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.
Whereas both Vigarello and Clark discuss the history of rape, either in the law code and in popular attitudes or as a means by which patriarchy enforced the system of separate spheres, Judith Walkowitz discusses rape only tangentially through her chapter on Jack the Ripper. Instead, Walkowitz studies a range of discourses of sexual danger that were used in Victorian London. Nevertheless, like Clark, Walkowitz argues that these discourses played a key role in the reinforcing, as well as the negotiating, of gendered spheres and spaces.
Walkowitz begins by describing the cultural landscape of late Victorian London. Unlike Anna Clark’s London of the early nineteenth century when women were warned not to venture into the public sphere, numerous women of the 1880s “spilled over and out of their ascribed, bounded roles, costumes and locales.” (Walkowitz, p. 41) Middle-class women “spilled over” into the East End as philanthropists; working-class women into the West End to protest for better working conditions. Although only a small number of women actually traversed strictly set gendered boundaries, their public visibility “exerted a powerful, informing presence in contemporary discussions of gender.” (p. 72)
This presence, this visibility, encouraged the development of numerous narratives of sexual danger during the 1880s, which served to discursively regulate gender boundaries. In July 1885 W. T. Stead published his “Maiden Tribute” articles, which he claimed was an expose on child prostitution. By the end of the year the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 was passed, raising the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, as well as making homosexual acts between men illegal until 1967. (pp. 82-3) Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” articles also led to the creation of local social purity vigilante committees which attacked music halls, theaters and pornography as well as forced police crackdowns on prostitutes and prostitution. (p. 83) As a prime example of the “classic moral panic,” Stead’s articles unleashed a backlash which led to “tougher laws, moral isolation, and symbolic court action.” (p. 121)
