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Stanford professor Estelle Freedman's new book examines how sex crimes oppressed women and blacks in the age of suffrage and segregation.
In 1793, 17-year-old Lanah Sawyer was pushed into a brothel and raped by a seemingly respectable man who had taken her for a walk in the streets of New York. In court, her assailant’s attorney said she had basically consented to sex when she agreed to go walking with him, and warned the jury against placing “the life of a citizen in the hands of a woman.” The man was acquitted. Both parties in this case were white, and the strangeness of the verdict has something to do with a 1765 index to the laws of Maryland:
“RAPE: See Negroes.”
What do these facts have in common? They support the notion that rape historically “reinforced the exclusivity of citizenship,” in the words of Estelle Freedman. A professor at Stanford, she’s the author of a new
book, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, which examines how a culture that historically distrusted both women and blacks conspired to keep both out of lawmaking—a process that has
everything to do with definitions of rape.
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Suffragists march in New York in March 1913. (AP)
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