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I recently reread havelock Ellis's 1897 Sexual Inversion in preparation for writing this essay. I dwelt, understandably, on his chapter "Sexual Inversion in Women," which is organized to show evidence that "homosexuality is not less common in women than in men." This is a statement that he repeats frequently, even as he admits the immense difficulty of finding documentation. It is not his only difficulty. Trying to describe every form of lesbian sexuality, Ellis can never make up his mind exactly what it is. He obsessively circles such questions as "Is same-sex desire acquired or congenital?" and "What are the identifying marks of a lesbian?" Unable to find a simple definition, he divides lesbians into two categories, the "actively inverted" (masculine-appearing women), and those who are "not repelled or disgusted by lover-like advances from persons of their own sex" (feminine-appearing women), concluding that the latter category of women are "the pick of the women whom the average man would pass by." ' He attempts to include all possibilities and can settle on no one defining characteristic. Never afraid of inconsistency, he frames lesbianism as an emotion, a sexual act, a general reversal, and either situational or innate. It is striking how much we are still indebted to these different and contradictory propositions. Yet my rereading of Ellis has made me more sympathetic to his achievements; I now feel that his very indecisiveness is precisely what characterizes lesbian history, down to the controversy of when, how, and if it is appropriate to use the word "lesbian."
In this essay I will briefly survey the last thirty years of lesbian history and its theoretical paradigms, and then suggest further areas of research and possible new approaches in this unstable field of study. For evidence, I draw largely upon my own field, modern British history, as well as classic texts in US history. Inevitably this focus on Euro-American scholarship limits my generalizations, but such a lively a field, which increasingly includes other nations, languages, and disciplines, cannot be fully covered in a single essay.2
Some may find the title of this essay obsolete, or at least historically out of date. But I find that "lesbian" is not simply a placeholder for women who loved women; I think it...