Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America

3. Sexual Consent and Sexual Coercion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

3 Sexual Consent and Sexual Coercion in Seventeenth-CenturyVirginia Terri L. Snyder IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY VIRGINIA, matters of sexual consent and coercion rarely came to the attention of the courts. Those few white women who sought to prosecute white men for sexual assault or rape faced formidable barriers to success. For African American slave women, the situation was, of course, worse. They could not seek legal redress for sexual violations; raping a slave was not a criminal act. Moreover, rumors of sexual misconduct often swirled around the victims of sexual coercion, casting doubts on their character. A white woman in Virginia walked a legal and social tightrope: successfully prosecuting a white man for sexual coercion was highly unlikely, but taking no legal action could damage her reputation.1 If she could not confidently prosecute for sexual coercion, how might a woman convince her neighborhood that she had not freely consented to sexual relations? In her study of sexual coercion in British North America, Sharon Block argues that sexual coercion was more than an act of power. Establishing and proving that sexual coercion had occurred depended on who controlled the definition of the act.2 When a woman stood before the assembled magistrates, juries, and spectators in county courtrooms in colonial Virginia, she could seize that power, simultaneously defending herself, wrestling the meaning of consent away from others, and defining it in her own terms. In doing so, she framed a narrative that would vindicate her. This essay explores the strategies employed by women in two cases in which sexual consent was fundamentally, although not directly, at issue. When they took command of the public forum of the courtroom, an admittedly rare 46 event, white women could use that forum to their advantage, even against white men, and control definitions of sexual consent and sexual coercion. Rightly deployed, women’s narrative strategies could successfully obtain retribution, clear their names, and restore their honor. In 1662 Ann Collins, an indentured servant, stood before the court in York County, Virginia, on the routine charges of fornication and outof -wedlock pregnancy. Instead of mutely receiving her sentence, as did most women in her situation, Ann Collins spoke out in her own defense . She was at a clear disadvantage in offering her relatively extended confession: she was a servant, pregnant, and unmarried in defiance of the law, standing in a courtroom full of legal authorities who would judge her and neighbors whose tongues would wag over her sentence. Still, she wanted the assembled individuals to understand how her consent was extracted and why she had engaged in the illegal act of sexual intercourse outside marriage. Collins presented a narrative of a bad bargain, and in recounting the circumstances under which her sexual consent was obtained, she controlled the terms of the contract, and therefore the definition of consent . From her point of view—a viewpoint that she wanted those assembled at court to share—sexual consent was strictly quid pro quo. Ann Collins viewed the exchange between her and Robert Pierce, her sexual partner, as a more or less contractual one: she consented to sex, and he consented to free her. More importantly, her story was framed to show that her consent was obtained by fraudulent means. In other words, Pierce bargained in bad faith. She wanted the court to understand , as she herself did, that this constituted a form of coercion. She framed the story to shift blame from herself to her partner. Ann Collins’s confession was explicit. She began by explaining that she would never have “yielded” to Pierce’s entreaties for sex, but eventually was persuaded to do so. Why? To put the matter simply, Pierce made significant promises to Collins. “Hee told mee that hee would free mee from my master whatsoever it would cost him and that hee had stocke cattle servants and a plantacon and that I should ride his Mare and then your Mistress will thinke much [of you].” Collins constructed herself as open, perhaps even susceptible, to an offer, and recounted the terms of the contract made between herself and Pierce. She agreed to sex, and with a romantic flourish Pierce agreed to free her “whatsoever it would cost him” and make her rich. While Pierce did not make a clear marriage offer, Collins may well have inferred such a promise or at least SEXUAL CONSENT AND SEXUAL COERCION IN VIRGINIA 47 felt it...