Rape without Women:
Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765–1815

Sharon Block

In 1815 a legal manual added a commentary to its recital of the proper treatment of rape. The author noted that "the material facts requisite to be given" in a trial for rape "are highly improper to be publicly discussed, except only in a court of justice." This sentence unintentionally pointed to a central paradox of rape: while the classification of a given sexual interaction as a criminal and morally reprehensible act of rape depended on specific details, those details were not fit for public exposition. Yet Americans regularly published remarks on rape in virtually every form of print: newspapers and almanacs, broadsides and pamphlets, novels and plays. We are accustomed to historians' viewing rape within its legal setting, but there was a print world of rape outside court proceedings and their accompanying publications. That print world transformed rape from an intimate sexual act into a public symbol that could define national and social boundaries.1	1
Whether figuring in wartime propaganda, an adventure tale, novel, newspaper story, or broadside, rape appeared in a consistent narrative pattern.2 For early Americans, rape was exclusively a male-female act; though men might be forced into sexual relations by other men, such sexual acts were considered sodomy, not rape. Yet the dominant trend in the public presentation of rape was the displacement of women from the narrative, making rape an occasion for men to speak to other men about a range of male prerogatives. The first section of this article shows how Americans made the very personal sexual interaction of rape publicly palatable by removing women from its retelling. Stories of rape, then, could accomplish what the newly popularized stories of seduction could not: by emphasizing men's interactions with one another, rape stories could provide an unequivocal assignment of right and wrong, unencumbered by concern over women's sexual desires and acts. Focusing attention on men's protection of women's virtue allowed authors to minimize the thorny issue of women's role in promoting their own morality. The absence of women allowed narratives of rape to categorize competing visions of masculinity.	2
Through this masculinized transformation, rape could be deployed in political battles. In the second section, I examine the politicization of rape in revolutionary rhetoric. Rather than invoking rape as a symbol of general savagery or as simply the marker dividing honorable from dishonorable masculinities, revolutionary-era narratives increasingly presented rape as an explicitly political trope. By replacing women's experiences of their own bodies with men's experiences of witnessing the victimization of women, rape-related stories opposed upstanding American male citizenry to corrupt British rule. In the revolutionary and early national eras, rape could convince readers of the need for American independence and allow Americans to see themselves as a community and a nation. The association of war and rape was not new. But the American Revolution focused the rhetorical power of rape on that political crisis to a degree completely unparalleled in early American history. Rape resonated as a means to disgrace and dismiss the British imperial system by transforming attacks on individual bodies into attacks on the American body politic. As American soldiers fought for their own rights as independent men, rape stories rallied supporters around the moral and political condemnation of the British Empire. The enemy of America was now the dominant villain in politicized stories of rape.	. . .