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  • Sexual Assault and Citizenship
  • Emily Epstein Landau (bio)
Estelle B. Freedman. Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 416 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Estelle B. Freedman's new book Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation is simultaneously a synthesis and a departure, offering new interpretations of existing scholarship and placing familiar episodes in American history in a new light, with the question of rape and its shifting meaning at the center of her analysis. Her thesis is utterly convincing: the meaning of “rape” has long been in flux in America. Its definition has depended in turn on how “consent” has been judged—a question inextricably tied up with citizenship. At the root of the issue, Freedman locates the twin concepts of self-sovereignty and patriarchal sex right. Drawing on the writings of Carole Pateman, Pamela Haag, and others, Freedman explores the sexual contract giving ownership or control of women to their husbands as the “flip-side” to the all-important social contract in classical liberalism, the root of America's system of governance, and of white male privilege within it. “At their origins, both the social contract and classical liberalism intentionally applied only to white males”(p. 6). Women and non-Europeans lacked the requisite autonomy to “consent” in sex or politics. Law and custom made manifest the gender and racial inequity premised on this sexist and racist assumption. Redefinitions of rape emerged out of challenges to white men's exclusive claim to citizenship rights and autonomous personhood; likewise, efforts to redefine rape were understood, often correctly, as challenges to white supremacy.

Rape as an act is not here in dispute; when rape was considered a crime, and against whom, is the issue. “At its core,” Freedman writes, “rape is a legal term that encompasses a malleable and culturally determined perception of an act” (p. 3). Yet, sometimes, at its core, rape is the act itself. At times Freedman blurs the distinction between the socially constructed and contingent meanings of “rape” and the act of rape, and this can cause confusion. Freedman does not make the radical—and ultimately unsupportable—claim that the act of rape does not exist outside the hegemonic language that has given it currency; at the same time, her argument relies on understanding “rape” as discursively [End Page 262] constructed over time, through repeated struggles over its definition. And yet, again, in order for us to understand these shifts in meaning over time and their relation to social justice, we have to have a fairly stable understanding of what rape is, and realize that private discussion may have used the word even when the dominant order would not. This difficulty underscores the enormity of the task Freedman undertook in writing this book, and it resonates with contemporary struggles to “redefine rape.”

No single movement in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries organized itself around the problem of sexual violence; every redefinition of rape came out of a different sort of fight. Each chapter offers a compact history of one or several social movements, analyzed for what is revealed about sex, sexuality, and sexual assault. Freedman has scoured a wide array of sources: court proceedings, legal treatises, newspaper reports, novels, the writings of social and purity reformers, of anti-lynching reformers, of free-lovers, and more, as well as a wealth of secondary literature. Abolitionists, feminists, anarchists, suffragists, free-love advocates, civil rights activists, temperance workers, child-welfare reformers, and more, challenged and redefined sexual assault as part of their efforts to realize their vision of a more inclusive and just society. “Rape” was used metaphorically and demagogically to broaden or limit the scope of political and social representation among competing groups, most often in conflict. For instance, white suffragists disparaged black sexuality and self-sovereignty; anti-lynching activists belittled working-class white women's ability to consent; child-welfare advocates targeted male immigrants as sexually dangerous; and so on.

Always at play in the history of redefining rape were the socially constructed, ever-shifting, and overlapping categories of gender, class, race, and childhood. It is not possible in...

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