“Freedman’s narrative is not simply relevant; it provides a sophisticated understanding of why rape is something we have been debating for centuries… This book is an ambitious and highly successful project. In clear prose filled with riveting anecdotes and powerful stories, Freedman recounts the story of rape, its wounds, its discontents and our as-yet-incomplete march to its end.”—Imani Perry, The San Francisco Chronicle
“Freedman’s compelling account of the journey to define rape in America reveals that whoever controls the meaning of rape and of sexual violence controls our future and freedom. It is a crucial book.”—Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and In the Body of the World
“Redefining Rape is a brilliant, vitally important, and richly textured history of the shifting definitions of rape in America, and of the relentless challenges that black and white women waged to protect their humanity and to own their bodies. Freedman perceptively traces the self-defense mechanisms women developed in order to sustain a culture of activism and resistance.”—Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History, Northwestern University
“Freedman eloquently demonstrates that changing understandings of who is likely to rape, and who is likely to be the victim, have been at the core of the troubled histories of racial and gender injustice. Read this remarkably important book to understand the enduring sexual politics of our own time.”—Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
“This is an unsparing and revelatory study. As she tracks evolving views of what constituted rape and who was to blame, Freedman illuminates American inequalities—of class, age, gender, and especially race—from wholly unexpected angles. A must for anyone concerned with equity in the American polity.”—Nancy F. Cott, author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation
Redefining Rape
Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation
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Book Details
HARDCOVER
$35.00 • £25.95 • €31.50
ISBN 9780674724846
Publication: September 2013
