marriage Archives - Not Even Past

Queering Postwar Marriage in the U.S.

At first look, Barbara Kalish fit the stereotype of the 1950s wife and mother. In 1947, at age eighteen, Barbara met and married a sailor who had recently returned home from the war. The couple bought a house in suburban Norwalk, California and had two daughters. While her husband financially supported the family, Barbara joined the local Democratic club and the PTA. Yet beneath the surface, Barbara’s picture-perfect life was more complicated. Soon after marrying, Barbara realized she had made a mistake. She called her mother asking to return home, but was told, “You’ve made your bed. Lie in it.” Divorce was not an option, so Barbara persevered. Eventually, through the PTA she met Pearl, another wife and mother who lived only a few blocks away. Though Barbara had never before been conscious of same-sex desires, she thought Pearl “the most gorgeous woman in the world” and fell madly in love. In an oral history interview recorded years later, Barbara could not recall exactly how it happened, but somehow she was able to tell Pearl that she loved her and the women began an affair that continued for more than a decade.

Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage centers on women like Barbara who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desires in the second half of the twentieth century. Many—if not most—women who experienced lesbian desires during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were married at some point, yet this population has been neglected in histories of gay and lesbian life, as well as histories of marriage and the family. Focusing on the period between 1945 and 1989, Her Neighbor’s Wife is the first historical study to focus on the personal experiences and public representation of wives who sexually desired women. Through interviews, diaries, memoirs and letters, the book documents the lives of more than three hundred wives of different races, classes, and geographic regions. These women serve as a unique lens through which to view changes in marriage, heterosexuality, and homosexuality in the post-World War II United States.

To a remarkable degree, the wives in this study were able to create space for their same-sex desires within marriage. Historians have typically categorized men or women who passed as straight while secretly carrying on gay or lesbian relationships as leading “double lives.” This concept may describe the experiences of married men who had anonymous homosexual encounters far from home, but it fails to capture the unique experiences of married women who tended to engage in affairs with other wives and mothers they met in the context of their daily lives: at church, at work, or in their local neighborhood. Barbara and Pearl, for instance, lived mere blocks away from each other. They socialized together with their husbands and children, went on trips together, and even ran a business together for many years. While LGBT history has focused on queer bars in urban spaces, many wives who desired other women found ample opportunity to engage in sexual relationships with other women in their own homes in their husbands’ absence. Some of these men remained unaware of their wives’ same-sex relationships, but others chose to turn a blind eye to their wives’ affairs and waited for them to pass.

Alma Routsong and her family in a press photo for her novel Round Shape, 1959. Routsong carried on a relationship with another woman for a year in Champaign, Illinois, in the early 1960s before divorcing her husband. Curt Beamer for the News-Gazette. (From the Isabel Miller Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Libraries.)

Lesbian history has highlighted the politically radical implications of love and sex between women, but married women’s same-sex affairs did not always function as a type of resistance to or protest against the institutions of heterosexuality and marriage. In some cases, engaging in same-sex relationships within marriage propelled women to identify as lesbians and to leave their marriages. This was a path, and a choice, that became increasingly available to (and expected of) women across this book’s time period as divorce became more common, and gay and lesbian activists challenged the stigmatization of homosexuality. However, many wives’ ambivalence about labeling themselves or their affairs as lesbian, and their refusal to divorce well into the 1980s and beyond, challenge a simplistic interpretation of such wives’ desires and identities. While the emergence of no-fault divorce, gay liberation, and lesbian feminism made it possible for many wives to leave unhappy marriages and build new lives with other women, others experienced the growing division between married and lesbian worlds as constraining, as forcing a choice they did not have to make before.

Della Sofronski dressed for a neighborhood Halloween party in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which she and her lover attended in costume as husband and wife, ca. 1945. (From the private collection of Kenneth Sofronski.)

Barbara and Pearl’s story reveals how women responded differently to the social and cultural transformations of the 1970s. During their many years together, Barbara and Pearl had secretly planned to leave their marriages once their children were grown. Around 1970, when Barbara was forty and her daughters were in high school, she decided she was ready to leave her marriage and begin her life with Pearl. But Pearl did not want to divorce. She was ill at the time and worried about losing health insurance if she left her husband, a man Barbara described as “a sweet guy.” So Pearl remained married, and Barbara divorced. “I went to Chuck Kalish and said, ‘I’m going.’ And I went,” she recalled. By this time Barbara had discovered the Star Room, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles. In fact, Barbara invested some of her own money in the bar, making her a part owner, and when she left her marriage she moved into a house directly behind the bar where she easily embarked on a new lesbian life. “I was in hog heaven,” Barbara later said.

Like Barbara and Pearl, the wives described in Her Neighbor’s Wife made a range of choices over the course of their lives. Some ended their lesbian relationships and remained married for good. Some experimented with “open” or “bisexual” marriages in the era of the sexual revolution. Yet others divorced their husbands in order to pursue openly lesbian lives. Whatever paths they took, however, the wives in this study suggest that marriage in the postwar period was not nearly as straight as it seemed.

Historians on Marriage and Sexuality in the United States

People celebrate the Obergefell vs Hodges decision in front of the Supreme Court in 2015 (Ted Eytan, via Flickr)

by Alexander Taft

In June 2015, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court of the United States resolved decades of debate by declaring marriage a fundamental right regardless of sexual orientation. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision changed the landscape of American marriage law, but what was this landscape in the first place? Two historians of marriage and sexuality in the United States have spent decades taking on that very question. Nancy Cott and George Chauncey have both participated in recent history as expert witnesses, amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief writers, and eminent scholars analyzing marriage and homosexuality. They show us how incorrect we often are when we think of these histories in the United States. These historians have made history a friend to the court as much as any lobbyist or interest group.

Nancy Cott’s Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation lays out centuries of marriage law in the United States. Far from the moral absolute marked by religious teachings that many might assume marriage was, it is a complicated and shifting concept in the history of the Western world. Cott points out that marriage has a national concern that secular governments legislate in order to create the best “civic units” out of the family. Society became concerned with civic character and then tried to improve these norms by engineering a certain type of family. The common practice of unofficial divorce and separation led to a formal legal process for divorces just as much as the legal definition led to formal divorces. We are accustomed to thinking of these everyday things as defined from above, yet our community practices often find their way into law as often as the other way around.

The history of marriage in the United States certainly does not have the kind of unchanging moral character that many opponents to marriage equality claim. “Traditional” families are constantly changing. Two centuries ago, the most important people in deciding a match may well have been the community in which the couple lived. Small rural towns had a deep interest and broad powers in marital arrangements. Cott’s book is full of such examples of unofficial activities that reflected community interests, not the interests of the individuals involved. Marriage today is much more of an individual choice based on one’s own expectations from life, even if still affected by an idea of “normalcy” and pressures to fit into a family, a faith, or some other kind of community. Ultimately, the majority of Americans are free to marry outside of their “tribe,” because whatever social costs that are associated are considerably lower. Similarly, marriage was limited to “consenting” and “free” individuals. This meant that slaves were barred from this institution while also condemned as immoral for engaging in extramarital intercourse; a key aspect of reconstruction was the construction of ex-slave marriage. If marriage is an ever-changing reality, why shouldn’t the court consider homosexuals simply another kind of marriage?

Marriage may be a concept in flux, but what about homosexuality? Today we identify people with their sexual orientation, but was that the case in the past? Many assume that throughout history, these communities were wholly underground — persecuted and kept hidden by families ashamed of their “perverse” siblings. But George Chauncey, along with a wide field of historians, have helped us to reconsider. Rather than being a gay or a lesbian, often individuals engaged in various kinds of sexual behaviors. In fact, Chauncey’s ground-breaking book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, outlined how urban men who participated in homosexual behaviors often considered themselves to be “normal,” that is, not defined by their same-sex intercourse, as long as they played the “active” role in intercourse. Those men engaging in the “passive” role in intercourse were seen from the outside as primarily a public nuisance on par with prostitution (which they often engaged in). The homosexual subculture of turn-of-the-century New York was visible and defined by specific kinds of sexual activities, not necessarily nature-born identities. In fact, the words we use today, such as “gay,” “lesbian,” and likely even “homosexual” would not have been known by the vast majority of people.

Twelve years before Obergefell, the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for this legal breakthrough. The June 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas, challenged and then overturned what were commonly known as “sodomy laws” that declared sodomy illegal. Much of the debate surrounding these laws considered them to be expressions of long-standing morals; an accepted societal conclusion that homosexuality itself was illegal. However, Chauncey’s amicus curiae brief (with input from a number of historians) decimated this belief by pointing out that “sodomy” itself was a dubious term that had shifted throughout history. He pointed out for example that famed thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas considered every sexual act that was not direct penetrative vaginal sex to be sodomy. He also explained that the history of sexuality shows that these “morals” were recent inventions and historically changeable. His brief was specifically quoted by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, whose opinion overturned decades of legal persecution.

Historians have much to teach, but not only to students. Society is improved by their scholarship, often because our collective memories are too short and our ability to see past our biases and preconceptions is often lacking.

Great Books on Women’s History: United States

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Here are some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in the United States.

Penne Restad recommends:

Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014).

A lively, often surprising, narrative history that chronicles the adventures of Wonder Woman, the comic strip devoted to her prowess, and Marston, the man who imagined her, in the center of the struggle for women’s rights in the U.S.

Erika Bsumek recommends:

Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (2011).

In 1851, the 13 year old Oatman was part of a Mormon family traveling west. She was captured by the Yavapai Indians and then traded to the Mohave, who adopted her. The book tells her story and provides some valuable context on the various Mormon sects, the tensions and troubles faced by American Indians in the face of American expansion, and how one young woman experienced it all.

Laurie Green recommends:

Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. (2013)

Think you know who Rosa Parks was? Jeanne Theoharis’s biography will change your understanding of the woman who became famous for triggering the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 when she was “too tired” to relinquish her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The book tells you the real story of Parks’s militant activism from the 1930s to the 1990s and her frustration with being recognized as a symbol, not a leader.

Emilio Zamora recommends:

Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed; The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (2009)

The book is a re-examination of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the longest running Mexican American civil rights organizations. Orozco is a well-known historian who incorporates women and gender in her histories of Mexican Americans. In this instance, women are placed at center stage in the cause for equal rights and dignity.

Jackie Jones recommends:

Ellen Fitzpatrick, The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (2016).

A great read and couldn’t be more timely! The book focuses on three women candidates for the presidency: Victoria Woodhull (ran in 1872), Margaret Chase Smith (1964), and Shirley Chisholm (1972).

Daina Berry recommends:

Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2016)

From the UNC Press website:

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia’s prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women’s presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women’s lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Charlotte Canning recommends:

Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008)

An award-winning cultural history of the African American women who were variety performers on chorus lines, in burlesques, cabarets, and vaudeville from 1890 to 1945. Despite the oppression they experienced, these women shaped an emerging urban popular culture. They pioneered social dances like the cakewalk and the Charleston. It is an ambitious view of popular culture and the ways in which women were integral to its definition.

Bruce Hunt and Megan Raby recommend:

Kimberly Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (2014)

While there is an enormous literature on the reception of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, this is the first book to examine the responses of women. This book is a lively account of how ideas about human evolution figured in debates over women’s rights in the late 19th century, by a recent UT American Studies PhD.

Megan Seaholm recommends:

Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement (2015)

Nelson provides an excellent addition to the growing literature about the women’s health movement that began in the 1960s. She concentrates on reproductive health and reproductive rights from abortion referral services organized before Roe v. Wade through the National Black Women’s Health Project organized in 1984. This is a good read and an important contribution.

Mark Lawrence recommends:

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1990)

Elaine Tyler May examines the resurgence of traditional gender roles in the years after the Second World War, arguing that a desire to enjoy postwar prosperity and to escape the dangers of the nuclear age drove Americans back to conventional norms. The book brilliantly blends women’s, social, political, and international history.

Judith Coffin recommends:

Nancy Cott, Public Vows : A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000)

The changing stakes of marriage for the nation and for men and women — gay and straight. Readable, smart, and connected to the present. Nancy Cott helped write several amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs in the marriage cases before the Supreme Court.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

The Countess’s Cats

by Douglas Cushing

Francesca Consagra, curator of In the Company of Cats and Dogs at the Blanton Museum of Art, has observed that felines and canines in art are rarely mere props. More than decoration, their presence serves a meaningful purpose. These creatures may represent human endeavors, moralities, values, and behaviors. Alternately, their image may signify the lives and conditions of individual animals themselves, or entire categories of such animals, existing in domestic relationships with humans, as suppliers of labor, or even as a sources of food. Animals in art offer novel and useful ways to understand historical trends and events. Within this exhibition, an excellent example of how cats provide charged and multifaceted meanings in a work of art, is a hand-colored, soft-ground etching by James Gillray entitled The Injured Count, S. __ (c. 1786).

James Gillray, The Injured Count S. ____, (c. 1786). Hand-colored soft-ground etching. Blanton Museum of Art (used with permission).

The print depicts the buxom Countess of Strathmore, Mary Eleanor Bowes, blithely suckling two greedy cats as she drinks wine or liquor with a pockmarked companion. A child at her side bawls, “I wish I was a cat / my mama would love me then.” Despite its curious scenario, the print reflects the tendency towards pet keeping that emerged in Enlightenment England. It also points to the Western historical-symbolic relationship between femininity and felinity, the status of women in late eighteenth-century England, and the machinations of power that played out in arenas of class and gender.

Gillray was a satirist working in a field that frequently burlesqued Georgian women, especially prominent ones.. The last four decades of the eighteenth century, when he was at work, are frequently thought to be the high point of English satirical printmaking. Here, the artist—something of a hired gun in the day—was likely fulfilling a commission that joined a series of attacks leveled against the countess. At the far left margin of the print, Gillray depicts her forsaken husband, Andrew Robinson Stoney, surveying a map of the countess’s estate. Stoney later changed his surname to Bowes, fulfilling the wishes of his wife’s father as expressed in his will. This name change traded the military associations with his family name for the more politically and socially recognized Bowes name, ultimately helping him to gain a position as M.P. for Newcastle. Stoney, however, was actually a fortune seeker, who, coveting the Countess’s wealth and social advantage, had tricked her into marriage. Widowed by John Lyon, the Earl of Strathmore, the lady’s dowager status gave her the right to own property—something denied to married women. This included the sizable inheritance she had brought into the marriage, which attracted Stoney. Staging a duel against a libelous newspaper editor in defense of the countess’s honor, Stoney emerged wounded. Under the pretense of a dying wish, he asked the countess’s hand in marriage. She agreed, and once married, Stoney recovered miraculously.Unbeknownst to him, however, her fortune had been deeded into the care of trustees. Stoney soon began to abuse his new wife physically and mentally. In time, the countess sought a divorce. She won preliminarily in an ecclesiastical court, but Stoney conspired to kidnap her and keep her hidden. Stoney also employed mendacious newspaper stories and satirical prints in an attempt to sway public opinion against the countess. When she eventually escaped and continued proceedings, the utter reprehensibility of Stoney’s actions secured a divorce.

The cats in this print likely represent the countess’s actual pets, Angelica and Jacintha. Tellingly, Stoney had lamented in a courtship letter that he was not one of her cats, musing, “. . . were I Proteus, I would instantly transform myself, to be happy that I was stroked and caressed like them, by you.” Gillray twisted Stoney’s sentiment in order to depict Mary Ellen Bowes as a bad mother who preferred her cats to her children. In truth, both Stoney and her previous husband’s family had cruelly separated her children from her at length. In addition to the accusation of being a poor mother, the presence of the licentious footman, beckoning her to bed, suggests that she is an adulterous wife. Infidelity was one of the reasons argued for divorce in eighteenth-century England, though marriage was generally held to be inviolable. The best that most people wishing a divorce could expect from the ecclesiastical courts of the day was a legal separation allowing a couple to live independent lives without dissolving the marriage itself. Full annulments were rarely granted to men, and almost never to women. Occasionally, after the ecclesiastical courts refused to dissolve certain marriages, special dispensations from Parliament (in the form of acts) permitted individual-case divorces. Such legislation was usually aimed at safeguarding fortunes from “bad” women and illegitimate children.

The lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq. and the Countess of Strathmore, written from thirty-three years professional attendance, from letters, and other well authenticated documents. By Jesse Foot Published 1810 for Becket and Porter, and Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, by J. Bryan in London. Available from Open Library

As symbols, cats reiterate these social constructions of femininity that is motherly if it is good, and morally negligent—wanton, desiring, willful, chaotic, and vicious—if it is ill. Cats often connoted immoral femininity, following a tradition that emerged from the concatenation of felines, Satan, and witchcraft from at least by the early thirteenth century until the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Above the countess in the print, Gillray places a painting of Messalina, one of antiquity’s most scandalous women, so as to reinforce the negative characterization of the countess. .

Gillray’s anthropomorphized cats also stand for what they are—pets. By the eighteenth century, the former luxury of keeping pets was practiced at all levels of society. And by the middle of the following century, cats would easily eclipse dogs as favorite pets in London. In this regard, the countess’s cats reflect the real tendencies of keeping pets and the growing popularity of felines in Georgian England.

Yet, in Gillray’s Injured Count, S., both woman and cat represent ideas of illicit femininity. A woman’s proper role in the day, enforced by a male-governed society, was foremost as a wife and mother, and in the late eighteenth century, breastfeeding was a sign of a good mother. Gillray’s 1796 The Fashionable Mamma,—or—the Convenience of Modern Dress lampoons an aristocratic woman, who, dressed in a skimpy, high-fashion gown, dispassionately suckles her child while her coach, visible through a window, waits to shuttle her away. A painting above her head entitled “Maternal Love” offers a foil, depicting a peasant woman who lovingly nurses her child in a natural landscape. The distinction between the dispassionate aristocratic mother, authentic natural mother, and the countess unnaturally suckling her cats, speaks volumes.

Listen to Francesca Consagra discuss the exhibit and the roles of cats and dogs in history on a podcast episode of 15 Minute History.

Read more about pets, marriage, and satirical prints in early modern England:

Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2004)

Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (1999)

Richard Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (2001)

Draper Hill, The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray (1976)

Linda Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (2005)

Cindy McCreedy, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (2004)

Wendy Moore, Wedlock (2009)

Oliver Ross McGregor, Divorce in England, A Centenary Study, (1957)

Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (2002)

Douglas Cushing earned his BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and his MA in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. His master’s thesis, written under the supervision of Linda Dalrymple Henderson, examines Marcel Duchamp’s relationship with the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont. Douglas is currently a PhD student in art history at the University of Texas at Austin and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Prints and Drawings, and European Paintings at the Blanton Museum of Art.

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