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

Abstract

In tracing married women's same-sex desire between 1945 and 1989, Her Neighbor's Wife illuminates major postwar changes in American marriage and sexual culture and dissects the sometimes-contradictory relationship between social and cultural categories such as “marriage” and “homosexuality” and the messy reality of human experience. Lauren Jae Gutterman shows how these wives moved from deploying “caution and discretion” to facing both greater freedom and greater pressure to “come out” and divorce after 1970—changes particularly influenced by gay and lesbian liberation and the divorce revolution. Strikingly, she argues that wives in the early period did not always live the stereotypical pain-filled “double life.” Through silence, discretion, and, surprisingly often, acceptance by husbands, many were able to balance lesbian affairs with marriage, with its “legal rigidity and its flexibility as a lived experience,” finding relationships among fellow suburban women in neighborhoods, churches, and parent-teacher associations. Later, lesbian rights groups such as the...