Roth, Randolph A. "Spousal Murder in Northern New England, 1776-1865" in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Intimate Violence in Early America. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Vigarello, Georges. A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001. Tr. by Jean Birrell from the French.
Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Georges Vigarello begins his study on the history of rape in France by examining broader societal values about violence that were prevalent in Ancien Regime France. French society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Vigarello maintains, did not take rape all that seriously as a crime in large part because it “was a society that tolerated a ready resort to action and ‘hyperaggressiveness.’ ” (Vigarello, p. 10) This lackadaisical attitude toward rape, however, was qualified by the weakness and “innocence” of the victim, her age, and her social class. Rapes committed against young girls, and rapes committed against women of the upper class by men of lower social classes were regarded as being far more serious offenses than rapes against an adult woman by a man or equal or greater social standing. (pp. 13, 17) Considered a moral crime that besmirched both victim and attacker, however, rape was rarely prosecuted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (pp. 27, 30) Furthermore, the few times when rape was prosecuted, the victim’s suffering was considered to be of secondary or even tertiary importance: the courts measured “damage done” to the “master,” not the rape victim. (p. 49)
The French Revolution, as in many other areas of French life and culture, resulted in great changes in the laws concerning rape and also resulted in a far more gradual, yet noticeable, shift in cultural and social attitudes toward rape. After 1791, rape was no longer considered to be a “moral crime,” but rather a crime belonging to the category of “crimes and attacks against persons.” (p. 93) Though the law code now considered rape against adult women as a far more serious crime than it had been before the Revolution, social and cultural attitudes changed far more slowly than the law. Rather than adult women, the chief initial beneficiaries of the new sensibilities resulting from the law changes were children. (p. 102)
