Guest: Lauren Jae Gutterman, Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
Host: Alina Scott, Ph.D. Student, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
The stereotypes of the 1950s family generally include a hardworking husband, a diligent housewife, their children, and a white picket fence. However, research by Lauren Gutterman and others suggests a much more flexible family system that included Lesbian relationships. In today’s episode, we talk to Dr. Gutterman about the postwar family, her book, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage, the stories of the women who “who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States” and how this new history expands the landscape of LGBTQ history in this period to include 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.”
Episode 126: Postwar Lesbian History