Rich wrote that instead of sexual relationships between women, lesbian can mean any woman who avoids a conventional married life and resists male tyranny. In 1970 the lesbian feminist organization Radicalesbians stated, "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion." In 1980 feminist writer and poet Adrienne Rich proposed a continuum of lesbian relationships ranging from sexual to platonic. Some groups widened the definition to mean any woman who didn't live a traditional heterosexual life. With the coming of second wave feminism in the later 20th Century, a tendency to view all women in more or less heterosexual terms stirred a rebellion in which the definition of lesbian was challenged. Women who have written about their affection for each other, along with spinsters who lived together for years, have often been viewed without much hint they had intimate relationships. Broadened meaningĬalling a historical figure a lesbian can be misleading. From the 1920s "lesbian" became the most commonly used term. Until the early twentieth century the term lesbian was used interchangeably with the word Sapphist. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word "lesbianism" to refer to a specific sexual identity or orientation to 1870, the word lesbian, as an adjective, to 1890 and as a noun to 1925. īy the late nineteenth century the term Uranian came into vogue for both male and female homosexuals. "Lesbian" in this period, then, remained largely a proper name, a place name, a geographical designation - though as Brantôme's usage indicates, a name strongly associated with sexual relations between women. However, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, the French 17th century writer on sexuality, uses the term "lesbian" ("dames et lesbiennes") to mean homosexual women, but according to David M Halperin the word is always still directly linked to the women of Lesbos: The dominant meaning of "lesbian" until the 19th century still referred to Lesbos rather than any sexual identity. The word meant "rubber", on the assumption that female homosexual practices involved sexual stimulation by rubbing together both the genitalia of two women, and referred to sexual practices rather than the modern concept of sexual orientations. This term continued to be the most common word used in medical literature in up to the 18th century in Europe. The ancient Greek rhetorician Lucian used "Lesbian" as an adjective to refer to female homosexuality, but the most common term used by ancient writers was Tribade, which could mean either a masculine woman, or a woman who has sex with another woman. From antiquity Lesbos was associated with female homosexuality because of the homoerotic verse of native poetess Sappho. The word lesbian in English was originally an adjective referring to the inhabitants of the Greek island of Lesbos and the dialect of Greek from the island. Here, it is doubled and twined in symbolic hues of lilac as a sign for lesbian. It was later also used to represent the female in biology and popular culture. Copper's ancient alchemy symbol became a sign for both the goddess and the planet. In ancient times, the metal copper was associated with the Roman goddess Venus because of its visual appeal.