“Too much life enters this house,” Tillie Olsen, the writer, labor activist and mother of four girls, wrote in a letter to the poet Anne Sexton. “Up at 6, breakfast in shifts, lunch packing — then, if no one ill, or it isn’t a holiday, or any of the other ORs, the day for work until 4, sometimes longer or an evening — depending on housework load, shopping, errands, people, current family or friend crisis.” This description of artistic and familial tumult was written in 1961, but it could have been an email from one mother to another in 2024.
Olsen and Sexton were among the early recipients of a paid fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. As described in Maggie Doherty’s “The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship and Liberation in the 1960s,” the fellowship “targeted a ubiquitous and yet marginalized class of Americans: mothers,” and it was “designed to combat the ‘climate of unexpectation’ facing women in midcentury America,” according to Radcliffe’s then-president, Mary Ingraham Bunting.
In some ways, remarkable progress has been made for American women; at the time, for example, it was perfectly legal to fire a woman for getting pregnant. (In other ways, we have returned to the 19th century.)
Still, I was surprised to find that much of the sentiment expressed by Olsen, Sexton, the professor Maxine Kumin, the painter Barbara Swan and the sculptor Marianna Pineda in Doherty’s excellent, sensitive book felt thoroughly modern six decades later. The book made me ponder whether some of the conflicts that parents feel between their family responsibilities and other parts of their lives can be fully resolved.
For one thing, these women had supportive husbands. Olsen’s husband, Jack, moved across the country with her from San Francisco when she got the fellowship. In academia the person who moves for the other person is often called a trailing spouse, and even in the 21st century, trailing spouses are more likely to be women. Pineda’s husband, Harold Tovish, was also a successful sculptor. He considered her “the better artist,” Doherty notes, and he gave Pineda the bigger, brighter, better studio space in their Massachusetts home.
Often, as for the women portrayed in Carmela Ciuraru’s “Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages,” domestic life with bratty, self-involved spouses was a roadblock for female artists. But for the women portrayed in “The Equivalents,” motherhood was also a muse: Pineda, for example, sculpted the pregnant form, and by doing so, according to her former gallerist Abigail Ross Goodman, “she’s also talking about the birth of creativity, the birth of ideas, what it is for an artist to give birth.”
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content
