Oral histories with women who were married to gay men

A project investigating marriages from the period 1978-2019. Oral histories were collected from women born between 1955 and 1978 who were married to closeted gay men. Scholarship on modern marriage has focused on standard marriages between a man and a woman. The study concludes that gender roles and perceptions of femininity held by the women in this cohort are more entrenched and resilient than the current historiography might suggest. These marriages gave rise to struggles with personal vs public expectations of what it means to be a wife and a woman. I propose that parental influence, religious ideology, and patriarchy experienced in the private family home exert pressures against the publicly expressed perceptions of female liberation, cultural, and societal change. Changes in the expectations women have for their marriages in this period add to the scholarship of feminist historiography and I also argue that romantic ideology continues to affect women and their expectations of marriage.
Guided life stories were recorded with twenty-two women living in the UK from different class backgrounds, education, and religions. They were recruited from an internet group called Straight Partners Anonymous. The participants were in different stages of their process of divorce. Practicing oral history as an insider gave rise to discoveries about effects on interviewees which contributes to scholarship of the consequences of life-story work. I put into context the acts of remembering and creating meaning after discovering a new piece of information about the marriage, which further illustrates the complexities surrounding oral history testimony. The implication of this research is that some marriages are resistant to cultural and societal forces. The project yielded a set of recordings covering women’s lived experience of marriage and divorce which will be archived at the British Library.