Rape in 18th/19th Centuries Great Britain

The purpose of this research is to examine the issue of rape in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The plan of the research will be to set forth the social and cultural context in which the issue achieves significance and then to discuss patterns of activity within the culture that appear to show an evolution of consciousness and priorities in the understanding of the phenomenon.

The conceptualization of rape in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appears to have been very much a social construction that dominated the whole of Western society, whether in England and the Empire, on the continent, or in the U.S. Thus however rape might have been perceived or experienced at the personal level, the principal social fact about the phenomenon was that it was subsidiary to more widely held views of social structure. In this regard, Clark (10-12, et passim) refers to the gender-based social organization, or a presumption of hierarchical norms to which men and women were expected to conform, with women being on the lower and men being on the higher tiers of the hierarchy. This fact, as well as the emphasis on property as a positive social value, appears to have affected the customs and practices associated with defining rape in Britain during that period. This conflation of property and social construction overrode what Brownmiller refers to as the single-sentence female definition of rape: "If a woman chooses not to have intercourse wi

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ho never so innocent" (cited by Brownmiller 369). It is difficult to see how this formulation can be explained in light of the fact that rape is an underreported crime, but it survived not merely into the nineteenth but well into the twentieth century in America and England. This is a feature as well of the "silence" of women in England in regard to sexual assault accusations and trials (Clark, Silence passim). There appears to have been a great deal of social support for enforcing such silence. According to Krafft-Ebing, a leading European authority on the psychology of sex of the Victorian period: There seems little doubt that the man who has learned various mechanical ways to stimulate his sexual specificity in order to copulate with a woman whom he does not this moment desire is doing far more violence to his nature than the female who needs only to receive a male to whom she gives many other assents[!], but possibly not active desire (Krafft-Ebing 13). Rape took form in a variety of ways in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. Social class appears to have been one predictor of whether a charge of could be sustained in law. Brownmiller makes the important point that in England rape definitions had a class compo

Category: History - R