The War Between the Tates is a novel by Alison Lurie. It concerns academic life at an elite university in the late 1960s, and particularly the role of women. It satirizes both self-satisfied men who see women as nothing but homemakers, and women who self-righteously blame men for problems a couple cooked up together.

Plot summary

Erica and Brian Tate are an ideal academic couple, it seems, in early 1969. Brian, the Sayles Professor of Political Science at Corinth University in upstate New York, is in his mid-40s and probably will write an important book for their times, though he begins to realize he may never be called to serve in Washington, D.C. Erica, at 40, with her Radcliffe B.A. and a couple of children’s books published, has up to now enjoyed raising their two children and participating in the round of dinner parties, concerts, and other get-togethers enjoyed by the faculty.

Of course, things are not as perfect as they seem. Erica realizes that she hates her pubescent children—their music, their manners, their selfishness. One war between the Tates is the war between the generations, between the children who refuse to remain children and their parents.

Brian has gotten involved with a grad student, Wendy, who is desperately in love with him. Erica finds out, Brian gives Wendy up, but things just aren’t the same. Brian stops giving Wendy up, and she gets pregnant. Among the options Wendy considers are suicide, an illegal abortion (New York State legalized abortion in 1970, and raising this child whose precious Tate genes should be nurtured for the sake of humanity. The second war between the Tates is the war between Brian and Erica over the fates of Wendy’s child and of their own marriage.

As we move back and forth between the points of view of Erica and Brian, the lies they tell themselves about themselves and each other become funnier and sadder. Erica’s confusion is complemented by the situation of her friend Danielle Zimmern—recently divorced from Leonard Zimmern—who has been trying to cope with her own life by getting involved with Women’s Liberation. On the other hand, Erica meets up with an old friend—Zed, a man who, despite being too homely for her to take seriously, fell in love with her when they were undergraduates and is now running a bookstore offering alternatives to institutional science and religion in Corinth. He is still in love with Erica, and invites her on an LSD trip. Brian meanwhile ends up helping a group of young women—in particular one very attractive one—who want to protest the sexist attitudes of one of his colleagues. Brian ends up supporting both sides in this battle. The war between men and women is, the author implies, part of the human condition, but sometimes peace is called for.

"The War Between the Tates" as a roman à clef

At the time this novel was published, Lurie was a faculty wife (with three sons) at Cornell University in upstate New York, where her husband was a professor in the English Department (she was also teaching in the department, at first on an adjunct basis and then as a tenure-track professor). Corinth University, with its setting of creeks flowing through deep gorges, gracious but not always comfortable academic buildings, and shabby Collegetown, is clearly modeled on Cornell. Thus Lurie’s novel got the reputation of being based on real people and their misadventures, both in marriage and in academic politics.

However, clearly Lurie did not depict life at Cornell during this period. In April 1969, just a year before Lurie sets the dramatic and very funny takeover of a sexist professor’s office by his female students, Cornell underwent a profound change, initiated by the takeover of the student union, Willard Straight Hall, by the association of Afro-American students. In the course of the takeover, the black students acquired guns (though they were not used). In a complex series of meetings, the students, under SDS guidance, and the faculty came to terms with the demands of the black students, thus redefining the source of power at Cornell as student demand rather than faculty integrity. Some professors, particularly in Government or Political Science, left Cornell (e.g. Allan Bloom); the suicide of one who stayed was attributed to the April 1969 events. Lurie begins her novel in March but the next chapter takes us to May without any attention to this upheaval. The actual events are only casually referred to (the women students in the novel are inspired by thinking about what the black students would do in this situation) and their repercussions are evidently personal (Brian Tate loses face) but don't affect the university as a whole.

Characters in "War Between the Tates"

• Brian Tate, professor of Political Science at Corinth
• Erica Tate, his wife
• Wendy Gahagan, a graduate student at Corinth
• Sanford Finkelstein, aka Zed, a bookshop owner
• Leonard Zimmern, his wife Danielle, and their daughters Roo and Celia

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In 1977, War Between the Tates” was made into a TV movie starring Elizabeth Ashley and Richard Crenna.

External links

New York Times review

References and Notes

Donald Downs, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University, Cornell University Press, 1999.

1. Chapter 12 begins "on a Monday afternoon in December" of the first year of the novel, which runs from March of one year to May of another. In this chapter, Erica complains to her friend Danielle about how much she hates living in 1969. This fits with one other datable reference, in the last chapter, when Brian notes that New York State has just passed a liberal law legalizing abortion; this pinpoints 1970.
2. See the Cornell News Service article from Sept 2005 for Lurie’s own comments on the real-life models for her characters. In a July 1998 Cornell Chronicle article, her colleague Jonathan Culler mentions the fear in the English department--nearly 25 years later--that she might write a sequel to The War Between the Tates.