Reviewed by Nancy Isenberg | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

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Reviewed by Nancy Isenberg | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Nancy Isenberg, University of Tulsa

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. By Sharon Block. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 292 pages. $45.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
This ambitious book is an extensively researched study of the meaning of rape in early America. Sharon Block has scoured twenty-five archives and uncovered 912 cases of rape, relying mainly but not exclusively on criminal court records supplemented with diaries and other literary sources. She explicitly rejects the limitations of a regional study, choosing instead to do what she calls a "large-scale project" (5) examining cases from all the colonies and later states and covering the period from the early seventeenth century to 1820. Block seeks to explain exactly how early Americans came to terms with rape, which "was both pervasive and invisible" (1).	1
Block begins by quickly dismissing the idea that the social practice of rape had anything to do with consent. The modern legal debate, which distinguishes rape from sexual consent, had little relevance in early Americans' understanding of rape. She persuasively shows that force was considered a natural part of sexual intercourse. Rape was not a distinct and isolated occurrence; it was, as Block writes, "a secondary recourse should a woman refuse a man's sexual overtures" (25). Anglo-American culture upheld the widely accepted belief that "women might need to be forced into sex" (51). All women, no matter how virtuous, made a show of resistance merely as a ruse, a preliminary dance, so that they could lure men into their clutches. "No" meant "yes." The same rationale reappears today among men who engage in date rape.	. . .

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