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

"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 PhD or 'the equivalent' in artistic success ... Maggie Doherty introduces us to five brilliant friends--poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana 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 ... narrative of friendship, ambition, activism, and art"--