The Quibley Corner
Since Google has digitized millions of books published since 1800, you can type in a word or phrase or sentence and see a graph of its occurrence over time in English as well as other languages. Here is the graph of the word 'gay,' which was used frequently in the early 1800's, but apparently had a different meaning. From 1960 on, the word 'gay' has resurfaced to a peak in 2000.
Graph these case-sensitive comma-separated phrases: between and
We can see the word 'lesbian' is not all that popular, or nonexistent until 1960. This goes along with feminist, though there are rumblings of the word as early as 1900.
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