Intimacy between women was fashionable between the 17th and 19th centuries, although sexuality was rarely publicly acknowledged.
During the 17th through 19th centuries, a woman expressing passionate love for another woman was fashionable, accepted, and encouraged.[90] These relationships were termed romantic friendships, Boston marriages, or “sentimental friends”, and were common in the U.S., Europe, and especially in England. Documentation of these relationships is possible by a large volume of letters written between women. Whether the relationship included any genital component was not a matter for public discourse, but women could form strong and exclusive bonds with each other and still be considered virtuous, innocent, and chaste; a similar relationship with a man would have destroyed a woman’s reputation. In fact, these relationships were promoted as alternatives to and practice for a woman’s marriage to a man.
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The varied meanings lesbian has known since the early 20th century caused some historians to revisit historic relationships between women before the wide usage of the word was defined by erotic proclivities. Discussion from historians caused further questioning of what qualifies as a lesbian relationship. As lesbian-feminists asserted, a sexual component was unnecessary in declaring oneself a lesbian if her primary and closest relationships were with women. When considering past relationships within appropriate historic context, there were times when love and sex were separate and unrelated notions.[67] In addition to the difficulties of this qualification, female sexuality is often not adequately represented in texts and documents. Until very recently, much of what has been documented about women’s sexuality has been written by men, in the context of male understanding, and relevant to women’s associations to men—as their wives, daughters, or mothers, for example.[68] Often artistic representations of female sexuality suggest trends or ideas on broad scales, giving historians clues as to how widespread or accepted erotic relationships between women were.
Ancient Greece and Rome
History is often analyzed with contemporary ideologies; Ancient Greece as a subject enjoyed popularity by the ruling class in Britain during the 19th century. Based on their social priorities, early Greek scholars interpreted Greece as a westernized, white, and masculine society, and essentially removed women from historical importance.[69] Women in Greece were sequestered with each other, and men with men. In this homosocial environment erotic and sexual relationships between males was common, and were recorded in literature, art, and philosophy. Hardly anything is recorded about homosexual activity between women. There is some speculation that similar relationships existed between women and girls. The poet Alcman used the term aitis, as the feminine form of aites — which was the official term for the younger participant in a pederastic relationship.[70] Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, mentions women who love women, but uses the term trepesthai (to be focused on) instead of eros, which was applied to other erotic relationships between men, and between men and women.[71]
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