Understanding and generosity among husbands wasn’t the rule, says Gutterman, but nor was fury and spite, though that certainly existed as well. The rule was that it was complicated. The fact, too, was that women who desired women were hardly alone in the post-war period in not expecting marriage to meet all or even most of their emotional and romantic needs. Many gay men married women but found ways to participate in relationships or simply have sex with other men. Many straight men and women slept with people other than their spouses. Marital sex, particularly from the woman’s perspective, wasn’t expected to be very good. Husbands and wives often spent long stretches of time apart, because of work or complex family situations or simply because they couldn’t stand being around each other. The accommodations, deceits, and silences that women deployed to stay in their marriages while seeing other women weren’t always so different from the compromises their straight counterparts made to keep their heterosexual marriages in equilibrium. She hit dissertational gold only after her adviser suggested she look into the genre of post-war lesbian pulp novels, bodice-rippers that masqueraded as morality tales. She began reading, and reading about, the novels, becoming fascinated by the recur- ring figure of the “lesbian wife,” who was both an erotic fantasy and a cautionary tale, an object of desire for the readers and a symbol of the supposed moral decadence of the post-war affluent society. I also love the way Sebastián chose to shoot it. It was storyboarded. All the wetness, the spitting in the mouth, the pubic hair, the vaginas, but also leaving some of it to the audience to imagine. Where is the other woman’s mouth, where are her fingers? It was important for him to focus on our faces to really capture that desire. There’s something very spiritual about their sex. I’m really proud of it." In the contemporary editions of Cleo and Cosmopolitan, the phrase is used in a way which suggests all women can participate in the “girl crush”. An interview with Zooey Deschanel in the July 2013 edition of Australian Cosmopolitan asks the actress to name the celebrity she has “a total girl crush on”.

This perhaps underscores a lingering anxiety around women’s same-sex sexuality. It can even work as a form of veiled homophobia analogous to the use of the phrase “no homo” among young men wishing to distance themselves from homosexuality.She points to a few high-pro- file recent examples, including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert left her husband for the writer Rayya Elias, with whom she had been close friends for many years. The two were together until Elias died of cancer. Gilbert’s next publicly disclosed relationship This is a far cry from references to lesbianism in the magazines from the previous two decades. Earlier references are steeped in the politics of social change and are often located in social commentary articles or advice columns. This seems like it shouldn't be a victory. And yet, the list of movies who've accomplished the same feat is painfully abbreviated. Don't talk to me about Blue is the Warmest Color, a movie made famous for its extended, impractical sex scenes and allegations of harassment by its director, Abdellatif Kechiche. Kechiche reportedly bullied the two female protagonists as well as his staff, forcing them to work 16-hour workdays under extreme pressure. Critics further accused the director of creating "voyeuristic" sex scenes intended to solicit the male gaze.

In an article from the October 1993 edition of Cleo, “lesbian chic”, or the phenomenon of “Ostensibly Heterosexual” women (often celebrities) dabbling in lesbian desire is described as “the new sexual revolution”. The magazine calls it the latest “fashion statement” – with “a gorgeous pouting gal-pal” labelled the hottest new “designer accessor[y]”. The increased level of comfort with lesbian sexuality embodied in the casual use of the phrase “girl crush” in contemporary mainstream women’s magazines might look like a sign that attitudes towards lesbians and gays have lightened up. I don’t want to sugarcoat the experience,” says Gutterman. “I think many of these women were deeply unhappy, and were in really difficult situations, torn between a sense of responsibility to husbands and children and these desires that they may not even have come to recognize until after they were married. But at the same time there was often a flexibility within post-war marriage that narrowed after gay liberation and lesbian feminism and changing expectations of what marriage should be like. In that stereotypical post-war marriage, you don’t tell your husband about your day. You don’t reveal your struggles. It’s understood and expected that you will in some ways have closer, more intimate relationships with your female friends than with your husband. Divorce was so much more stigmatized, which created this freedom or elasticity within marriage, and therefore allowed women to act on these desires to a greater extent.” By observing changes in the representation of women’s same-sex sexuality in women’s magazines over time, new parameters within which lesbian desire is socially sanctioned become apparent.Lesbian sexuality in this configuration is presented as an erotic playground for heterosexual women – to titillate their male partners. Gutterman’s research brought her to the papers of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the United States. In them, she found an extraordinary repository of letters to the founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, and to the organizational newsletter, The Ladder. Many of the letters were from married women who were seeking and finding romantic connections to other women in the midst of their outwardly conventional lives.

If complexity is the dominant melody of Gutterman’s book, its counterpoint is compassion. She writes compassionately of husbands and children who suffered when their wives and mothers left for other women, as well as of lovers who suffered when wives chose to stay in their marriages. There is compassion for lesbian feminists who were struggling to figure out how to exist and act in a transformed world. Above all, there is compassion for the struggles of married women with lesbian desire, torn between romance and obligation, committed to exploring their same-sex desire but not ready to wholly reject their more conventional families and communities.

Ever since Director Sebastián Lelio's Disobedience premiered at TIFF in 2017, it's been the talk of the town among the five queer women who care about this kind of stuff. The film tells story of Orthodox Jewish lesbians in London: Esti (Rachel McAdams) caught in a loveless relationship with a Rabbi, and Ronit (Rachel Weisz) trapped in a series of meaningless heterosexual hookups. The main history in Her Neighbor’s Wife ends in 1989, before the extraordinary advances in gay rights of the last few decades. In a brief epilogue, however, Gutterman comes to the present, and argues that for everything that has changed, the challenge of the “lesbian wife” has not wholly disappeared. Women who desire other women still marry men, and women who marry men still discover, after marriage, that they have desires for other women. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be,” she says. “I was in my mid-20s when I began the project and kind of naïve about these experiences and how much sadness and regret and guilt many women would feel. I thought I would be told uplifting happy stories about forming and affirming new relationships, about discovering one’s true identity.