ABSTRACT
The revolution that was lesbian feminism transformed the meaning and practice of lesbianism. In this chapter, I will examine the way that lesbianism was understood and lived before the Women’s Liberation Movement and the changes that lesbian feminism wrought. I will describe how lesbians came from two directions to create lesbian feminism, from the Gay Liberation Movement and from the Women’s Liberation Movement. The lesbians left gay liberation because the movement was dominated by gay males and had priorities that were not only different from but often in direct contradiction to those of lesbians. I will also show how lesbian feminists started to organise and form groups within the women’s liberation movement against opposition from some heterosexual feminists who argued that the lesbians put women off. The chapter will show that differences of class, education and race affected the way that lesbian feminism developed, as did political differences between socialist feminists and radical feminists in particular over the ways that lesbianism and feminism related to each other.
