ABSTRACT
Lesbian feminists were very important from the beginning of the WLM in creating the theory of feminism and radical feminism. They were involved in all the different areas of feminist activism in the 1970s and 1980s, but their way of seeing things was likely to be different from that of their heterosexual sisters. I shall focus on an area of feminist theory and practice which is not usually seen as susceptible to the lesbian perspective: men’s violence against women, in which lesbians were particularly prominent. I shall also examine ideas about the first objects of lesbian feminist scrutiny, which were lesbianism itself and women’s relationships with other women in general, including women’s friendships and women’s love for women. The lesbian perspective was also important in relation to the construction of sexuality. In the 1980s there was the blossoming of a field of thought that was called in the US ‘lesbian ethics’. This directed a conscious lesbian perspective to the ways in which lesbians did and should relate to each other, and I shall look at this important development here.
