The Return of Patriarchy

"Rape is an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder yet to be defended by the party accused." These words were spoken first in 1676 by England's chief justice. Yet recently, a Maryland state delegate parroted them in his criticism of a bill proposed to deny parental rights to convicted rapists whose victims had borne children. Few instances demonstrate the degree to which early modern assumptions about sex, gender, credibility, and power continue to inform the twenty-first century. In fact, this observation captures a challenge located at the heart of Sharon Block's exceptional book Rape and Sexual Power in Early America: to acknowledge the grimly transhistorical nature of sexual assault while illuminating its historically specific construction and meanings. It is a daunting methodological and intellectual task, but Block proves herself up to it through a combination of impressive, wide-ranging research and thoughtful, sharp analysis. The book accomplishes nothing less than laying bare the relationship between social and sexual power in early America, locating the historical origins of what Block terms the "racialization of rape,"—chiefly the equation of the offense with African American men—and establishing its enduring consequences for the maintenance of white patriarchy in America (p. 4).¹

Although Block seems to be covering well-trod ground by examining the relationship among rape, gender, and race, the book distinguishes itself through chronological and geographical breadth as well as methodology. It considers the whole of British North America and focuses on a "long" eighteenth century—from 1700, when the social and legal systems of the colonies began to stabilize, she explains, to 1820, by which point the cultural meanings of rape and the practices of its criminalization helped to "mark the boundaries of the new American nation" (p. 14). The book's spatial and temporal scope yields great evidentiary fruit. Although Block's use of printed materials such as legal treatises, novels, and other published narratives is critical to her analysis of ideas and practices, the book's foundation lies in over nine hundred documented incidents of "sexual coercion." These represent not only various places and moments in time but a host of early American voices, some louder than others. In fact, the silences are as important to this project as the screams.

The carefully chosen phrase "sexual coercion" suggests one of Block's central concerns, and the thorny question that animates chapter one: what made sex into rape in early America? In theory the crime of rape, defined as "carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will," was straightforward (p. 16). In practice, prevailing gender ideas and roles made rape difficult to define, even for its victims, Block demonstrates. First, the legal theory of coverture, which subsumed married women in every public way to their husbands, made rape within marriage legally impossible. But even outside wedlock, in a world of assumed unequal social and sexual relations between men and women, one in which sexual intercourse was never an "equal partnering" but always expressed a power differential, the line between "proper" versus "coerced" sex was unclear. What constituted unacceptable "force" in an early modern society that did not wholly separate sex and violence? Moreover, what was a woman's "will," and how could it reliably be known?

Since prevailing wisdom regarded women as passive receptacles not wholly capable of giving clear consent, their claims fell under immediate suspicion. The idea that women lacked credibility, whether considered naturally "lusty," as all were in the seventeenth century, or "chaste," as only some were by the nineteenth, created a double bind that has persisted. On one hand it rendered women's consent irrelevant, since they could not fully know their own minds; yet by the same token the strict questioning arising from general mistrust of women made them seem responsible for staving off rape. Either way, the fault lay with the female victim, faced with proving her resistance in order to establish...