Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage (Politics and Culture in Modern America) - Hardcover

Gutterman, Lauren Jae

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812251741 ISBN 13: 9780812251746

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Synopsis

At first glance, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of a 1950s wife and mother. Married at eighteen, Barbara lived with her husband and two daughters in a California suburb, where she was president of the Parent-Teacher Association. At a PTA training conference in San Francisco, Barbara met Pearl, another PTA president who also had two children and happened to live only a few blocks away from her. To Barbara, Pearl was "the most gorgeous woman in the world," and the two began an affair that lasted over a decade.

Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women, like Barbara Kalish, who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States. In doing so, 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: through work, at church, or in their neighborhoods.

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; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore 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 American marriage.

About this title

About the Author

Lauren Jae Gutterman teaches American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Review

"In a field dominated by studies of gay men (still), Her Neighbor's Wife offers an LGBT history that centers a gendered analysis of women's lives. It is a critical intervention in histories of marriage, same-sex desires, feminism, and therapeutic ideas of the authentic self."—Rebecca L. Davis, author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss

"Her Neighbor's Wife is an engaging, highly readable sociocultural history that serves as a necessary and illuminating corrective to the general dearth of lesbian history. Lauren Jae Gutterman shows the concept of fluidity has a much deeper past than what is typically imagined and that heterosexual marriage was much less straight than it seemed."—Heather Murray, author of Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America

"Her Neighbor's Wife is a revelation. Lauren Jae Gutterman locates lesbian histories not at the margins but at the center of postwar American life, often accommodated within marriages with men and family life. Alert to the complex meanings of married women's desire for women, beyond the poles of protest and conformity, Gutterman queers postwar marriage, the family, and normativity itself."—Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0812251741
• ISBN 13: 9780812251746
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 328