Why are gay women called lesbians?

Answer 1

Lesbian is the term most widely used in the English language to describe romantic or sexual attraction between women. The word may be used as a noun to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characteried by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an adjective to describe characteristics of an object or activity related to female same-sex attraction.

"Lesbian" as a concept, used to differentiate women with a shared sexual orientation, is a 20th Century construct. Throughout history women have not had the same freedom or independence to pursue homosexual relationships as me, but neither have they met the same harsh punishment as homosexual men in some societies. Instead, lesbian relationships have often been regarded as harmless and incomparable to heterosexual ones unless the participants attempted to assert privelages traditionally enjoyed by men. As a result, little in history has been documented to give an accurate description of how female homosexuality has been expressed. When early sexologist in the late 19th Century began to categorize and describe homosexual behavior, hampered by a lack of knowledge about female homosexuality or women's sexuality, they distinguished lesbians as women who did not adhere to female gender roles and incorrectly designated them mentally ill - a designation which has been reversed in the global scientific community.

The world "lesbian" is derived from the name of the Greek island Lesbos, home to the 6th Century BCE poet Sappho. From various ancient writings, historians have gathered that a group of young women were left in Sappho's charge for their instruction or cultural edification. Not much is of Sappho's poetry rermains, but that which does reflects the topics she wrote about: women's daily lives, their relationships, and rituals. She focused on the beauty of women and poclaimed her love for girls. Before the late 19th Century the word "Lesbian" referred to any derivative or aspect of Lesbos, including a type of wine.

In 1890, the term was used in a medical dictionary an an adjective to describe tribadims (as lesbian love): sexual gratification of two women by stimulating intercourse. "Lesbianism" to describe erotic relationships between women had been documented in 1870. The terms were interchangeable with "Sapphist" and "Sapphism" around the turn of the 20th Century. The use of "lesbianism" in medical literature became prominent; by 1925, the word was recorded as a noun to mean the female equivelant of a sodomite.

There is so much more detail on this out there, but that's just the basics on how the word was formed and become known as the term for "female homosexuality".