The morbidification of love between women by 19th-century sexologists

Twentieth-century attitudes toward love between women are very different from those of previous centuries. Fiction and personal correspondence that antedate the work of Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis in the late 19th century indicate that a much broader spectrum of expression of love and affection between women had been acceptable than that to which we have become accustomed. Medical science and psychology for the past 100 years have morbidified intense love relationships between women by inventing a syndrome of ills that supposedly accompany such affection, and by denying the validity or seriousness of the affection where such ills are clearly not present. The result has been that (until the lesbian-feminist movement) 20th-century women were largely forced to deny their love for other women unless they were willing to acknowledge their concomitant morbidity.