Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America

4. Coerced Sex and Gendered Violence in New Netherland

4 Coerced Sex and GenderedViolence in New Netherland James Homer Williams VIOLENCE PERVADED NEW Netherland. This Dutch colony in the Hudson and Delaware valleys was frequently at war with its Indian and European neighbors and feared constantly that another military conflict was at hand. In addition, court records reveal that more personal violence was, if not an everyday occurrence, common enough. Both women and men filed charges of assault, slander, and physical violence . These cases litter the colony’s records from the late 1630s to the English takeover in 1664. More extraordinary for their scarcity and the reactions to them recorded by the court secretaries were the cases involving child molestation , rape, and sodomy. These crimes clearly crossed the line from ordinary gendered crime to extraordinary, even abominable, offenses . They occurred with sufficient regularity to allow us to gauge the society’s thoughts and feelings toward these crimes and to see how people separated in their own minds “ordinary” offenses from intolerable ones. Since it is included in a volume on rape in America, one might expect this essay to have much to say about rape in New Netherland. My research in the scores of cases of gendered violence, however, has uncovered only a handful of rape cases, and nearly all of those deal with adults molesting children. The absence of reported rapes is not surprising , for rape has often gone unreported in modern times. Garthine Walker has pointed out the rarity of rape cases in early modern England —about 1 percent of indicted felonies—and the even greater scarcity of convictions, although a majority of guilty rapists were hanged. 61 Attempted rape was a misdemeanor and “formed only a tiny majority of prosecutions.”1 Walker indicts social historians for making the history of rape “a non-history, a history of absence.” It is tempting to do the same for New Netherland, for a void exists between the numerous cases of gendered violence, such as slander and beatings, and the extreme instances of sex crimes, such as the rape of children. In a colony with nearly every other sort of coerced sex (bestiality cases are absent) and gendered violence, it remains a puzzle that so few man-woman rape cases were prosecuted, or occurred at all. Using more than a hundred rape cases across England in the seventeenth century, Walker succeeds in giving voice to victims of rape.2 The task is more difficult in New Netherland. In seeking a solution to this puzzle, this essay recognizes that issues of sex and violence in early modern Europe and North America must be understood within the world of gendered power that determined political , economic, and social relationships in European societies. As they colonized societies across the globe, Europeans attempted to order their new worlds as they knew the old worlds at home.3 In New Netherland, Dutchmen sought to impose a male-dominated system on Indian peoples accustomed to a matrilineal and matriarchal order. If they succeeded , it was only with those Algonquian and Iroquois people who strayed into Dutch territory. More successful, perhaps, was the imposition of European cultural norms on Africans, slave and free, in the colony , though so little is known about the inner workings of African society in New Netherland as to make any statement only speculative. Clearly, though, Africans lacked power in this society. This essay explores a range of gendered violence and sex crimes in New Netherland. What the colony’s court records make clear is that Dutch ideas about power were transplanted largely intact to North America. The peculiarities of the colony’s government, as well as the presence of Indians and Africans in the Dutch domain, forced adaptations in the application of criminal codes. The argument, then, is that gendered power, as revealed in violent crime, operated in an identifiably Dutch way. But just as the Dutch varied from their European neighbors, so too did New Netherlanders differ from their nearest competitors , the English in the Chesapeake and New England. Seventeenth-century European courts, whether in Europe or the colonies, assumed the responsibility of maintaining community order. 62 JAMES HOMER WILLIAMS Therefore, courts adjudicated all manner of disorderly crimes, including those between men and women, adults and children, and Africans, Indians, and Europeans. Because New Netherland was an outpost of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), company employees promulgated and enforced its laws. Ultimate authority lay in the company’s Amsterdam...