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

by Lauren Jae Gutterman

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, LGBT, Lesbian, Gender, Sexuality

328 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2019

Reviews

[carlageek · Rating 4 out of 5]

With resources such as interviews, oral histories, and most notably a vast trove of decades of correspondence between married women and pioneering lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Gutterman charts the trajectories of married lesbian from the conformist pressures of the post-war era, into the swinging 70s, and through the rising divorce rates of the 80s.

In the first half of the book, Gutterman argues that in the conformist era of the 50s and 60s, women who desired women found ways to connect and to live within the matrimonial structure, sometimes with the knowledge and understanding of their husbands, sometimes without. Pretty much any type of situation or arrangement you can think of, Gutterman finds evidence for in Lyon and Martin’s correspondence—from secret afternoon dalliances with the mother next door to acknowledged lovers who come along on family vacations.

In the second half of the book, Gutterman shows that later, in the era of feminist awareness, married lesbians earned more legal options for leaving their marriages, and more of them did so. But the de facto structures of economic inequality and anti-lesbian bias in family court made it a difficult practical choice. Still later, in the swinging era, white, suburban married women were able to love other women, but it was socially sanctioned only within the confines and context of male voyeuristic pleasure. And if those relationships became too serious, husbands could and still did use the mechanisms of the courts against their wives.

The personal correspondence is clearly the treasure trove of this book, and it’s worth reading just to hear from the legions of women who wrote to Lyon and Martin or published essays in various underground newsletters, for the breadth of understanding of people’s lives and self-conceptions beyond the popular representations and stereotypes that we tend to have of the past. However, Gutterman’s sharp analysis of those popular culture depictions is just as interesting (to me at least). She shows how the prevailing societal conception of the married lesbian evolved, with two archetypes appearing in popular media: the predatory lesbian in our midst, the wolf in sheep’s clothing—and the innocent (or at worst, curious or misguided) victim of her seduction. In the 50s, married lesbians were suspected of lurking in suburban bridge groups and PTAs, ready to undermine the wholesome American way of life. (Gutterman offers an absolutely delicious reading of The Price of Salt as a defense of the married lesbian in the face of this prevailing archetype.) Later, through the 70s, distinctions were made in popular culture between the “true” lesbian and the bisexual, with some interesting nuance. In heteronormative swinging communities, Gutterman argues, bisexual wives were hip and game, as long as their relationships with women were primarily for male voyeuristic consumption and didn’t get too serious. But the counterpoint to this was an anti-bisexual sentiment in certain lesbian-feminist communities which, I know from my own experience, lasted through the 80s.

Gutterman concludes with a brief and probably overly optimistic epilogue about sexual fluidity in the 21st century, citing a few high-profile examples of women who fell in love with women after being married to men, and declined to claim a specific lesbian or bisexual identity. Notably absent from this discussion are lesbians who fell in love with and married men—an omission I can’t help but take a little personally.

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage (2020), Gutterman seeks to understand the personal experiences and the public representations of same-sex desiring women within marriages in the post-Second World War period. While other scholarship has offered an investigation into women after they left their marriages and entered into lesbian relationships, very little literature has focused on women’s same-sex desire within the institution of marriage. In the wake of the Second World War, the heteronormative, nuclear family became the foundational building block of American society. Yet Gutterman’s study of women’s same-sex desire within their marriage challenges the seemingly heteronormative institution of marriage by queering. As such, Gutterman argues that the institution of marriage, unlike other American institutions of the time, provided a degree of flexibility for women to experience their same-sex desire. While women could not marry other women, nothing stopped them from marrying the opposite sex and even same-sex affairs did not immediately constitute grounds for divorce. As such, Gutterman reveals a new aspect to the marital institution in mid-century America. Rather than be wholly oppressive and antithetical to same-sex desire it provided space for women’s desires to explored, sought out, and affirmed. Gutterman also pushes back against the narrative that same-sex desiring wives, even if they remained in heterosexual marriages, were not self-hating or pitiful figures.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book with a less common analytic perspective, provided a lot of insight into the past overlap of lesbian/bisexual identities and some of the factors that led to lesbian and bisexual identities splitting off into separate movements.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this easy to follow if/because very academic, and somewhat well-researched if you accept that this is about a specific subset of women (i.e., white middle-class). The author makes attempts to include other racial and class identities but admits her corpus is (very) limited in this respect. I would have liked more nuancing interpretations but I understand that the author wanted to let the sources talk and to not overreach/step. I guess this means my issue was more with the chosen corpus again.

[Boyd Cothran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterful social and cultural history of wives who desired women. It provides a nuanced analysis of how married women navigated their own desires in the face of changing social pressures and concerns, and along the way, provides a narrative of space power that challenges standard narratives, which have focused more on the experiences of men over those of women.

[Zak Kizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly researched and extremely insightful look into the quirks of marriage, love and sexuality.