Rape and sexual power in early America /Sharon Block.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Acknowledgments -- List of illustrations -- Archival abbreviations -- Introduction -- Consent and coercion : the continuum of sexual relations -- The means of sexual coercion : identity, power, and social consent -- After coerced sex : the progression of knowledge -- The crime of rape : transatlantic standards, American racialization, and local judgment -- Constructing rape and race at Early American courts -- New worlds of rape: masculinity, myth, and revolution -- Conclusion -- Appendix A : Tabulation of known sexual coercion incidents -- Appendix B : Legal records consulted -- Index.

Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implictions of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundres more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classfied as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charded only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial toes to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-born system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.

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