I’m teaching a chapter from Sharon Block’s Rape  and Sexual Power in Early America tomorrow in US women’s history, and I know that when we talk about it, much of the conversation will center around how shocking early American ideas about power and consent and sex are. And then, across the semester, we will come back to Block’s arguments, over and over, and I’ll have to see my students confront the fact that the discourse Block presents is not that unfamiliar to them. This paragraph, in particular, really gets to them.

This dual construction of women’s sexual role – always resisting, therefore never really resisting – had a powerful result: women could not be trusted to judge or represent their own consent. Accordingly, the discourse surrounding rape repeatedly implied that men had to determine a woman’s consent for her…Because women could not admit their true desires – they said one thing but meant another – they could not be trusted….Because women could not be trusted either to be honest or to be faithful, women’s consent had to be surrendered to men’s judgment, whether through marriage or through limitations on their claims to rape. (40)

We’ll keep coming back to this passage, and this argument, as we make our way towards the present. We’ll look at it in the last week when we’re reading Katie Roiphe. Usually I like it when my students see connections between the past and the present. In this case, I wish they saw fewer connections.