Married Women Who Love Women

During middle age, after 25 years of happy marriage to a man, Carren Strock fell in love with a woman. After a period of intense confusion and pain, Strock came to accept her sexuality and realize that there were other women who discovered lesbianism in the context of a heterosexual marriage. This book is based on interviews that Strock conducted with more than 100 women who had that experience--60 percent of whom were between the ages of 36 and 55--as well as their husbands, children, and lovers. Some women in this situation have remained in the closet, either repressing their desires or keeping their affairs secret. Others have come out to husbands and friends and been able to incorporate their lesbianism into their marriages. Others have ended their marriages. The very personal voices in this book remind us that most women who came of age before the relatively tolerant present did so in a culture in which lesbianism was not regarded as a healthy sexual possibility but as a shameful perversion.