Advised to protect their graduate student husbands from stress, three women face confl icts within each marriage amid anti-war protests, drug use, racial unrest and the emerging feminist movement. Told from the women’s perspectives, the story begins in harmony, but turns to discord as: • Meg struggles to balance motherhood with her own academic ambitions, and copes with her husband’s violent mood swings; • Rosemary, daughter of a British coal-miner, copes with her upperclass husband’s verbal abuse; • Terry, an artist familiar with the drugs of the time, married to a former Navy SEAL, balances her anti-war activism against her husband’s Vietnam memories.