Rape in Chicago: Race, Myth, and the Courts

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments After more than a decade of research and writing on the topic of rape myths and rape trials in a modern city, I assumed that I would feel great satisfaction in finally sitting down to acknowledge those who have helped me along the way. Instead, I find myself overwhelmed by thinking about the widespread encouragement that I have received over the years and am nearly paralyzed in trying here to recount it all. I shall do my best. No scholarly research would ever be completed without financial support , and I am fortunate to be able to thank several sources. The American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Award for Legal History and the King V. Hostick Award for Illinois History at the Illinois State Historical Society supported early stages of the research presented here. Both the Department of History and the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provided funding to help offset the costs of research and conference travel, and I am grateful that they were able to help get me started. The Social Science Research Council’s Sexuality Research Fellowship Program, funded by the Ford Foundation, provided significant financial support, allowing me to take a year off from other duties and concentrate on thinking and writing. The SRFP also put me in contact with a broad array of scholars whose research on sexuality has inspired me in countless ways, and I cherish the friendships I made as a result. Support from the President’s Research Fund at Campion College at the University of Regina allowed me to return to Chicago and get back into the archives after several years away. Subvention funds from the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Regina aided in the final production of this manuscript. x Acknowledgments I have also had the good fortune to receive extensive support from friends and colleagues at a number of different institutions over the years. The gender and history reading group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provided an intellectually stimulating space to discuss new ideas. Friends in the Women’s Studies Program and the Department of History at the University of Wyoming at Laramie and in the History Department at the University of South Florida at Tampa also offered unending enthusiasm for my work. The comments and questions I received during annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the Social Science History Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the American Association for the History of Medicine helped me identify more clearly what I had to say about the difficult topic of sexual violence. I would also like to thank Maria Bevaqua, E. Frances White, and the editors at the Journal of Women’s History for helping me sharpen the focus of this research. I thank the Journal for allowing me to reprint portions of my article “‘They Didn’t Treat Me Good’: African American Rape Victims and Chicago Courtroom Strategies during the 1950s,” (vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 2005), which appear here in Chapter 3. Thank you to Laurie Matheson at the University of Illinois Press, whose confidence in this project and whose patience with my many questions has helped the book come to fruition. Thank you as well to Lisa Lindquist Dorr and the anonymous reviewers for the press, who took the time to offer thoughtful comments and critiques about this work. While certainly rewarding for everyone involved, the voluntary peer-review process can be a thankless task, and I very much appreciate the extensive efforts put forth by those who agreed to review this manuscript. For their support in the copyediting and production stages of publication, thank you to Julie Gay and Jennifer Clark. In these shrinking budgetary times, it is a pleasure to work with a scholarly press that takes such good care of its authors. Thank you to Katherine Jensen for her work on preparing the index. Not all sources of encouragement and critique have been anonymous or distant. My Canadian colleagues have offered keen support for this “foreign” topic, and I would especially like to thank those who listened to and remarked on portions of it presented at the University of Regina History Department Colloquia and Campion College’s Idle Talk Series. Special thanks to Jeet Heer for reading most of this manuscript at an early stage and offering his valuable impressions about it. Several other individuals have also read all or portions of this research, and my work is better...