Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (review)

"He threw me on the Bed... he caught hold of me and threw me down...s I struggled each time—but consented at last" (16). So begins the first chapter of a book that places us in a world both strangely foreign and familiar. Familiar is the sexual coercion of women that seems to be, as Block says, "widely transhistoric and transcultural" (7). But foreign is the notion, held in this case by the woman herself, that she could consent to forced sex, and that what occurred was not, therefore a rape. The idea that a woman can consent to coercion (consent being different from resignation or submission) is jarring to modern-day sensibilities, and it leads Block down a fascinating path of cultural difference and historically specific understandings of rape and sexual power in America between 1700 and 1820.

Block offers an original and multifaceted exploration of rape as it was described by the victims, vetted by women in the community, defined by changing statutes, reconstructed in courtroom hearings, and remarked upon in newspapers, novels, adventure stories, and broadsides. The book combines the methodological approaches of social, legal, and cultural history to offer many perspectives on rape, and it does so within a sophisticated theoretical framework that spans literary, legal, and historical analyses of gender, power, sexuality, race, and colonialism. Furthermore, Block draws on an impressive array of sources from twenty-nine archives in fifteen states, consulting also the legal treatises and statutes of ten more. Given the elegance with which this book does all that, it will surely become standard reading for scholars of early American history, women's history more broadly, and students of gender, race, sexuality, and power. It is accessible enough for advanced undergraduates, sophisticated enough for graduate students, and a role model for anyone wishing to move beyond the confines of any one approach (legal, social, cultural) to an historical topic.

But methodological versatility, theoretical sophistication, and a broad research base are only the tools with which Block forges what really matters here, namely innovative arguments about rape as the complex result of many historical contingencies. "Social and economic relations underwrote sexual power, both through the act and through a community's reaction" (3). Rape in early America was not identifiable apart from the context in which it took place. "The identities and relationships of the participants, not the quality of a sexual interaction (which was largely unknowable to all but the participants) most easily defined rape" (3). This meant in practice that "[m]en's racial and class identities largely determined whether they could coerce sex undetected and unpunished, just as women's identities determined their vulnerability to men's sexual force" (4). The status of a white man and that of the woman he coerced was precisely that which made a woman's "consent" to coercion not only possible but commonly accepted, and not only during the attack but long afterwards as the community assessed what had taken place and whether there had been any damage.

Block shows how normative understandings of sex reduced white women's ability to claim persuasively that a rape had occurred. Sexual coercion was standard in a culture in which virtuous women were supposed to resist non-marital sex. (The concept of marital rape did not yet exist.) In this context, a woman's resistance did not indicate lack of desire, and it was assumed that "[c]onsensual sex could be physically forceful" (17). Thus it becomes possible to charge a New York man with "assault with an intent to seduce" a woman (29). The difference between forced consensual sex and rape was unclear, with rape often resulting from what the assailant initially hoped would be consensual (if forced) intercourse. Rape in this earlier era was understood as an effort to obtain sexual relations, and not, as today, thought to be primarily about the act of domination itself. Had the victim only consented to sex, as did the woman whose words...