In 1960, Harvard’s sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of the Institute for Independent Study, a “messy experiment” in women’s education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships—poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen—quickly formed deep bonds with one another, exchanging ideas and art, forging friendships that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work for the rest of their lives. They called themselves the Equivalents. Drawing from notebooks, letters, lecture recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie Doherty weaves from these women’s own voices a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and activism, love and heartbreak. These five women, vividly brought to life, dramatize artistic ambition, the tension between art and life, and the need for creative community.