Anne Sexton's collection Live or Die, published in Boston in 1966 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, exemplified the confessional poetry movement's commitment to exploring the female body, its illnesses, its reproductive history, and its social constraints with unprecedented directness. Sexton, working in the Boston literary circle alongside Sylvia Plath, wrote poems about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, and the physical indignities of female life that had never appeared in mainstream American poetry before. Her work made the women's body a legitimate — indeed, central — poetic subject.

Sexton's frank bodily poetry prepared the ground for the feminist verse that followed the Miss America protest and the women's liberation movement. Her work directly challenged the tradition of the 'proper lady' in poetry — the tradition of decorous femininity that the corset had symbolized — by naming and examining the female body in all its reality. Sexton and Plath together established a Boston-Cambridge axis of feminist confessional verse that influenced virtually every subsequent American woman poet.