“A Question of Love”: Representations of Divorced Lesbians in the 1970s

In the 1970s, divorced lesbians became the focus of Hollywood films, TV movies, novels, newspaper and magazine articles.  This new population of women embodied anxieties about increasing rates of divorce and female-headed households, fatherless children and, above all, the effects of women’s liberation on the nuclear family. What would happen, Americans wondered, if women started putting their own needs and desires on a par with or even before those of their husbands and children? In the face of these concerns, lesbian feminist writers established a triumphant conventional- wife-to-out-lesbian narrative in novels, nonfiction books, and periodicals of their own. Such representations provided women with the encouragement they needed to leave unfulfilling marriages and fight for child custody, but left little room for once-married lesbians’ public expressions of regret, sadness, or guilt regarding divorce and its effects on ex-husbands and children. In the pages of lesbian feminist publications women who did express these negative emotions were often portrayed as suffering from false consciousness, or as stuck in an earlier, pre-feminist historical moment. Such wives, lesbian feminists argued, were not only maintaining their own oppression, preventing themselves from building better lives and more egalitarian relationships with women, but benefiting from the privileges of heterosexuality, and standing in the way of women’s and lesbian liberation more broadly. This paper suggests that the lesbian feminist movement did not only empower or “free” wives who desired women, but silenced them as well.