Teaching & Learning Guide for: How Should We Look at Rape in Early America?
Authors: Block Sharon 
Published: June 2007

Focus Questions

What are the advantages or disadvantages of various approaches to studying the history of rape? How do different approaches endorse particular perspectives (either historical or contemporary) on sexual assaults?

What does the study of rape reveal about life in early America? What comparisons can you make to the understanding, process, or prosecution of sexual assaults in other times and places? What do these comparisons suggest about how we write the history of rape?

Author Recommends

* Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

This book is a comprehensive study of the social, legal and cultural histories of rape in early America. Looking at all of British America from 1700–1820, Block encourages readers to think beyond the legal definition of rape to unravel how early Americans thought about and treated sexual coercion in their daily lives. Her multi‐faceted analysis extends racial constructions of rape back into the colonial period and beyond the bounds of the southern slave‐labor system.

* Cornelia H. Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Chapter 5, 231–84.

Dayton provides an excellent legal study of rape in the colony of Connecticut that also focuses on the people involved in sexual assaults. She traces the shifts from a seventeenth‐century religious view of rape as a sin of concern to the entire community toward an eighteenth‐century view of rape as a serious crime only when committed by outsiders.

* Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), Chapter 5, 159–90.

Fischer explores how rape and other forms of sexualized violence were part of the production of race in colonial North Carolina. Fischer looks at an array of rape cases, as well as violent assaults (especially on enslaved people) with less obvious sexual intent. In so doing, she suggests a wider conceptualization of the intersection of sexual and racial oppression in the colonial South.

* Pamela Scully, ‘Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth‐Century Cape Colony, South Africa,’American Historical Review, 100 (1995): 335–59.

Scully looks at the intersection of race, sex, class, and ideas about masculinity in colonial South Africa through an in‐depth analysis of rape law and cases. This piece provides a nice comparison to the racialized views of rape in the colonial U.S. context, particularly in the ways that it explores the sexual abuse of African women as part of the European imperial project.

Online Materials

1. DoHistory

http://dohistory.org/two_stories/index.html

This website is centered around the diary of an eighteenth‐century New England midwife named Martha Ballard. In that diary, she mentions a rape trial in which she testifies and about which she wrote in her diary. The website allows you to look at all the known primary sources used to reconstruct what happened in this case, comparing the official documents to Martha Ballard’s comments. Click to ‘Table of Contents’ to see an overview of the story.

2. The History of Rape: A Bibliography

http://de.geocities.com/history_guide/horb/

Stefan Blaschke has compiled an incredibly extensive bibliography on the history of the rape worldwide. Users can search the bibliography alphabetically by author, chronologically, geographically, topically or by keyword.