gainst his own estate" (Brownmiller 24). In an examination of British Home Office records, in Kent (a southern county in England) of the mid-Victorian period, Conley explains that the legal definition of rape was so vague that judges and juries could make law in this regard more or less on a case-by-case (and inconsistent) basis (Conley, "Rape" 528). The key criterion appears to have been the judicial perception of character on the part of accusers and accused.
What from a female point of view might seem easily defined was, as a practical matter in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, weighed down with a whole range of socially constructed features, chief among them the conceptualization of civil society predicated of property rights. Brownmiller (376) says that modern law has evolved from the era when "rape meant simply and conclusively the theft of a father's daughter's virginity, a specialized crime that damaged valuable goods before they could reach the matrimonial market, but modern legal perceptions of rape are rooted still in ancient male concepts of property." According to Krueger, rape under the law and in society "was understood primarily as a violation of a man's right to a woman's body--whether that of his wife, daughter or servant" (Krueger 121). The violation of a woman "was first and foremost a violation of male rights of possession, based on male requirements of virginity, chastity and consent to private access as the female bargain in the marriage contract (the underpinnings, as he enforced them, of man's economic estate)" (Brownmiller 377). This definition presumes a configuration of male social experience as dominating whatever other features of social experience might arise in problematic circumstances. That explains the presumption of male entitlement to use "sexual language . . . to discipline women who challenged their supremacy" in society in general (Clark, Breeches 56). The male's proprietary experien...