ce of the world means that rape was a crime against property as well as (or instead of) against the person of a woman.
Where rape achieved its most straightforward conceptualiza tion in Britain period was in situations in which women were assaulted by those outside the family circle. As stated by Conley (802), "In Victorian England rape charges were usually only sustained when a respectable woman of good character had been brutally assaulted in public by a total stranger." Such a conceptualization entails the male property-rights traditions of thought in England, but even more significant is the implication that because of the male entitlements attaching to marriage, the law considered that a woman could not be raped by her husband (Woodward 292ff). Nor was this merely an antique artifact of Regency and Victorian England; the so-called "marital exemption" or the presumption of husband's (and indeed virtually all males') right to sex persisted as a matter of law until the 1970s (Ryan 941; 945ff). According to Abrams (267), throughout Europe marriage
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