Rape

Rape. All crimes must be viewed within their social and historical context, and this is certainly true of the crime of rape in America. Complicating the problem is the lack of a definitive historical study of the topic in the United States.

While both the legal history and the social and cultural understandings of rape have shifted dramatically from the Colonial Era to the present, several themes clearly emerge. For much of the period, rape was understood as a kind of theft by one man of another man's property (that is, a daughter or a wife). Further, some property was deemed especially valuable. In colonial New England, for example, rape was punishable by death, but of the tiny fraction of rape accusations that actually resulted in execution, all involved instances where the victim was married, engaged, or a young child; in other words, when she obviously and unambiguously “belonged” to a man. Another major theme in the history of rape has been a distinction based on the victim's race. Southern slave codes, for example, did not recognize the rape of a black female slave by her white owner as a crime.

Indeed, the racial politics of rape make the issue extremely complicated. Myths of the sexual voraciousness of African‐American males and females enabled white men during and after slavery to exert control over the bodies of blacks, male and female, as well as white women, to whom they stood as self‐appointed protectors. The notion that black men were genetically predisposed to rape, and that their preferred victims were white women, flourished in the postemancipation era. In these years, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has put it, rape stories functioned as the “folk porn[ography] of the Bible belt.” In this setting, lynching became an ever more popular response to these imagined fears. While only about a quarter of the lynchings of black males were actually motivated by rape accusations, the fusion of racial and sexual politics meant that lynching was widely understood as the honorable act of white men protecting “their” women. Leaders of the antilynching campaign, including such women as Ida B. Wells‐Barnett and Jessie Daniel Ames, of course, rejected the attempt to justify lynching as an expression of chivalry. Wells‐Barnett, an African American, further noted that black women were absent from the rhetorical defense of lynching as a means of protecting female virtue.

Studies of the history of rape in Canada, England, and other Western countries all suggest that it is and has been a crime that tends to take place within, not across, the boundaries of race, social class, and ethnic group. The American obsession with black men as rapists (though not the response of lynching) has a historical parallel, in Canada and England, with the notion that working‐class men are similarly incapable of controlling their animal instincts. But historical and contemporary studies suggest that the more similar in background and the better acquainted the alleged victim and the alleged rapist, the less likely that the alleged victim would be believed in court. This underscored the persistence, at least among judges and juries, of the popular misperception that rapists are most likely to come from outside their victim's social group.

The often humiliating treatment of rape complainants by the legal system, coupled with the emergence of a revived women's rights movement, helped to politicize rape again in the 1960s and beyond. The redefinition of rape by feminists, especially Susan Brownmiller's highly influential book about rape, Against Our Will (1975), changed the politics of the issue. Many feminists now viewed rape as a crime of gender power alone. As the foundation of a system of male dominance, some argued, rape united all women as victims, and all men—whatever their class or color—as potential rapists or beneficiaries of women's fears of rape. In this view, rape was seen as the key to patriarchal rule, the ultimate act of domination by which all men keep all women in a near‐constant state of fear. Yet as black feminists have continually pointed out, the racial dynamics of rape, and the legacy of the myth of the menacing black man, had yet to be directly addressed.

By the 1990s a reaction had set in, as some women writers criticized some feminists' obsession with rape as a revival, in a new guise, of old notions of women's sexual innocence and helplessness in the face of sexually aggressive male behavior. Nevertheless, a belief in women's bodily inviolability remained at the forefront of the antirape campaigns, campus marches, and rape crisis centers that proliferated in the United States as the twentieth century ended.
See also Crime; Feminism; Racism; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform.

Bibliography

Susan Brownmiller , Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, 1975.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall , Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign against Lynching, 1979.
Angela Y. Davis , Women, Race and Class, 1981.
Thelma Jennings , ’Us Colored Women Had to Go through a Plenty‘: Sexual Exploitation of African American Slave Women, Journal of Women's History 1 (1990): 45–66.
Karen Dubinsky , Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880–1929, 1993.
Mary Odem , Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920, 1995.

Karen Dubinsky