Two women were prosecuted for lewd conduct in 1649 in Plymouth Colony, and one of them was convicted. This may be the only conviction for lesbianism in American history. England's attempted criminalization of sexual acts between women paralleled the American attempts to amend sodomy codes to include lesbianism. During consideration of the Labouchere Amendment, brought before Parliament in 1885, whose language had already banned any male homosexual conduct as a capital crime. Attempts to include prohibition of intimacy between females were smothered, both by Queen Victoria's refusal to acknowledge the existence of lesbianism and the honest dread in the House of Lords that criminalization thereof would actually alert women to the possibility of female sexual relations and thus indirectly enc