Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, by Estelle B. Freedman. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. 387 pp. $35 US (cloth). Estelle Freedman is arguably the most distinguished historian of US sexual history. Her 1988 Intimate Matters, co-written with John D'Emilio, provided a synthesis of historical change in sexual practices and meanings from the earliest days of the republic, so it is no surprise that her new survey, Redefining Rape, is similarly comprehensive. A study both synthetic and analytic, based on new research as well as mastery of the scholarship, it is quite possibly the most important of her works. This is not a book for specialists in gender or sexual politics: its material should be integrated centrally into American history textbooks and teaching--as well as used by historians as a guide to the questions and research we need about other regions. This is because, as Freedman so definitively shows, rape has been a fundamental shaper of citizenship. As today's feminists are reviving campaigns against sexual assault, not only in the US but around the world, this history becomes particularly vital because it illustrates what is at stake. The book's leading motif is the several-century-long struggle about the definition of rape. Raping women was long understood in law as an injury to the woman's father, husband, or other male guardian, a spoiling of her marriage-ability and/or her social worth. But that seemingly simple aspect of coverture was intersected since time immemorial by other social and economic structures. Armies promised sexual access to women as an entitlement, an entitlement still widespread today. Landlords, employers and slaveowners expected the same. Men of ruling races claimed access to women of subordinate races. In the US, where racialized conquest and slavery placed racial domination at the centre of its political and economic organization, rape functioned as far more than a satisfaction for individual assailants; rape established and confirmed structures of dominance. It could be said to be a form of terrorism, inasmuch as its message reached not only direct victims, but all women; and not only women, because it told subordinated men that they should not aspire to a masculinity that included marital fidelity or their own access to women of their group. Freedman's book is full of vivid cases of rapists' impunity, of course, but it is more importantly a history of campaigns against rape, fought on gendered, racial, and class bases as fundamental parts of the stmggle for freedom and social justice. Until the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, there were no explicit, single-issue campaigns against rape, but there were many that eroded some of that impunity. Of particular importance is Freedman's fine discussion of nineteenth-century feminists' campaign to criminalize seduction. …