Rape and Sexual Power in Early America
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A01=Sharon Block
Author_Sharon Block
Category=JKV
Category=NHTB
coerced sex
colonial subordination
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forced sex
patriarchy
race and rape
rape
rape prosecution
seduction
sex and patriarchy
sexual access
sexual behavior
sexual coercion
sexual ideology
sexual norms
sexual power
sexuality
social hierarchy
statutory law
Product details
- ISBN 9780807857618
- Weight: 423g
- Dimensions: 231 x 159mm
- Publication Date: 04 Sep 2006
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based. Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications 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 classified 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 charged 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-labor 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.
Sharon Block is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
