| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. By Sharon Block. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xvi, 276 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3045-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5761-8.)
With this book, Sharon Block has written the definitive study of sexual violence in early America. Spanning the long eighteenth century (1700–1820), Rape and Sexual Power in Early America explores early Americans' paradoxical relationship with rape: it was viewed as a heinous crime, but it was rarely identified or prosecuted. Block argues—based on 912 instances of sexual coercion recorded in popular print, and superior court and slave trial records throughout British North America—that the continuities in Americans' understandings of rape and the uses of sexual violence outweigh regional differences and change over time. The story here is of fundamental stability in power relations grounded in beliefs about gendered sexualities and commitments to hierarchical power relations.	1
This book makes colonial understandings of rape comprehensible to modern readers and ties the story of colonial sexual violence to the political uses of rape in U.S. race relations—two significant achievements.	. . .

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