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

The poet Anne Sexton spent the summer of 1962 swimming. Months away from publishing her second book and poised on the edge of fame, she soothed her nerves with water. When the weather was warm enough for a dip, she would step out of her house, strip nude, and slide into the pool in her backyard. She delighted in the warmth of the sun, the smooth feel of the water, the quiet of the morning. She could see an old train track from her backyard, while just out of sight, beyond the old, rolling hills of a golf course, the Charles River flowed through Newton Lower Falls, wending its way to the harbor in Boston.

Sextons young daughters, Joy and Linda, didnt like when their mom skinny-dipped. But the kids were often absent that summer, off with a babysitter or with Sextons mother-in-law, who frequently helped with child care. Sexton needed the time to work: though shed only started writing poetry seriously five and a half years earlier, on a whim, her first collection had been a critical success. Fellow poets respected her; some of them expected great things. Sexton was a natural performer: an elegant woman with long legs and slim hips, she captivated audiences at her readings. But she was also a labile, anxious woman, and she frequently needed time off from mothering simply to relax. On these summer mornings, she would swim calmly from one end of her pool to the other, traversing its twenty-five-foot length.

Anne Sexton in her swimming pool in the 1960s

Poetry usually followed her ritual sun worship. She would experiment with new poems, tinker with old ones, write a letter or two. One of her major projects that summer was reviewing the galleys for her next collection of poetry. The book, her second, was to be published by Houghton Mifflin in October; the esteemed poet Robert Lowell, her friend and former teacher, had already agreed to let her quote some of his words of praise. If she were so inclined, she could drive into Cambridges Harvard Square and review the galleys in a gabled house where she and twenty-three other women created, studied, and worked, each with her own small office. But most days, Sexton found it more comfortable to work at homeespecially now that she could, to her husbands relief, work somewhere other than the dining room table.

Her home study had been built the previous summer. She described it to a friend as a wooden tower standing where the porch had once been. It had one long window that faced the backyard. Looking out, Sexton could see the pine trees and the blue hills from her desk, but when she was writing, she faced away from the windownaturebecomes my enemy, she explained. While working, she sat either in her straight desk chair or, more often, in a soft red chair with her feet perched on one of her many bookcases. She could spend hours sitting in this position, drawing inspiration from the great writers on the shelves, many of whom shed encountered only recentlyKafka, Rilke, Dostoevskyand many of whom shed come to love. I hoard books, she once confessed to a friend. They are people who do not leave.

There was another advantage to working from home. Sexton lived just a few minutes drive from her best friend, the poet Maxine Kumin. Tall, lean, and dark-haired, Kumin could seem at first to be Sextons twin, until one noticed her athletic build, her slightly hooded eyes, the sharp angles of her face. She, too, was a suburban mother and the author of a published book of poetry. She was also Sextons main source of emotional and creative support.

In the early 1960s, the poets lives were enmeshed: they spoke on the phone every day, sometimes about writing, sometimes simply about their lives. They watched each others children. They served cocktails to each others husbands. After Sexton installed her pool, the friends developed a happy routine that blended work and play. Kumin brought her children over to swim, and she and Sexton sat by the edge of the pool with typewriters in their laps, their legs dangling in the water, and worked together on a childrens book, a nice break from their adult compositions. Though Sexton often feared social gatherings, Kumins dependable, comfortable company was almost always welcome.

But in the mornings Kumin was usually still at her own home, caring for her own children. Sexton was left to appreciate her solitude. On these summer mornings, no one needed hernot her husband, not her children, not her mother-in-law, not even her friend. The day was beautifully, blissfully hers.

Everything about these summer daysthe pool, the study, the solitude, the second book, the second place to write, even the companionship of Kuminwas the product of a novel experiment in womens higher education. In the fall of 1960, the prestigious womens college Radcliffe, the sister school of Harvard, had announced an unprecedented fellowship program, one that targeted a ubiquitous and yet marginalized class of Americans: mothers. In the words of its founder, the Radcliffe president and microbiologist Mary Ingraham Bunting, the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study was designed to combat the climate of unexpectation facing women in mid-century America. As she saw it, too many accomplished female undergraduates were giving up their dreams of becoming scholars or artists because they couldnt see how they could do research or write a book while also managing a family and keeping house. The new program proposed to get these intellectually displaced women back on track.