Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. Lillian Faderman (Morrow, 496pp., $18.95, Quill paperback, $10.95)

This book is not about lesbians. According to Professor Lillian Faderman's quite thorough scholarship, the “Lesbian” did not even exist in Europe until the 1880s and in the United States until 1910. Not a natural phenomenon, she was invented by the medical profession to cope with women's entry into the professions and higher education and to insure that female economic independence would not allow women to avoid marriage. Love between women, which did exist, was unlike Lesbianism in being socially honored, not secretive, and extremely common, and here Faderman makes her most ambitious points and may lose some readers.

As late as 1929 a nationwide study of American women chosen as normal revealed that 50 percent had experienced “intense emotional relations with other women” while half of this group had experienced such relations as sexual. Earlier, in Faderman's words, “it was virtually impossible to study the correspondence of any nineteenth-century woman … of America … England, France and Germany, and not uncover a passionate commitment to another woman at some time in her life.”

In short, the inventors of “Lesbianism” saw the bell curve of emotional and sensual experience as skewed towards one of its ends, the “normal,” while the other end was declared a separate and “abnormal” phenomenon. Such an unnatural separation can be – and has been – used to make all close bonds between women suspect. In connection with the twentiethcentury view that eroticism can be reduced to genital contact, this same artificial division functions to declare all passionate attachments between women either trivial (those without a genital element) or criminal (those with). This modern idea that genitality is the point of division in relationships between women (not a turn-of-the-century criterion, as Faderman points out) cannot – I think – survive Faderman's piling up of evidence. In an age when carnality with anyone was forbidden to ladies there is little written evidence of genital contact between women (though some exists) but erotically toned “romances,” “love affairs,” and “marriages” abound. The creators of Lesbianism got around the ubiquity of such behavior by declaring that their model Lesbian (who was hysterical, insane, promiscuous, congenitally defective, murderous, suicidal, and anatomically mannish) was the “real” one and all others somehow unreal.