Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage

Her Neighbor's Wife explores the stories of women who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States, drawing attention to the homes of married women and the lesbian feminist movement and no-fault divorce revolution. It challenges the presumed straightness of traditional American marriage and complicates a simple interpretation of women's relationship choices.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 05 August 2022
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Barbara Kalish, a 1950s wife and mother, lived in a California suburb with her husband and two daughters. She was president of the Parent-Teacher Association and met Pearl, another PTA president, at a training conference in San Francisco. The two began an affair that lasted over a decade. Her Neighbor's Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. Lauren Jae Gutterman draws our attention away from the postwar landscape of urban gay bars and into the homes of married women, who tended to engage in affairs with wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives, but they were confronted by hostile state discrimination in legal battles over child custody. Many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices.

By revealing the extent to which marriage has historically permitted space for wives' relationships with other women, Her Neighbor's Wife calls into question the presumed straightness of traditional.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781512823691