Abstract
In Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, Estelle Freedman brilliantly traces shifting definitions of rape and sexual violence. Freedman, a premiere historian of gender and sexuality, tells us that popular narratives, including definitions of who rapes and who gets raped, reflect the larger political struggles over race, gender, and sexuality. Arguing that constructions of rape have historically served to uphold white male political and sexual privilege, Freedman places a spotlight on the late 19th- and early 20th-century landscape of post-reconstruction and progressive era United States where social inequalities produced a dominant rape narrative of the African America male assailant and the chaste, white female victim. Freedman simultaneously unearths political and social resistance to this narrative and details the disparate forerunners of a movement that would radically redefine sexual violence in the later 20th century.
Drawing on archival sources that took a decade to compile and weaving together social and political history, Freedman’s story begins in the antebellum United States, where definitions of rape began to “narrow” along racial lines in the wake of emancipation. The growing social risks associated with nonmarital sexuality in this modernizing context increased the social value placed on white women’s chastity. By the post-reconstruction era, black men were far more likely to be prosecuted for rape than white men, and lynching emerged as an extralegal response to presumed black male sexual violence against white women.
This powerful narrative of the black male rapist was not without challenge and competed with alternative interpretations of sexual violence. Most significant, according to Freedman, were understandings of rape advanced by late 19th century and turn of the century moral reformers and women’s rights activists. These reformers recognized women’s and girls’ unique sexual vulnerabilities in the industrializing landscape as well as the gender inequalities expressed through sexual violence. The female reform agenda promulgated a host of issues related to protection of women and girls, including antiseduction laws that targeted white men who sexually coerced women with false promises of marriage, statutory rape laws, and media campaigns targeting the “masher,” an early caricature of white male immigrants who engaged in street harassment. Suffragists generally lent support to these efforts, yet they understood sexual violence as related to women’s lack of political rights, particularly voting rights and the right to serve on juries. Freedman links these differing interpretations of sexual violence to larger, well-studied tensions within first-wave feminism.
Despite their recognition of other forms of sexual violence, these predominately white female reformers did not consistently or explicitly challenge the racialization of rape. Direct protest emerged within the African American community, both from female activists and clubwomen who highlighted the legacy of African American female sexual victimization by white men and by male activists and members of the black press who exposed the brutality of lynching and false claims against African American men.
Freedman details a variety of social shifts that tore at this narrow construction of rape by mid-century, including African American migration northwards and the Civil Rights movement, loosening sexual norms, and a growing cultural preoccupation with the seeming threat of homosexuality. Second-wave feminism, Freedman maintains, most dramatically changed the conversation and politics around rape by placing male privilege at the center of its analysis.
Redefining Rape leaves its reader appreciating how definitions of rape and sexual violence are subject to political contest and “help determine … who may exercise fully the rights of American citizenship” (p. 11). Of great relevance to social workers and their students, Freedman’s exemplary scholarship inspires us to lead the charge of redefining sexual violence in our contemporary, digital landscape. Freedman also reinforces a fundamental historical lesson for social workers—that social movements, despite flaws and tensions, can move us closer to social justice.