who called themselves 'The Equivalents' ..."
"The book reads like a novel, and an intense one at that ..."
"Doherty's account, may have its flaws, but The Equivalents is nevertheless an illuminating contribution to our history."
"The episodes lose their weight ..."
"After their Radcliffe idyll ended, the friendships were attenuated by time, distance, and other strains."
"electricity is palpable in Doherty's pages."
"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."
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