equation of two decidedly different social circumstances that simply have no equality in life. A woman of strength and honesty may, if she chooses, sever her marriage and marry a new male mate and society will be upset that the divorce rate is rising so but there are few places in the United States, in any event, where she will be anything remotely akin to an 'outcast'. Obviously this is not true for a woman who would end her marriage to take up life with another woman.

"I very loudly agree, on the other hand, with the writer's view that women who violate their marriages freely be cause the violations involve women rather than men deserve the condemnation of both society and lesbian opinion. Not so much because of any sacredness of our dubious social morality, but rather because it involves the deception of another human being and that, as always, is intolerable. Also I think it is very nice if somehow lesbian women in general might lend themselves amiably to showing that all relationships between women need not be those of 'cats' tearing at one another but in this particular discussion it seems rather beside the point.

"I suspect that the problem of the married woman who would prefer emotional-physical relationships with other women is proportionally much higher than a similar statistic for men. (A statistic surely no one will ever really have.) This because the estate of woman being what it is, how could.we ever begin to guess the numbers of women who are not prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taught all their lives to believe was their 'natural' destiny AND · their only expectation for ECONOMIC seourity. It seems to me that this is why the question has an immensity that it does not have for male homosexuals. We must, as noted above, take a dim view of anyone who treats a married partner without respect; but at the same time I should imagine that we would have a particularly sensitive and sympathetic awareness of the nature of the 'social trap' (I cannot think of a better set of words at the moment) which the fundamental position of women as a sex is likely to force many women into. homosexual or heterosexual.

"I am suggesting here that perhaps it is pat and even unfair to suggest that all that remains for the married