Rape & Sexual Power in Early America (review)

This book's strength lies in the cultural and intellectual history of gender and race through the analysis of texts; the author parses a host of judicial cases and other recorded incidents of rape and sexual assault. In this respect, the book has no equal for the time and places that it considers. The author compellingly discloses the political and social frailty of women and African Americans in early American society that enabled their victimization. Without advocates or mediators for their grievances, they were denied justice at the hands of their communities, courts, and even their families. In the case of African Americans, accused men as well as victimized women suffered.

Block claims to incorporate "multiple methodological approaches" (242), but the book employs little in the way of social-science methodology or sociological and criminological theory. Moreover, her analysis of quantitative data is piecemeal and unsystematic.

Block's subject is all of Anglo-America to 1820, but in casting so wide a net, she sacrifices precision and conclusiveness. For example, she searched just one Pennsylvania newspaper for mentions of rape; she relied on the public documents of just one or two Pennsylvania counties, but not all such documents. She might have provided more information about rapes in Philadelphia, America's largest city. The coverage of rape in the courts of Virginia and much of the South appears faint in this book. Block acknowledges her inattention to regional particularities and to secular change. She might have added inattention to ethnic and religious peculiarities: For example, Scots-Irishmen are curiously often among the suspected rapists. Although Native Americans are not entirely absent, no cases of accused Indian men appear in the book. Block's case for the significance of rape in the American Revolution is not well substantiated.

The greatest problem with the history of rape is the "dark figure" of unreported and unrecorded crimes. Block's commendable parsing of cases and other records shows that it was vast, as she asserts. Her alternative attempt, ingeniously, to confirm its vastness, by collating court dockets with court papers, yields far less certainty. The ten years of records that she uses are a small sample from a single county, and if every assault on a woman there were a sexual assault, it would still not make rape as vast as she earlier established. Furthermore, she confers on county clerks the liberty to reduce charges of rape to lesser crimes out of consideration for the accused men, but the clerks could not have exercised this privilege without orders from the king's attorneys or attorneys-general.

Of the few cases that have exceptional significance for the author, none are more noteworthy than those of Rachel Davis, a servant, and Harriet Jacobs, a slave, both raped by their respective masters. Other members of their households and communities knew of the rapes but did not intervene on their behalf. But the author has not discussed an equally significant, but contrary, case, in 1787/88—that of Alice Clifton, a young black woman, raped by a married, white man, "Fat John" Shaffer. Prominent Philadelphians rallied to her defense and to the spectacular prosecution of Shaffer.

This work is not the last word on rape in early America, but it is the essential latest word for anyone interested in this topic.