“Too much life enters this house,” Tillie Olsen, the writer, labor activist and mother of four daughters, wrote in a letter to the poet Anne Sexton. Olsen and Sexton were among the early recipients of a paid fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. In some ways, remarkable progress has been made for American women since then — 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.) 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.

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Persons: ” Tillie Olsen, Anne Sexton, “, lunchpacking —, Olsen, Sexton, Maggie Doherty’s, Radcliffe’s, Mary Ingraham Bunting, Maxine Kumin, Barbara Swan, Marianna Pineda Organizations: Radcliffe Institute for Independent, Art Locations: midcentury America, Doherty’s