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 with a specific man and the man chooses to proceed against her will, that is a criminal act of rape" (18). Brownmiller says that rape as conceptualized in English law from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries was far more complicated, is a "wondrous maze of contradictory approaches re flecting a gradual humanization of jurisprudence . . . and . . . man's eternal confusion, never quite resolved, as to whether the crime was . . . against a woman's body or a crime a...