Her Neighbor's Wife

Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor's Wife traces the stories of hundreds of women who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States.

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.

The book is published by University of Pennsylvania Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"Engaging, highly readable sociocultural history that serves as a necessary and illuminating corrective to the general dearth of lesbian history."(Heather Murray, author of Not in This Family)

"A revelation...locates lesbian histories not at the margins but at the center of postwar American life." (Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy)

"Critical intervention in histories of marriage, same-sex desires, feminism, and therapeutic ideas of the authentic self." (Rebecca L. Davis, author of More Perfect Unions)