When Rape Was Legal: The Untold History

makes an interesting point about the social aspect of sexual violence for white men, analysing an example of group sexual assault. Although this is an important point, Feinstein is clearly limited by the source base.

Moving beyond the antebellum period and exploring sexual violence in the Reconstruction period would have added weight to this argument: as Lisa Cardyn has argued, group sexual attacks by the Ku Klux Klan were a central tool of racial oppression and of white identity expression in the immediate aftermath of emancipation.(1) In her exploration of resistance to sexual violence, Feinstein focuses on the counter-framing of sexual violence by enslaved men and women. Through analysing the testimonies of enslaved people,

Feinstein highlights assertions of equality, bodily autonomy, and rights, counter to white stereotyping of black Americans as consenting, hypersexual, and deserving of violence.
of racial and gendered oppression. Feinstein focuses on the ways in which sexism worked to silence white women, highlighting the economic dependence they had upon their husbands, and class and social pressures that slaveholding women faced. What Feinstein does not emphasise so much here is the ways in which white women directly benefitted both from their whiteness and the institution of slavery itself, something which much recent scholarship about slaveholding women has focused on.(2) Feinstein goes on to analyse instances in which white women did resist white men’s sexual abuse of black women. Here, she highlights that in such cases white women rarely objected on behalf of victimised black women, but instead emphasised the ways that white men’s behaviour degraded white women, and the evils of racial amalgamation. Feinstein’s broader point, however, that white women’s failure to resist their husband’s sexual violence against black women only upheld the oppression of white women, is a valid and important one. This analysis is perhaps the inevitable result of focusing on white women’s responses to sexual violence, an issue in which the disapproval of white women is clear (even if they did not consider their husbands’ behaviour to be rape, they were nevertheless wives with unfaithful husbands). By considering slaveholding women’s behaviour more broadly, however, Feinstein’s argument loses some of its weight: white women clearly and repeatedly prioritised the power that their whiteness granted them above any attempts to find any shared interests with black women.(3) While, as Feinstein argues, this could be a result of their relatively weak social position and of ‘white sexism’ (p. 53), the centrality of race does need to be considered more fully in her analysis, especially given white women’s continued social and political behaviour in the present day.