In this impressive book, Estelle Freedman recovers an unfamiliar chapter in the history of sexual violence. Rape reform brings to mind feminist-led efforts of the 1970s that exploded previous definitions of sexual consent, leading to the formation of rape crisis centers, the abolition of the marital rape exception, and the expansion of the legal understanding of rape. Focusing on the years between 1870 and 1930, Redefining Rape reminds us that the story began much earlier. As Freedman rightly notes, this campaign has remained mostly invisible in histories of sexual violence, because the suffragists, social purity activists, free lovers, and antilynching advocates who populate the world of Redefining Rape “never formed a unified social movement” (8). Although the disparate groups seeking to redefine rape had different priorities and tactics, Freedman reveals the common stakes of battles to “determine who is entitled to sexual and political sovereignty” (11). Freedman's book is ultimately as much a history of American citizenship as it is a history of sexual violence in the United States.

Freedman begins her narrative with the narrowing of legal and social understandings of consent over the course of the eighteenth and early-to-mid-nineteenth centuries. As Freedman explains, “[t]he expansion of white men's rights at the end of the eighteenth century paralleled a contraction of opportunities for others who were defined as being outside the democratic polity” (21). Race, class, marital status, and sex shaped who counted as a plausible victim or perpetrator of rape.

The rest of Redefining Rape chronicles the conflicted struggle to challenge this consensus. As Freedman's narrative makes clear, the groups committed to transforming sexual consent often pursued incremental strategies with substantial unintended consequences. Suffragists expanded protections for women by raising the age of consent and introducing tort and criminal laws banning seduction. African Americans insisted that lynching did not protect white women against what contemporaries called the “Negro crime,” but often masked the reality of intraracial rape. By the 1920s, rape laws became more gender neutral, as boys as well as girls received greater protection from sexual assault. However, these protections reflected both a growing hostility to immigrant communities and “fears about the possibility of homosexual contagion” (189).

Freedman also reminds us that reform took place in fits and starts, with some activists achieving only fleeting success. The triumph of age-of-consent laws was incomplete, as modern theories of sexuality and a new dating culture displaced an earlier protective framework. In the early twentieth century, a campaign to combat “mashing,” an aggressive form of public sexual harassment, afforded women of any race greater safety, public authority, and freedom of movement. However, after the 1920s, a growing climate of sexual liberalism again narrowed the options available to women vulnerable to unwanted sexual attentions.

The compromises inherent in the struggle to redefine rape emerge most starkly in Freedman's analysis of the notorious Scottsboro rape case. Scottsboro marked a well-recognized turning point in debates about race and rape, spawning a series of major Supreme Court rulings on the rights owed criminal defendants in state courts. In Freedman's telling, Scottsboro finally brought together white leftists and African Americans in a campaign against lynching. At the same time, progress in Scottsboro came at a cost. The discrediting of the Scottsboro complainants, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, played on stereotypes about the promiscuity of poor women and the duplicity of any woman “crying rape.” Although it extended new (if incomplete) civil rights to African American men, Scottsboro “signaled a diminution of a century-long effort to resist the narrowing definition of rape for women of all classes and races” (269–70).

Scottsboro would have served as a perfect end-point for Freedman's story of “inevitable compromises and . . . unintended consequences” (289), but the final chapter brings the narrative up to the present. Freedman briefly surveys new questions about consent that arose in the second half of the twentieth century with the loosening of sexual mores, the revival of the feminist movement, and the influence of the civil rights movement. Here, Redefining Rape spotlights the legacy of earlier struggles to redefine rape: victim blaming, racial profiling, and the neglect of certain classes of victims.

At the heart of Freedman's narrative is a story about the promise and limits of consent as a tool for defining citizenship. Throughout Redefining Rape, consent serves as shorthand for a variety of clashing ideas and commitments: racial justice, equality for women, and the boundaries of sexual pleasure. At the same time, consent leaves juries and ordinary citizens to make a black-and-white determination of guilt, foreclosing a more careful inquiry into when and how sex is coerced. Redefining Rape does a masterful job of tracing how American law and culture embraced such a flawed but crucial understanding of sexual sovereignty.