Rape and sexual power in early America
By: Sharon Block.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press; The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780807830451; 9780807857618
Subjects: Rape -- United States -- History; Sex crimes -- United States -- History; United States -- History 18th century; United States -- History 19th century
Description: Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implictions of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classfied as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charded only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-born system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
"Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia."