Speaker: Lauren Gutterman, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies, Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows

In the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s cultural anxiety arose around white, middle-class “lesbian wives," married women who engaged in lesbian affairs. In psychoanalytic and pseudoscientific studies, journalistic reports, novels and films the lesbian wife was portrayed as imperiling her family’s sanctity and undermining her husband’s masculinity. While politicians sought to expel homosexuals who “infiltrated” the federal government, cultural producers could not and did not want to push lesbians out of the nuclear family. Rather, by repeatedly revealing the lesbian wife to the public they hoped to prevent divorce, reform errant wives, and reinforce the “natural” order of power within the white family. While lesbianism has played only a minor role in histories of women’s sexual and domestic containment during the early Cold War, this talk will demonstrate how the discourse around the lesbian wife worked to police women’s behavior within marriage.