| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America. Ed. by Merril D. Smith. (New York: New York University Press, 2001. x, 308 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8147-9788-1. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-8147-9789-X.)

Sex without Consent gives readers an opportunity to explore both the meanings given to sexual coercion in America's past and the methods used by scholars to recover and interpret evidence about it. The contributors to this volume explore the circumstances of sexual coercion and reactions to it from the era of early contact between Europeans and Native peoples to the present day. Not surprisingly, their essays point to critical continuities in how rape and sexual coercion have been experienced, prosecuted, and understood. Thus, whether women lived in colonial Massachusetts, nineteenth-century Georgia, or twentieth-century Virginia, they faced obstacles to obtaining convictions of male sexual assailants in court. Judges, prosecutors, juries, and the lay public doubted the veracity and virtue of women who claimed they had been assaulted or raped, especially if the victims were neither white nor married to high-status men. Sex without Consent also points to important changes in the meaning of sexual coercion over time, as well as to differences of experience related to region and subculture and to ideologies of gender, race, and class. In the late nineteenth century, free-love advocates denounced marriage for legitimizing husbands' rape of wives, speaking in a manner unimaginable to colonial Americans. By the second half of the twentieth century, activist organizations such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) made it possible for black women to press charges of rape against white men.

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