Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

Published in 1981， this feminist classic began modestly as an academic essay on Emily Dickinson's love poems and letters to her future sister-in-law， Sue Gilbert. In her introduction， Faderman recalled her surprise at finding these records of an erotic attachment between women that showed no evidence of guilt， anxiety， or the need for secrecy. Yet 60 or 70 years after they were written， the original letters had been bowdlerized by a niece of Dickinson's， who clearly found them too shocking for publication. Why， Faderman wondered， was passionate love between women， once almost universally applauded in the Western world， now almost universally condemned? She learned that the love between Dickinson and Gilbert had many precedents， and that it was only in the late 19th century that medical literature and antifeminism combined to rank women who loved women as "inverts", and those who had sex with other women as evil "lesbians". Under this stigma, some romantic friends shunned away from their true love and emotion, while others moblized around it wave after wave lesbianist feminist movements.