Abstract
The standard narrative of antirape activism during the second wave of the women’s movement often credits white feminists for making rape a public issue, while criticizing the movement’s marginalization of voices of color. As Catherine Jacquet elucidates in her book, much of this origin story is incorrect. Rape was publicly discussed long before the 1970s, and women’s liberation was not the only movement organizing against rape. The Injustices of Rape examines antirape activism between 1950 and 1980, within the two social movements that centered sexual violence in their activism: the black freedom movement and the women’s liberation movement. The Injustices of Rape is the first comprehensive study that examines the black freedom and women’s liberation movements’ responses to rape alongside one other. Utilizing primary sources to establish a time line of sexual violence legislation and organizing, Jacquet describes how each movement mobilized antirape analyses from their own frameworks of injustice.
Her book begins with a revelatory historical exploration of centuries of legal and psychological thought that entrenched common rape myths into the courts, racial justice movements, and liberal society alike. Jacquet then charts how contrasting racial and gender justice frameworks caused deep fissions between the movements. To do this, Jacquet traces the implementation of rape legislation within false accusations of, punishment for, and self-defense during rape.
Jacquet provides insight into the potential of organizing when an issue garners the attention of multiple movements. The movements operated separately but successfully in establishing the right of a rape victim to use self-defense during the Joan Little case in 1975 and secured the prohibition of capital punishment for adult rape cases in 1977. Conversely, the consequences of disparate movements are also laid bare. Jacquet illustrates the development of rape shield protections that limit the use of a victim’s prior sexual history in court. She dissects the refusal of the leaders of some racial justice legal organizations to support rape shield legislation, as they used sexist tropes to defend black men on trial. Simultaneously, the women’s movement would not acknowledge the use of rape accusations to perpetrate extralegal and state violence against black men. This created an impasse between the movements, and as Jacquet assesses, “these racialized and gendered dynamics would cast a long shadow over antirape activism” (p. 67).
Both movements refused to center black feminist analyses of the racism and sexism in sexual violence. Jacquet thoroughly details the contributions of those approaching sexual violence from intersectional frameworks, and in so doing, the book combats the erasure of these voices. Similarly, when Jacquet documents the institutionalization of the women’s movement into state structures, she provides space for the antistate feminists who resisted from within the movement. This is rare, as much scholarship on the antiviolence movement can portray institutionalization as inevitable and universal. In her conclusion, Jacquet assesses the failure of reforms to improve conditions for victims or reduce sexual violence and ends the book by recentering the work of women of color who continue to strategize for safety from both sexual and state violence.
A strength of Jacquet’s analysis is her acknowledgment of, but refusal to utilize, common assumptions within antirape advocacy, such as the measurement of success through criminal–legal reporting. Given this, it would have been pertinent to unpack the idea of justice throughout the book. At various points, justice is differently applied as a goal for victims, defendants, and social movements; at other times, justice is both individually and structurally attained. Given these varied definitions, Jacquet’s material analysis would have been well suited to exploring what “justice” means for each person or group and how this has changed over time.
The Injustices of Rape is equally relevant as an introduction to antirape activism as well as a deep dive that will further the knowledge of experts and advocates. Jacquet’s book raises as many questions about our present as it does about the past. Intersectional frameworks may finally be gaining a foothold within mainstream feminist organizing, but is the movement ready to take accountability for the racial consequences of alignment with the state? Her book makes clear that if antirape activism wants to realize the goal of a future without sexual violence, we will need to first reckon with the past.
