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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Queering Postwar Marriage in the U.S.

By Lauren Gutterman

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.

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.

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.

Further reading:

               

Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (2014). Using diaries and letters Cleves uncovers a more than forty-year relationship between two women, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, in nineteenth century New England. Bryant and Drake’s family and community members recognized their relationship as a marriage, thus challenging the notion that same-sex marriage is a new invention without historical precedent.

Clayton Howard, The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California (2019). Focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area, Howard’s book explains how suburban development practices and federal housing policies privileged married home buyers and sought to protect their sexual privacy in the postwar period. Suburbanization, Howard shows, built sexual segregation—between married couples and sexually non-normative others—into the geographic division between urban and suburban areas.

Heather Murray, Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America (2010). Not in This Family traces shifting relationships between gays and lesbians and their parents between the immediate postwar period and the era of gay and lesbian liberation. Murray examines the central role of biological family ties in gay and lesbian politics and charts how “coming out” to one’s parents became an expected rite of gay and lesbian identification.

Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II (2015). Rivers challenges understandings of parents and the family as exclusively heterosexual. His book shows how gay and lesbian parents raised their children, often within the context of heterosexual marriages, in the postwar period, before fighting for child custody in brutal family court battles of the 1970s and 1980s.

Top image: Della Sofronski and her family on vacation, ca. 1945. From the private collection of Kenneth Sofronski.

A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America by Grace Elizabeth Hale (2011)

by Ashley Garcia

In the works of modern philosophers and novelists and even in the lyrical stylings of folk icon Bob Dylan, the question of authenticity lingers in the background of our search for meaning and truth. In A Nation of Outsiders, Grace Hale seeks to explain how and why white Americans in the second half of the twentieth century became enamored with the romance and rebellion of the outsider. Hale uncovers how white middle-class youths of the 1950s and 1960s acquired meaning and freedom in their everyday lives through the cultural, social, and political appropriation of marginalized American people, such as African Americans. The perceived authenticity of black Americans fascinated the white youth disillusioned with the phoniness of capitalist culture, state-sponsored violence, and the expectations of their parents.

Hale’s most effective case studies include her chapters on the beatniks, blues followers, New Left Marxists, and folk revivalists who participated in the prevailing counterculture of the 1960s and the creation of their own culture of cool. These groups simultaneously exploited the music, culture, and experiences of black Americans to assuage their own anxiety and yearning for self-determination and authenticity. Hale points to J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Elvis Presley, and even Bob Dylan as examples of this appropriation of authenticity where white Americans crafted new identities in accordance with the experiences and culture of the oppressed black community they hoped to emulate. Similarly, Hale illuminates how white members of the New Left participated in the Civil Rights Movement out of more than political solidarity. Many white New Left members viewed the movement as an opportunity to transform their own lives into something meaningful and romanticized the Southern experience of black Americans as authentically beautiful.

African American and white supporters of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in front of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ, 1964 (via Wikimedia)

Hale’s book investigates a historically relevant question of how and why white Americans romanticize and appropriate the experiences of the outsider to find meaning and freedom in their own lives. The romance of the outsider has never left white middle class American minds and Hale’s work uncovers the damage this romanticism has had on material efforts to achieve equality. White fantasies of the black experience allowed the disillusioned white middle class to forge an imaginary bond with the “outsider” and thereby solidified their own status as outsiders as well. However, this one-sided bond that occurred in the white imaginary prevented white Americans from working with actual Africans Americans to achieve equality. This romanticism of the outsider, while it served the yearning of unsatisfied white Americans, did nothing to combat the oppression and inequality the actual outsider faced in the 1950s and 1960s.

Hale’s last chapter echoes an even graver political threat that dominates American electoral politics – the widespread adoption of the ideology of the oppressed outsider by overwhelmingly non-oppressed groups. The adoption of this identity of outsider has evolved since the 1960s, but has been a staple in parts of the New Right and conservative politics for decades. Just as evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s entered the political sphere as outsiders with a mission to reclaim the moral issues liberals of the era politicized, Tea Party activists and recent Donald Trump supporters have also declared themselves outsiders aiming to recover the “truth” in a world dominated by lying liberals, power hungry elites, and news media phonies. A Nation of Outsiders opens the door to further analysis concerning the political viability of the ideology and identity of the outsider in white politics. Scholars must be aware of how political candidates and their constituents romanticize the notion of the outsider as it provides insight into voters’ perceptions of their social, political, and economic place in the world. What drives this alienation of members of the white middle class? How have they come to understand themselves as outsiders, oppressed, and marginalized in a world where their economic resources and political power indicate otherwise?

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