Sex without Consent

Rape and Sexual Coercion in America

Merril D. Smith

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780814797891
• eBook ISBN: 9780814738214
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A group of men rape an intoxicated fifteen year old girl to "make a woman of her." An immigrant woman is raped after accepting a ride from a stranger. A young mother is accosted after a neighbor escorts her home. In another case, a college frat party is the scene of the crime. Although these incidents appear similar to accounts one can read in the newspapers almost any day in the United States, only the last one occurred in this century. Each, however, involved a woman or girl compelled to have sex against her will.
Sex without Consent explores the experience, prosecution, and meaning of rape in American history from the time of the early contact between Europeans and Native Americans to the present. By exploring what rape meant in particular times and places in American history, from interracial encounters due to colonization and slavery to rape on contemporary college campuses, the contributors add to our understanding of crime and punishment, as well as to gender relations, gender roles, and sexual politics.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Studying Rape in American History
• 1 “None of the Women Were Abused”: Indigenous Contextsfor the Treatment of Women Captives in the Northeast
• 2 “Playing the Rogue”: Rape and Issues of Consent inSeventeenth-Century Massachusetts
• 3 Sexual Consent and Sexual Coercion inSeventeenth-Century Virginia
• 4 Coerced Sex and Gendered Violence in New Netherland
• 5 Rape, Law, Courts, and Custom in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800
• 6 “The Law Should Be Her Protector”: The CriminalProsecution of Rape in Upper Canada, 1791–1850
• 7 “I Was Very Much Wounded”: Rape Law, Children, andthe Antebellum South
• 8 “A Most Detestable Crime”: Character, Consent, andCorroboration in Vermont’s Rape Law, 1850–1920
• 9 “In the Marriage Bed Woman’s Sex Has Been Enslavedand Abused”: Defining and Exposing Marital Rape inLate-Nineteenth-Century America
• 10 Race, Honor, Citizenship: The Massie Rape/Murder Case
• 11 “Another Negro-Did-It Crime”: Black-on-White Rape andProtest in Virginia, 1945–1960
• 12 Sexual Coercion and Limited Choices: Their Link to TeenPregnancy and Welfare
• 13 Rape on Campus: Numbers Tell Less Than Half the Story
• Contributors
• Index