"Crimes which startle and horrify": Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900

Abstract

R a p e i s a t r o u b l i n g a n d e l u s i v e s u b j e c t . As a crime it has been defined in Anglo-American law as the carnal knowledge of a woman by force and against her will (and, until recently, by a man other than her husband). Conflicting accounts of “force” and “will,” however, make rape a prime example of the difficulty of fixing “truth” in light of multiple perspectives on an event. As feminist theorist Sharon marcus has argued, rape is as much a linguistic as a physical act. The history of rape, then, consists in large part of tracking the changing cultural narratives that define which women may charge which men with the crime of forceful, unwanted sex and whose accounts will be believed. These rape narratives also have political import. In the late nineteenth-century United States, they served to shore up white male privilege through constructions of dependent women and dangerous African Americans, groups that remained excluded from full citizenship rights because of their alleged incapacity for self-government. The abundant reports of rape, outrage, ravishment, and seduction in nineteenth-century American newspapers offer rich cultural clues to the popular dissemination of these narratives of sexual violence. While recent studies of criminal justice records reveal racial patterns of prosecution and