In January 2014, President Barack Obama convened a task force to investigate rapes reported on university campuses and complaints about administrative inaction, bringing federal attention to issues that feminists have long attempted to expose. This effort follows a trajectory in which sexual violence remains at the center of American citizenship rights and protections, and it is this history that Estelle Freedman traces in her new book, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation. The provocative title suggests that rape has been understood differently throughout U.S. history, even if its physical manifestations have changed very little over time. The study considers political discourses engaging sexual violence, mainly around the turn of the twentieth century, and posits “that the way we understand rape helps determine who is entitled to sexual and political sovereignty and who may exercise fully the rights of American citizenship” (11). This assertion is as valid today as it was at the nation's founding, which Freedman demonstrates with examples of laws and reform campaigns placed into a broader context of sociopolitical and cultural shifts.

Freedman uses appellate court transcripts from different states to make sense of legal trends involving sexual violence. Although such materials are necessarily limited as they are only produced upon appeal, she expands the research by analyzing print media sources including mainstream and “race” newspapers, popular magazines, and medical and legal journals. The book considers heterosexual violence, ranging from minor street harassment (the early twentieth-century “masher”) to violent sexual attacks (what some today would call “forcible rape”). Freedman also considers, in a more limited way, same-sex violence through an analysis of infamous “crime against nature” prosecutions, and discusses as well thwarted attempts to recognize and combat what modern feminists have classified as marital and acquaintance rape. Her work also benefits from a close reading of scholarly studies about sexual violence in different historical periods and regions that have emerged since the advent of women's and gender history as fields of inquiry in the late 1970s.

While the book mainly focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Freedman recalls patterns of convictions, acquittals, and sentencing in the Early Republic, demonstrating how they “show that the sexual prerogatives of white men—like their right to citizenship—rested upon the legal disabilities of African American or Native American men and all women” (21). At a time when the negotiation of rights dominated the politics of nation building, the absence of all but white men was glaringly obvious in courtroom practices and political rhetoric alike. Reform impulses repeatedly challenged these omissions as Americans struggled to put into practice this new experiment in democracy.

Beginning in civil suits and eventually spreading to criminal courts, especially middle-class women sought legal protections against men who sexually violated them. If women had little power to resist unwanted advances, then they could sometimes be compensated through seduction lawsuits and prosecutions; while such laws failed to prevent sexual violence, they provided an avenue by which at least white women's reputations might be saved by potentially forcing convicted seducers into marrying women they might otherwise have abandoned. It is no surprise that such reform emerged during the antebellum period, just as the woman suffrage movement was beginning. Women's rights supporters believed that only full citizenship rights, including the franchise and jury service, would help undermine rape. Until that time, reform-minded women sought other kinds of legal protections. Progressive reformers worked to redefine rape by creating a new legal category—statutory rape, which removed consent from the equation when considering young victims. Campaigns to raise the age of consent matched the trajectory of first wave feminism, with the West, Midwest, and Northeast leading the way before southern states adopted such changes.

African American victims were often excluded from the rhetoric of protection. No laws safeguarded slave women from rape by their masters. This trope of white male privilege and un-rapeable black women carried over into the antebellum North and lasted well beyond Emancipation. Freedman's work clarifies how gender and race complicated efforts to curtail the sexual prerogatives of white men as women and racial minorities struggled to pursue citizenship rights. In the Jim Crow era, the nascent civil rights movement campaigned against lynching by exposing its false connections to interracial sexual violence and, in doing so, tried to combat perceptions that all rapists were so-called black beasts and all victims chaste white women. By highlighting the interracial rapes of black women by white men, and by defending the rights of black men falsely accused of interracial sexual violence, organizations such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching sought to extend legal protections to groups long denied them. Their efforts often ignored the possibility of intraracial rape among African Americans, a tendency that persisted into the civil rights movement and beyond.

Post-suffrage sexual liberalism brought with it new challenges to the definition of rape. As the rhetoric of equality replaced protectionism, the trope of lying women again began to dominate public discussions and courtroom prosecutions, especially in the enforcement (or lack thereof) of revised laws that extended rights to new groups. In spite of difficulties, women never stopped trying to assert their legal right to protection against sexual violence. Nor did racial minority men stop trying to combat their cultural reputation as sexually dangerous Others. As Freedman clarifies, these two socio-demographic categories often clashed in American courtrooms, with white male privilege, unsurprisingly, the typical winner. For anyone thinking that the United States has achieved ‘post-racial’ or ‘post-feminist’ nirvana, “the history of conflicts over who can be raped and who will be prosecuted for the crime reverberates in contemporary politics, illuminating the persistent tensions over how Americans understand both gender and race” (271). Redefining Rape gives us much to think about as we continue to confront questions about sexual violence. Freedman reveals the triumphs and obstacles encountered along the path to stopping rape.