A new book on postwar lesbian desire show how flexible “straight” marriages could really be.
The cover of Lauren Jae Gutterman’s new history of lesbian desire among married women in the postwar period,, features a woman in a robin’s-egg blue cashmere crew neck and perfect pink lipstick, her eyes blocked by a black box. From letters written to lesbian activists and from oral histories, Gutterman has collected 300 stories of wives who, between the end of World War II and the 1970s, found themselves falling in love with other women.
Lauren Jae Gutterman: Yes, for a few reasons. In the 1950s, there was just that tremendous expectation that women would marry and should marry; it was a cultural expectation and an economic imperative. Especially if women wanted to have children: to be able to support yourself and your children outside of marriage was really, really difficult. Not that marriage always provided economic security! But it was a better bet.
Then beyond that, a lot of husbands I found in this study were just kind of willing to turn a blind eye. They might have suspected their wives’ friendship [with a woman] was very close, but they weren’t going to pry into it. In some cases where husbands did have evidence that their wives had been or were actively involved in lesbian relationships, they thought it was something that would pass.
Yes! I do try and analyze that titillation in terms of pop culture representations, and to show that how the common storyline of a married woman engaging in a lesbian relationship, when it was presented for a broader audience, was a way that people tried to make these relationships unthreatening—that way, they might see them as titillating for an outside viewer, often a male onlooker.
Far from being titillated, I found I was unexpectedly saddened by this book.
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