Lesbian Herstory Timeline

Archaeological research has found the oldest representations of humans in art and objects were mostly of women. In the absence of written records, they are a symbolic system of 'silent witnesses' in which women were the sex made visible.

Many figures of female couples also have been found (male-female couples are very rare), but their meanings are not clear. They could represent 'mother and daughter, sisters, priestesses who together oversaw the cult of the twin goddesses, double queens, handed down from the Amazon myths, or simply lovers.'

Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist born in Lithuania, who migrated to the US as the result of World War II, used her knowledge of folk culture to interpret all the ancient objects as goddess figures, producing a controversial theory of Old Europe as a peaceful goddess-worshipping culture.

Fragments of love poems written to women by Sappho and Alcman still survive. Greek men largely didn't write about lesbianism, perhaps not even allowing for love between women to be identified as sexual. Occasional depictions of lesbian love have been found in ancient Greek art.

Masawaiyh (c  777–857) reported in a medical text that lesbianism was caused by the mother's diet: Lesbianism results when a nursing woman eats celery, rocket,  melilot leaves and the flowers of a bitters of a bitter orange tree. When she eats these plants and suckles her child, they will affect the labia of her suckling and generate an itch which the suckling will carry through her future life.

Al-Kindi (c. 801–873 AD) wrote: Lesbianism is due to a vapor which, condensed, generates in the labia heat and an itch which only dissolve and become cold through friction and orgasm. When friction and orgasm take place, the heat turns into coldness because the liquid that a woman ejaculates in lesbian intercourse is cold whereas the same liquid that results from sexual union with men is hot. Heat, however, cannot be extinguished by heat; rather, it will increase since it needs to be treated by its opposite. As coldness is repelled by heat, so heat is also repelled by coldness.

The Encyclopedia of Pleasure or Jawāmiʿ al-Ladhdhah (جوامع اللّذّة) is the earliest existent Arabic erotic work. It documents the first lesbian love story in Arab culture, about a female poet named Hind Bint al-Nu’man (known as Al-Hurqah (هند بنت النعمان), and Hind Bint al-Khuss al-Iyadiyyah (known as al-Zarqa’) from Yamama in Arabia.

Male homosexual relationships first criminalised in England  when the act of anal intercourse (buggery) was criminalised. The law applied to both men and women, but when applied to men it acted as a homosexist warning to the male brotherhood to use their penis 'morally.' The focus on the act of penile penetration meant that lesbian sexuality was not criminalised.

Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) met Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831). Both were members of wealthy families from the Irish aristocracy and determined not to be married off. They fought parental efforts to stop them leaving Ireland but they eventually were allowed to go to Wales, where they finally settled down in 1780 and lived as a couple for nearly fifty years with a servant, Mary Carryl, and a series of dogs all named Sappho.

The emerging suffragist and women's movement encouraged greater independence for middle & upper-class women through gaining educational and employment opportunities. Passionate friendships became evident in novels and real life.

Jennings, Rebecca 2007.  Lesbian History of Britain. Love and Sex between Women Since 1500, Greenwood, Oxford.

'Homosexuality' coined in an anonymous pamphlet by its author, journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny, in Germany (Herzer 1985).

Sexology 'experts' in England and Europe (Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Freud) developed theories of 'inversion,' Uranism,' 'arrested development,' which raised questions about emotional or romantic friendships between women.

Jennings (2007) A Lesbian History of Britain. Love and Sex Between Women since 1500.

For an origins story of the 'born in the wrong body' idea and lurid stories of conspiracies that blame women (sound familar to late modern TERF ears?), see here.

South Australia decriminalised homosexuality.

The term was first published in papers presented by Robert Stoller and Greenson at the 23rd International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Stockholm (Byrne (2023) 'The origin of gender identity,' Letter to the Editor,  Archives of Sexual Behavior, 52, pp. 2709-2711, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02628-0

Formation of CAMP in Balmain NSW announced by Christabel Poll and John Ware in the first edition of the newsletter CAMP INK, soon after 2 articles in The Australian by Janet Hawley 'Homosexuals form group aimed at ending an aura of mistique, secrecy' and 'Couples'. Within a year, a national network of CAMP and Society Five groups were established in Queensland, Victoria, ACT, Tasmania and most universities, where it was known as Campus CAMP.

1,000 acres of land on the Mid-North Coast of NSW were found by Kerryn Higgs and purchased from her prize money for the manuscript of her first novel, supplemented by fundraisers run by the newly formed Firestone Mountain Cooperative. This land was informally named 'The Mountain'. Two more adjacent purchases increased the total size of women's land to 3,000 acres: The Valley in 1980 and Herland in 1982. Keryn's novel, All That False Instruction. A Novel of Lesbian Love, published by Angus & Robertson in 1975 under the pseudonym Elizabeth Riley was the first Australian lesbian novel. It was re-published in 2001 under Kerryn's name by Spinifex Press. (Source: Sand Hall, Amazon Acres, You Beauty. Stories of Women's Lands Australia, Shell Publishing, Wollongong)

For more information, see 

here.