This book is not inviting. A thick, black, hard covered volume with the word RAPE capitalized and in bold, red print. Just seeing it puts you on edge, makes you wary. You do not feel invited into its pages. I know that for me it, the prospect of it was like standing at the edge of a dock about to take the plunge into a lake I know will be ice cold. So imagine my surprise when I finally dove in and found that it was much warmer than I had expected.
I don’t want to give the impression that it was an easy read. It was emotionally taxing to the point that I had to work my way through in much smaller doses than I’m used to. But that’s as it should be. A history of rape in American culture (in any culture, of course, but American culture is what this book concerns) cannot and should not, by any means, be easy to engage with. It’s a challenge, but Estelle Freedman makes it one from which I never once wanted to back down. She has an incredibly keen and engaging writing style that at once takes the reader on a journey while never letting us off the hook in terms of being fully engaged in the narrative.
Freedman is concerned here not only with tracking the precise and diverse history of rape in America, but also with illustrating how each point in history has influenced the way we define rape today and how we as a society interact with that. In particular, Freedman maps out how the definition and meaning of rape has evolved over the course of American history, troubling the notion that rape is a clear-cut, easily identifiable act. Instead, Freedman proposes that “ ‘rape’ is a word in flux”[1], in large part, she explains, because the definition of rape is so closely tied to the definition of citizenship. This is a fascinating perspective, and one that for me was at once completely original and spot on.
In short, Freedman takes a history that is full of horror and trauma and makes it far less daunting while at the same time preserving all of the gravity that it merits. She leads the reader through it in a way that is instructive, engaging, completely relevant.
[1] Freedman, E. B. (2013). Redefining rape: Sexual violence in the era of suffrage and segregation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
I don’t want to give the impression that it was an easy read. It was emotionally taxing to the point that I had to work my way through in much smaller doses than I’m used to. But that’s as it should be. A history of rape in American culture (in any culture, of course, but American culture is what this book concerns) cannot and should not, by any means, be easy to engage with. It’s a challenge, but Estelle Freedman makes it one from which I never once wanted to back down. She has an incredibly keen and engaging writing style that at once takes the reader on a journey while never letting us off the hook in terms of being fully engaged in the narrative.
Freedman is concerned here not only with tracking the precise and diverse history of rape in America, but also with illustrating how each point in history has influenced the way we define rape today and how we as a society interact with that. In particular, Freedman maps out how the definition and meaning of rape has evolved over the course of American history, troubling the notion that rape is a clear-cut, easily identifiable act. Instead, Freedman proposes that “ ‘rape’ is a word in flux”[1], in large part, she explains, because the definition of rape is so closely tied to the definition of citizenship. This is a fascinating perspective, and one that for me was at once completely original and spot on.
In short, Freedman takes a history that is full of horror and trauma and makes it far less daunting while at the same time preserving all of the gravity that it merits. She leads the reader through it in a way that is instructive, engaging, completely relevant.
[1] Freedman, E. B. (2013). Redefining rape: Sexual violence in the era of suffrage and segregation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press