Married Women Who Love Women, Second Edition

Carren Strock fell in love with a woman after twenty-seven years of a happy--and on-going--marriage. She wrote this book as a way to deal with her own discovery, and to help other women deal with theirs. By revealing her personal experience, and also interviewing over one hundred women of diverse backgrounds, as well as their husbands and children, she shows us that this phenomenon--married women loving women--is not as uncommon as we would have believed. Writing in an intimate and warm tone, Strock takes readers step-by-step through the experience of married women who discover they love women--from coming out to family and friends and dealing with guilt and shame, to first sexual experiences and finding acceptance. One of her many insights is that many women, like herself, remain married while also actively loving women.



Apart from a few well-known MWLW, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf and Collette, married lesbians are a large, but largely hidden, segment of the population. This is the first book written for them, and their friends and families, and for all women who have wondered about their sexuality, their marriages, and whether they might be more fulfilled in same-sex relationships. This book will also fascinate anyone interested in female sexuality and human behavior.

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.