The History Of Lesbians Torrent

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This article needs attention from an expert in history of sexuality. (January 2015)
Lesbianism is the sexual and romantic desire between women. There are historically far fewer mentions of lesbianism than male homosexuality, due to many historical writings and records focusing primarily on men.
The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1700 BC) mentioned a term Sal-zikrum which translates to 'man-woman', in reference to women who were allowed to marry other women,[1] and were able to inherit the same amount as their brothers.[2] Another term Sal-nu-bar referred to women who were allowed to marry, but were forbidden to have children, so they brought other women with them to bear children; however, they could have children of their own, but they have to keep it as a secret, or cast them out as Sargon's mother did.[2] In addition, an old Assyrian text indicated that two women, who might have been two widows of a dead father, had a betrothal contract for their "daughter".[3]
Homosexuality in ancient Egypt between women is less often recorded, or alluded to, in documents and other artifacts as compared to homosexuality among men, but it does appear in such documents, e.g. in the Dream Book of Carlsberg papyrus XIII: "If a woman dreams that a woman has intercourse with her, she will come to a bad end".[5][6] Depictions of women during the New Kingdom suggest they enjoyed, in a relaxed and intimate atmosphere, the company of other women who were scantily clad or naked; some cosmetics-related items, which may have been owned and used by women, feature nude and suggestive depictions of women.[6]
The evidence about female homosexuality in the ancient Greek world is limited, with it being hardly mentioned in extant Greek literature.[7] Most surviving sources from the classical period come from Athens, and they are without exception written by men. At least among these Athenian men, the discussion and depiction of female homosexual activity seems to have been taboo.[8] Kenneth Dover suggests that, due to the role played by the phallus in ancient Greek men's conceptions of sexuality, female homosexual love was not explicitly defined as a sexuality or category by the authors of our surviving sources.[9]
Nonetheless, there are a few references to female homosexuality in ancient Greek literature. Two poets from the archaic period, Sappho and Alcman, have been interpreted as writing about female homosexual desire. Alcman wrote hymns known as partheneia,[note 1] which discuss attraction between young women. Though it is ambiguous, historians have considered the attraction in question to be erotic or sexual.[10] At roughly the same time, Sappho's poems discuss her love for both men and women. For instance, in Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite, the poet asks Aphrodite for aid in wooing another woman. It is noticeable that the fragment describes Sappho both giving to and receiving sexual contact from the same partner, in contrast with the rigid active/passive partner dichotomy observed in Greek male homosexual relationships.[11] Only one fragment of Sappho's poetry, Sappho 94, contains a clear mention of female homosexual acts.[12]
In classical Athens, the idea of homosexual women is briefly mentioned in the Speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium.[13] Later references to female homosexuality in Greek literature include an epigram by Asclepiades, which describes two women who reject Aphrodite's "rules" but instead do "other things which are not seemly".[14] Dover comments on the "striking" hostility shown in the epigram to female homosexuality, contrasting it with Asclepiades' willingness to discuss his own homosexual desire in other works, suggesting that this apparent male anxiety about female homosexuality in ancient Greece is the reason for our paucity of sources discussing it.[15]
In Greek mythology, the story of Callisto has been interpreted as implying that Artemis and Callisto were lovers.[16] The myth of the Amazons has also been interpreted as referring to female homosexual activities.[17]
Female-female relationships or sexual activities were occasionally depicted on Greek art. An early example of this is a plate from archaic Thera, which appears to show two women courting.[18] An Attic red figure vase in the collection of the Tarquinia National Museum in Italy shows a kneeling woman fingering the genitals of another woman, in a rare example of sexual activity between women being explicitly portrayed in Greek art.[18]
Sappho is the most often mentioned example of an ancient Greek woman who may have actually engaged in sexual acts with women. Her sexuality has been debated by historians, with some such as Denys Page arguing that she was attracted to women, while others, such as Eva Stigers, arguing that the descriptions of love between women in Sappho's writings are not evidence for her own sexuality.[19] Some historians have gone so far as to argue that Sappho's circle were involved in female homosexuality as a kind of initiation ritual.[20] The earliest evidence of Sappho's reputation for homosexual desire comes from the Hellenistic period, with a fragment of a biography found in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri which mentions that Sappho is criticised for being "gynaikerastria".[note 2][21]
Similarly, some find evidence in Plutarch that Spartan women engaged in homosexual activities, though Plutarch wrote many centuries after classical Greece. In Plutarch's biography of Lycurgus of Sparta, part of his Parallel Lives, the author claims that older Spartan women formed relationships with girls that were similar to the erastes/eromenos relationships that existed between some older and younger male Greeks.[18] Sarah Pomeroy believes that Plutarch's depiction of homosexual relationships between Spartan women is plausible. For instance, she argues, in the girls' choirs that performed the partheneia of Alcman, homosexual relationships between the girls would have "flourished".[22]
The lesbian love story between Iphis and Ianthe, in Book IX of Ovid's the Metamorphoses, is most vivid. When Iphis' mother becomes pregnant, her husband declares that he will kill the child if it is a girl. She bears a girl and attempts to conceal her sex by giving her a name that is of ambiguous gender: Iphis. When the "son" is thirteen, the father chooses a golden-haired maiden named Ianthe as the "boy's" bride. The love of the two girls is written sympathetically:
They were of equal age, they both were lovely,
Had learned the ABC from the same teachers,
And so love came to both of them together
In simple innocence, and filled their hearts
With equal longing.
However, as the marriage draws ever closer, Iphis recoils, calling her love "monstrous and unheard of". The goddess Isis hears the girl's moans and turns her into a boy.
References to love between women are sparse. Phaedrus attempted to explain lesbianism through a myth of his own making: Prometheus, coming home drunk from a party, had mistakenly exchanged the genitals of some women and some men – "Lust now enjoys perverted pleasure."[23]
It is quite clear that paiderastia and lesbianism were not held in equally good light, possibly because of the violation of strict gender roles. Seneca the Elder mentions a husband who killed his wife and her female lover and implies that their crime was worse than that of adultery between a male and female. The Babyloniaca of Iamblichus describes an Egyptian princess named Berenice who loves and marries another woman. This novelist also states that such love is "wild and lawless".
Another example of the gender-sexual worldview of the times was documented in Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans, in which Megilla renames herself Megillus and wears a wig to cover her shaved head. She marries Demonassa of Corinth, although Megillus is from Lesbos. Her friend Leaena comments that "They say there are women like that in Lesbos, with faces like men, and unwilling to consort with men, but only with women, as though they themselves were men". Megillus seduces Leaena, who feels that the experience is too disgusting to describe in detail.
In another dialogue ascribed to Lucian, two men debate over which is better, male love or heterosexuality. One man protested that if male affairs were legitimized, then lesbianism would soon be condoned as well, an unthinkable notion.[24]
The apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter describes the punishment of both male and female homosexuals in Hell:[25]
And other men and women being cast down from a great rock fell to the bottom, and again were driven by them that were set over them, to go up upon the rock, and thence were cast down to the bottom and had no rest from this torment. And these were they that did defile their bodies behaving as women: and the women that were with them were they that lay with one another as a man with a woman.
The canonical New Testament usually mentions homosexuality in only general terms (i.e. mentioning both men and women who had engaged in sexual acts with the same sex) and both are equally condemned. Women who'd done this were only mentioned once however.[26]
In medieval Europe, the Christian Church took a stricter view of same-sex relations between women. Penitentials, developed by Celtic monks in Ireland, were unofficial guidebooks which became popular, especially in the British Isles. These books listed crimes and the penances that must be done for them. For example, "...he who commits the male crime of the Sodomites shall do penance for four years". The several versions of the Paenitentiale Theodori, attributed to Theodore of Tarsus, who became archbishop of Canterbury in the 7th century, make special references to lesbianism. The Paenitentiale states, "If a woman practices vice with a woman she shall do penance for three years".[27] Penitentials soon spread from the British Isles to mainland Europe. The authors of most medieval penitentials either did not explicitly discuss lesbian activities at all, or treated them as a less serious sin than male homosexuality.[28]
The Old French legal treatise Li livres de jostice et de plet (c. 1260) is the earliest reference to legal punishment for lesbianism akin to that for male homosexuality. It prescribed dismemberment on the first two offences and death by burning for the third: a near exact parallel to the penalty for a man, although what "dismemberment" could mean for a medieval woman is unknown.[29][30]:13 In Spain, Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire, sodomy between women was included in acts considered unnatural and punishable by burning to death, although few instances are recorded of this taking place.[citation needed] In the Holy Roman Empire under Charles V, a law on sexual offences specifically prohibits sex acts between women.[30]:18
There exist records of about a dozen women in the medieval period who were involved in lesbian sex, as defined by Judith Bennett as same-sex genital contact. All of these women are known through their involvement with the courts, and were imprisoned or executed.[31] An early example of a woman executed for homosexual acts occurred in 1477, when a girl in Speier, Germany, was drowned.[30]:17 Not all women were so harshly punished, though. In the early fifteenth century, a Frenchwoman, Laurence, wife of Colin Poitevin, was imprisoned for her affair with another woman, Jehanne. She pleaded for clemency on the grounds that Jehanne had been the instigator and she regretted her sins, and was freed to return home after six months imprisonment.[32] A later example, from Pescia in Italy, involved an abbess, Sister Benedetta Carlini, who was documented in inquests between 1619 and 1623 as having committed grave offences including a passionately erotic love affair with another nun when possessed by a Divine male spirit named "Splenditello". She was declared the victim of a "diabolical obsession" and placed in the convent's prison for the last 35 years of her life.[33]
However, an Italian surgeon, William of Bologna, attributed lesbianism to a "growth emanating from the mouth of the womb and appearing outside the vagina as a pseudopenis."[34]
In the medieval Arab world, lesbianism[note 3] was considered to be caused by heat generated in a woman's labia, which could be alleviated by friction against another woman's genitalia.[35] Medieval Arabic medical texts considered lesbianism to be inborn. For instance, Masawaiyh reported:[35]
Lesbianism results when a nursing woman eats celery, rocket, melilot leaves and the flowers 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.
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 earliest story about lesbianism in Arabic literature comes from the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, and tells the story of the love between a Christian, Hind bint al-Nu'man, and an Arab woman, Hind bint al-Khuss, and we know from the Fihrist, a tenth-century catalogue of works in Arabic, of writings about twelve other lesbian couples which have not survived.[37] In addition, Ahmad al-Tifashi wrote a collection of stories, known as A Promenade of the Hearts, which included some poems on homosexual and lesbian themes.[38][39] Other accounts which mentioned lesbian relationships, include Allen Edwardes in his The Jewel in the Lotus: A Historical Survey of the Sexual Culture of the East, and Leo Africanus who reported about female diviners in Fez.[38] Moreover, the mutazarrifat (refined courtly ladies, also used for lesbians) were present in the Islamic world such as Wallada bint al-Mustakfi in Al-Andalus,[40] and slave girls (qaynas) who lived in the Abbasid Caliphate.[41]
Between 1170 and 1180 Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbis in Jewish history, compiled his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah. It is the only Medieval-era work that details all of Jewish observance, and as regarding lesbianism states:[42]
For women to be mesollelot [women rubbing genitals against each other] with one another is forbidden, as this is the practice of Egypt, which we were warned against: "Like the practice of the land of Egypt ... you shall not do" (Leviticus 18:3). The Sages said [in the midrash of Sifra Aharei Mot 8:8–9], "What did they do? A man married a man, and a woman married a woman, and a woman married two men." Even though this practice is forbidden, one is not lashed [as for a Torah prohibition] on account of it, since there is no specific prohibition against it, and there is no real intercourse. Therefore, [one who does this] is not forbidden to the priesthood because of harlotry, and a woman is not prohibited to her husband by this, since it is not harlotry. But it is appropriate to administer to them lashings of rebellion [i.e., those given for violation of rabbinic prohibitions], since they did something forbidden. And a man should be strict with his wife in this matter, and should prevent women known to do this from coming to her or from her going to them.
In early modern England, female homosexual behaviour became increasingly culturally visible. Some historians, such as Traub, have argued that this led to increasing cultural sanctions against lesbian behaviours.[43] For instance, in 1709 Delariviere Manley published The New Atlantis, attacking lesbian activities.[44] However, others, such as Friedli and Faderman have played down the cultural opposition to female homosexuality, pointing out that it was better tolerated than male homosexual activities.[45] Additionally, despite the social stigma, English courts did not prosecute homosexual activities between women, and lesbianism was largely ignored by the law in England.[45] For instance, Mary Hamilton (the "Female Husband", as Henry Fielding's account of the case had it), while she was whipped for fraud, does not seem to have been considered to have committed any sex crimes by either the courts or the press at the time.[46] On the other hand, Terry Castle contends that English law in the eighteenth century ignored female homosexual activity not out of indifference, but out of male fears about acknowledging and reifying lesbianism.[43]
The literature of the time attempted to rationalise some women's lesbian activities, commonly searching for visible indications of sapphic tendencies.[47] In The New Atlantis, for instance, the "real" lesbians are depicted as being masculine.[47] However, Craft-Fairchild argues that Manley – along with Cleland in Fanny Hill – failed to establish a coherent narrative of lesbians as anatomically distinct from other women,[48] while Fielding in The Female Husband instead focuses on the corruption of Hamilton's mind as leading to her homosexual acts and cross-dressing.[49] This difficulty in establishing a narrative framework to fit female homosexuality into was acknowledged by Jonathan Swift in his writing for the Tatler in 1711, where he describes a woman having her virginity tested by a lion. Despite the onlookers' failure to see anything unusual about the woman, the lion identified her as "no true Virgin".[50][51] At the same time, writings which were positive, or potentially positive, about female homosexuality, drew on the languages both of female same-sex friendship, and of heterosexual romance, as there were at the time no widespread cultural motifs of homosexuality.[52] Only among the less respectable members of society does it seem that there was anything like a lesbian subculture. For instance, there was probably a lesbian subculture amongst dancers and prostitutes in eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Paris, and in eighteenth-century Amsterdam.[53]
Laws against lesbianism were suggested but usually not created or enforced in early American history. In 1636, John Cotton proposed a law for Massachusetts Bay making sex between two women (or two men) a capital offense, but the law was not enacted.[54] It would have read, "Unnatural filthiness, to be punished with death, whether sodomy, which is carnal fellowship of man with man, or woman with woman, or buggery, which is carnal fellowship of man or woman with beasts or fowls."[55] In 1655, the Connecticut Colony passed a law against sodomy between women (as well as between men), but nothing came of this either.[56] In 1779, Thomas Jefferson proposed a law stating that, "Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with man or
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