Rape In Early America

Block, Sharon. Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Thesis: Block argues that both “known” men and unknown rape victims were vital to connecting rape to Early American social and sexual power (15). This is important because according to Block, “Rape was a part of the architecture of early American racial and gender hierarchies that used women’s bodies to delineate its rules and boundaries (241).”

Themes: One of the first themes of the text is “reluctant resistance.” This theme is apparent throughout the text as well because it spoke large volumes for the colonial/early republic culture of America. Women were supposed to be reluctant of any sexual advance, lest they be seen as immoral, so men could not properly determine if the reluctance was true, or

Print culture utilized rape announcements to perpetuate and add to the wedge between the races, and further promote the superiority of the white race. Through print culture, rape was represented as a “black-on-white” crime, with any reported “white” rapes being an anomaly (200). When a white man was convicted of rape, his race was typically left out of the description of the crime (201). White men for both their purity and their immorality used white women; when a black man raped a white woman, she was pure and innocent, but when a white woman charged a white man with rape, her character was tarnished and she was portrayed as unchaste (206). Another theme of the text was patriarchy. Patriarchy was key for a woman’s innocence or her demise. A woman was not deemed trustable enough to judge her own consent, and had to rely on the testimonies and judgments of a male protector to ensure that her testimony was heard, believed, and she was not morally ruined (40,123). Attackers would often seek absolution from fathers rather than the actual victim, because the woman was of little importance