People keep asking where the bisexual women are when we look at the history of the western LGBT movement. The thing is that it’s almost impossible to talk about the history of lesbians, bi women and trans men as separate groups until relatively recently because of the ways that sexuality and gender identity were understood and conflated. These ideas have changed radically over the last century, not that they remained static before that, and it was not until around the 1970s – nearly at the end of our thousands of years of community history – that we even began to use these terms (lesbian, bisexual, trans) in the way we understand them now.
“Lesbian”, as a term to describe women who loved other women, came in during the late Victorian period (circa 1890), as an extension of “sapphic”, which has been used on and off for centuries (off during the times when society – and for society read men – has been unwilling to admit that women feel desire for each other at all).