Throughout history some women have engaged in sexual relationships with other women as well as desired other women. However, it has only been since the late nineteenth century that such women been categorized as a distinct type of person, "a lesbian", by virtue of their sexual interests. The evidence suggests that emotional and sexual aspects of their life have taken various forms in different periods of history and in different cultures. Nowadays lesbian desire is accepted as a part of the normal range of human intimacy.
             Until the mid nineteenth century, lesbianism was considered a shameful and dangerous practise and therefore socially and legally discouraged. Lesbian relations were often represented as anguished and violent, structured around female rebelliousness. Husbands were misjudged and called unable to satisfy and control their sexually promiscuous wives.
             In "Lesbian Feminism and Psychology", Rachel Parkins writes that "Lesbians were described as jealous, insecure and unhappy, the sick products of disturbed upbringings, suffering from unresolved castration anxiety, or oedipal conflicts pursuing other women in a futile attempt to substitute a clitoris for a nipple as a result of their unresolved weaning problems."
             Society thought having a husband and children is the first and most important aim of feminine existence. Bertha Harris writes in "In Our Right To Love" lesbian invisibility existed "Between the time of Sappho and the birth of Natalie Clifford Barney (ca. 613 B.C – 1876 A.D). That was the 'lesbian silence' of twenty-four centuries."
             Among European settlers, colonial court cases indicate that some women had sexual relations with other women: " Female homosexual issues do not appear explicitly in medieval English literature. For lesbians attempting to understand why they have been silenced for much of the English trad...