Annie Shields, Los Angeles Review of Books
IN SEPTEMBER 2011, the FBI released its 82nd annual Uniform
Crime Report (UCR). Up to this point, the agency had only counted one very
specific type of rape in the UCR: rapes of females by vaginal intercourse
committed by males through the use of force. It did not count rape of men or boys.
It did not count rapes of transgender people. It did not count assaults
involving forced anal or oral sex. Frequently, it did not count rapes in which
victims were unconscious or unable to consent because of physical or mental
disabilities, or assaults in which drugs or alcohol were used to inhibit the
victim’s capacity to resist.
This was because, since 1929, the FBI had counted in the UCR
only “forcible rapes,” defined as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly
and against her will.” That definition, which has its origin in British common
law, doesn’t square with how most Americans think of rape today. But the
distinction between “forcible rape” and regular rape became a topic of national
conversation in 2011 when House Republicans introduced the No Taxpayer Funding
for Abortion Act. Even though federal funding of abortion is already illegal,
with the exception of victims of rape or incest, H.R.3 sought to further limit
that coverage to victims of “forcible rape” alone.
At that time I was working at Ms. magazine, where news that
Republicans were going after the reproductive rights of rape victims was at
once enraging and viewed as completely predictable. Being the flagship
publication of institutional feminism published by second-wavers in Washington
often meant sounding like a broken record that very few people can hear. But
for some reason, this time, when the House GOP tried to redefine rape at the
expense of victims in need of abortions, everyone paid attention. The Daily
Show devoted a full segment to ridiculing H.R.3’s forcible rape distinction.
Extensive news coverage of the bill helped gin up so much backlash that H.R.3’s
sponsor was forced to change the language before the bill could come up for a
vote. Forcible rape was out of the bill, but the public outrage over the notion
that some rapes are more important than others was still strong.
Capitalizing on the media attention to the HR3 debacle, Ms.
and our publisher, the Feminist Majority Foundation, launched the “Rape is
Rape” campaign, petitioning the FBI to update the archaic “forcible rape”
definition to a more inclusive one. The campaign consisted of a series of
reports on the definition as well as a Change.org petition — the most popular
in the site’s history at the time — which earned over 160,000 signatures.
Within eight months, the public pressure coupled with the lobbying efforts of a
number of feminist organizations in Washington forced the FBI to do what it
hadn’t done in 84 years: change the definition of rape.
The evolution of how rape has been defined in the United
States is the subject of the historian Estelle B. Freedman’s Redefining Rape:
Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation. In this book, Freedman
tells the story of the many disparate social movements whose efforts brought
about changes in the social and legal constructions of rape from the end of the
Civil War until the early 20th century. Not unlike the “Rape is Rape” campaign,
most efforts to redefine rape throughout the country’s history have relied on both
long-term organizing and unpredictable shifts in the political climate. The
impact of anti-rape activism, like that of all movements for social change, is
influenced by the fickle public attention span. The FBI’s decision to discard
the category of “forcible rape” in favor of a more inclusive definition of
assault was a big victory, but it went largely unnoticed by the public. Getting
people to sign on was easy, but getting the media to cover an esoteric
definitional change by a bureaucratic agency was a struggle. Despite the
substantive policy victory the campaign achieved, the big story of rape
activism in 2011 had nothing to do with the UCR. By the time the Ms. cover
story on “Rape is Rape” was released, everybody was already talking about
SlutWalk.
The same week Republicans in Washington introduced H.R.3, a
Toronto police officer came under fire after telling a University safety forum
that, in order to prevent rape, "women should avoid dressing like
sluts." Thus, SlutWalk was born. The first march was held in Toronto as a
demonstration against the rape culture and victim blaming exemplified by the
officer’s remarks. Organizers promoted the idea of reclaiming the label “slut”
and encouraged women to come dressed like one, the point being that an outfit is
not an invitation. Naturally, the media couldn’t ignore women dressed in
underwear and high heels marching in the streets.
As SlutWalks started popping up in more cities, controversy
over the merits of the approach grew. The marches touched on long-standing
divisions among feminists about sexuality, and that’s what dominated much of
the debate in the mainstream media. Was SlutWalk’s guaranteed-to-get-noticed
approach worth the risk that the message would get lost amid the images of the
woman on a mobile stripper pole? Was it a symptom of the pornification of our
culture, or a realization of sex-positivity that had previously been estranged
from the movement work? Was this the future of feminism, or the end of it?
There was no shortage of commentary about what to make of SlutWalk in
mainstream and alternative spaces during its heyday. But one thing some white
feminists seemed not so eager to discuss was SlutWalk’s race problem.
From the beginning, many women of color took issue with
SlutWalk, pointing out, among other things, the racial privilege required to
reclaim the word. Many objections were described in “An Open Letter From Black
Women to the SlutWalk,” first published on the website Black Women’s Blueprint
in September 2011 and subsequently reprinted on the Huffington Post and
elsewhere:
As Black women and girls we find no space in SlutWalk, no
space for participation and to unequivocally denounce rape and sexual assault
as we have experienced it. … Much of this is tied to our particular history. In
the United States, where slavery constructed Black female sexualities, Jim Crow
kidnappings, rape and lynchings, gender misrepresentations, and more recently,
where the Black female immigrant struggle combine, "slut" has
different associations for Black women. We do not recognize ourselves nor do we
see our lived experiences reflected within SlutWalk and especially not in its
brand and its label. ... Although we understand the valid impetus behind the
use of the word "slut" as language to frame and brand an anti-rape
movement, we are gravely concerned.
Perhaps more than any other recent cultural phenomenon,
SlutWalk revealed the utter ignorance on the part of many young white feminists
of the history of rape as a tool of white supremacy. It is that history, the
one that was explained over and over again by women of color in criticisms of
SlutWalk, that Freedman lays out in her Redefining Rape. For anyone not already
familiar with how we got here, this book is an excellent place to start.
¤
Freedman’s thesis is a simple one: throughout the history of
the term “rape,” its changing definition has been inextricably bound to
changing definitions of citizenship. She traces the evolution of rape as a
social and political concept from the end of the Civil War to the mid-20th
century. Through historical records, court transcripts, and newspaper archives,
Freedman shows how, since the country’s founding, ideas about sexual violence
have traditionally been informed — and enforced — by and for a ruling class of
white men. She also outlines the history of anti-rape movements that challenged
white supremacy and male supremacy. The presentation of these disparate
movements, which were often at odds with one another despite having seemingly
similar goals, is among the most fascinating aspects of Freedman’s narrative.
Redefining Rape begins with the colonial period, when rape
was defined according to British common law, as we have seen, as “unlawful and
carnal knowledge of a Woman, by Force and against her will.” Husbands were
excluded from the class of potential rapists, as married women were not
permitted to retract their “matrimonial consent.” The issue of consent,
Freedman points out, was fundamental to not only rape, but to the fight for
full citizenship and equality undertaken by both the feminist and the racial
justice movements. At the country’s inception, white women and people of color
alike were excluded from the rights of citizenship. Coverture, which came from
British common law, meant that married white women were the subjects of their
husbands and had no right to withdraw sexual consent. And enslaved women had no
ability to refuse sex with anyone.
In spite of this, rape laws in both Europe and the colonies
in the 17th and 18th centuries were quite harsh. Rape was a capital offense in
both northern and southern colonies. However, conviction rates were relatively
low. Sexual norms at the time were influenced by narratives of conquest and
empire which normalized sexual violence. A widespread belief that women desired
aggressive sex made proving the two key elements of rape — lack of consent and
the use of force — difficult. Not surprisingly, in the rape cases that were
prosecuted, white men were much less likely to be convicted than men of color.
And while white women of European descent often had trouble
proving the use of force and lack of consent required to win a conviction for
rape, non-white women usually couldn’t bring charges at all. Throughout U.S.
history, definitions of citizenship have allowed white men to assault Native
American women with impunity. Indigenous women were treated as the “spoils of
war” by European soldiers. White miners in California in the 19th century raped
native women with the knowledge that there would likely be no recourse —
according to California law, the testimony of an Indian person was insufficient
to convict a white person. General George Armstrong Custer gave his soldiers
permission to “avail themselves of the services of a captured squaw,” as he
himself did, after winning a battle against the Cheyenne.
Like native women, enslaved black women had no legal
standing to bring rape charges. Forced breeding with male slaves was standard
practice in the antebellum South, as was rape at the hands of slave owners. (In
fact, Freedman points out that some owners bought female slaves explicitly for
sexual labor.) And rape among slaves was largely ignored. Freedman cites a
lawyer who wrote at the time that, “The violation of the person of a female
slave, carries with it no other punishment than the damages which the master
may recover for the trespass on his property.”
One of Freedman’s main focuses in the book is the role the
South played in redefining rape for the entire country beginning in the late
19th century, when a new definition of rape began to take root, shaped by the
Southern beliefs that black women could not be raped and that black men
threatened white female virtue. After Reconstruction, both the cultural and
legal conceptions of rape came to implicitly assume a chaste white female
victim assaulted by a nonwhite male. This racialized definition of rape became
the foundation for a new infrastructure of white supremacy in the South,
implemented through lynching and segregation.
In May 1919, W.E.B. Du Bois described the process of
reestablishing white supremacy after slavery this way:
The charge of rape against colored Americans was invented by
the white South after Reconstruction to excuse mob violence… After the war,
when murder and mob violence was the recognized method of re-enslaving blacks,
it was discovered that it was only necessary to add the charge of rape to
justify before the North and Europe.
Indeed, Freedman points out that the rape panic of the 1880s
was a departure from antebellum attitudes among whites, when insurrection among
blacks was a far greater concern than rape. But as African Americans started to
gain civil rights and economic mobility, southern whites’ dominance was
threatened. Violent mobs often targeted black men who were becoming upwardly
mobile or politically active with lynching, using false rape accusations as
justification. Fears of rape, which became known as “The Negro Crime,” were
also fueled by a desire to preserve “racial purity.” Eventually even consensual
interracial relations between black men and white women were redefined as rape
by Southern white authorities — a reminder that a white woman’s “consent” was
not really hers to give.
At the same time, black women remained frequent targets of
sexual violence. After emancipation, the notion that black women lacked the
virtue of white women and therefore were acceptable sexual outlets for white
men persisted. Moreover, Freedman suggests, sexual assault of black women by
white men in the era of lynching and segregation was a means of further
undermining black men’s status in the patriarchy as protectors of their
sisters, daughters, and wives.
The narrative of the black rapist, first popularized by
white vigilantes, quickly infiltrated mainstream politics. Southern politicians
found it a useful tool for justifying policies of segregation and disenfranchisement.
Southern Democrats warned that if black men were permitted to enter civil
society they would gain sexual access to white women. Democratic candidates
successfully ran for office on pro-lynching platforms based on the defense of
white womanhood. And once elected, Freedman notes, they instituted policies
that perpetuated that framework, “install[ing] sheriffs and a judiciary that
viewed black men as sexual predators, black women as inherently immoral, and
white women as in need of protection.” The construct soon permeated national
politics. Despite his opposition to the practice of lynching, President
Roosevelt attributed it to “the perpetuation, especially by black men, of the
hideous crime of rape” in his 1906 State of the Union address.
It was in this climate of escalating racial violence, where
white supremacist views of rape infused the criminal justice system, that one
of many social movements challenging the established definition of rape
emerged. Against all odds, African American women in the post-emancipation
South began to assert their newly granted rights of citizenship by reporting
their rapes. Through black press accounts from the era, Freedman presents the
“uphill battle against white male sexual privilege” that African American women
undertook as part of a larger effort to exercise the rights of citizenship.
“Their efforts revealed the centrality of sexuality, along with economic
opportunity and political rights, to achieving the goal of full citizenship
after emancipation,” she writes.
The effort to redefine black women as potential rape victims
was always a direct challenge to white supremacy. The rape of black women by
white men reinforced the construct of black immorality, one that held black
women to be unconditionally promiscuous and unfit for participation in civil
society. “Among the many things that have transpired to dishearten the Negroes
in their effort to attain a level in the status of civilized races,” the black
journalist and activist Ida B. Wells wrote in 1886, “has been the wholesale
contemptuous defamation of their women.” Freedman makes it clear that the
object of early critics like Wells was to extend the prize of respectability
and purity to black women as well as white. This was in conflict with the
dominant white supremacist norms of the time, which excluded all African
Americans from the realm of respectability. Southern white women participated
in demeaning black women’s morality alongside white men. In a letter to the
editor of the Independent, a New York-based magazine, the celebrated Georgia
novelist Corra White Harris launched her writing career with a response to an
editorial condemning a lynching. Her defense of the lynching was titled “A
Southern Woman’s View.” “On this account I venture to inform you of facts which
do not mitigate the atrocious conduct of the Newnan mob, but which do explain
its savage fury,” Harris wrote:
The pioneer in colonial days protected his wife and child
from the wild beasts with his gun and knife; but to-day in the South every
white woman lives next door to a savage brute who grows more intelligent and
more insolent in his outrages every year, against whom the dilettante laws of
Georgia and other Southern States offer no protection… Nothing can be more
truly said of the ordinary negro than that he is a spiritual hypocrite. The
most prominent women in their religious enthusiasms are oftenest public prostitutes.
Only yesterday I passed one of the “preaching” to a crowd of men on a street
corner, and I assure you her ethics were high, while her gestures were lewd and
blasphemous. Out of this cesspool of vice rises that hideous monster, a
possible menace to every home in the South. He has the savage nature and the
murderous instincts of the wild beast, plus the cunning and lust of a fiend… To
him liberty has always meant license of one sort or another. Is it any wonder
North Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana have passed laws virtually
disfranchising him?
Clearly Harris, whose novels included A Circuit Rider’s Wife
and In Search of a Husband, was no crusader for equality. But Freedman offers
many examples of conflict between white and black women within reform movements
of the time. While white supremacy was thriving in the South, white women
across the United States had been organizing for equal rights during what would
become known as the first-wave feminist period. Women’s clubs provided a
setting for advocates of women’s suffrage, expanded rights for women and
temperance to develop and promote new ideas about morality and gender justice.
These racially-exclusive groups largely saw rape as a problem caused by gender
inequality and the exclusion of women from the full rights of citizenship (and
in the case of temperance advocates, the degradation of morality caused by
alcohol consumption). Morality — specifically, Christian morality — and
respectability were central to the mainstream women’s movement of the Victorian
era, and the dominant white supremacist notion of the time excluding black
women from the realm of respectability was a major barrier to inclusion.
The quest for sexual respectability among black women helped
give rise to the black women’s club movement of the 1890s. Inspired by
anti-lynching activists like Ida B. Wells, middle class black women in the
North formed civic groups and honed a strategy to counter the popular
stereotypes of black women as promiscuous, and organized anti-lynching and
pro-suffrage campaigns. But conflict arose when these groups attempted to ally
with white women’s rights activists. Freedman describes the failed attempt to
integrate the pro-suffrage Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which condemned
domestic and sexual violence within the popular temperance framework:
The public conflict between Ida B. Wells and WTCU president
Frances E. Willard exemplified [the] racial tensions [of the time]. Wells
wanted white reformers such as Willard to condemn without equivocation not only
lynching but also the false charges of rape that fueled vigilantism. Yet when
Willard addressed the WTCU in 1893, she reinforced the southern rape myth by
claiming that intoxicated black men posed a threat to the safety of womanhood…
At the organization’s 1984 conference, Ida B. Wells and sympathetic WCTU
members failed in their effort to pass a strong anti-lynching resolution.
Instead, the WTCU condemned the lawless acts but at the same time incorporated
the southern defensive rhetoric by referring to “the unspeakable outrages which
have so often provoked such lawlessness.”
Like most white women reformers of the time, Willard was
unable or unwilling to take significant account in her rhetoric or analysis for
the obvious role that racism played in both rape and vigilantism. At best,
Willard equated the social problems of rape and lynching by blaming them both
on drunkenness. Meanwhile black women knew that it was crucial to distinguish
white supremacy from alcoholism. Freedman speculates that the divergent
approaches toward sexual violence of white temperance advocates and black club
women delayed an interracial anti-lynching movement from taking shape for
another generation.
¤
By presenting the conflicts that prevented progress as well
as the limitations of the movements that managed to chip away at the legal
definition of rape over time, Freedman’s narrative tells us as much about
feminism’s failings as its successes. Throughout history there has been no
cohesive anti-rape movement, and Redefining Rape makes the reasons for that
clear. By cataloguing the many disparate critiques of the popular definitions
of rape over time, Freedman has placed a largely invisible history of anti-rape
reform in the broader context of ongoing struggles for social equality in the
United States.
Though she primarily focuses on the 1870s through the 1930s,
Freedman closes her book by touching on the social and political changes since
the mid-20th century that have continued to reshape the definition of rape into
the familiar but still fluid one we have today. The civil rights movement and
second-wave feminism expanded and furthered the race- and gender-based
criticisms of American society made by their predecessors. Legal reforms like
the 1994 Violence Against Women Act have expanded legal remedies for sexual
violence considerably. Anti-rape theorists and activists from Susan Brownmiller
to Andrea Smith have dramatically expanded the framework for thinking about
rape as a cultural and criminal issue in recent decades. However, as Freedman
points out, today’s response to sexual violence is still plagued with problems
like racial profiling, victim blaming, underreporting, and silencing.
Freedman cites both the Rape is Rape campaign and SlutWalk
briefly in her closing chapter as examples of contemporary anti-rape efforts.
She doesn’t, however, mention the many powerful racial critiques that SlutWalk
generated, even though they refer to so much of what was elaborated in the
book. It’s clear that much progress has been made in the ongoing efforts
against sexual violence — preliminary crime data for 2013 shows an increase in
the number of rapes counted by many police departments last year thanks to the
FBI’s new definition: the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or
anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of
another person, without the consent of the victim. But the high note that
Freedman ends on may obscure the reality of persistent racism in feminist
activist spaces. As the recent trending Twitter hashtag
#solidarityisforwhitewomen and the conversations it inspired have demonstrated,
the feminist movement is still influenced by the forces of white supremacy
discussed throughout Redefining Rape.
Still, for anyone interested in undertaking intersectional,
anti-racist feminist action against sexual violence, Redefining Rape has a lot
to offer. Freedman does a great service in providing a historical account of
where we came from, how we got here, and lessons for how to do it better in the
future.
