The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  WHEN IS A CUSTOM A CRIME?

  Before the women’s movement, rape—like breast cancer—had been a shameful secret. Conventional wisdom held that a raped woman had invariably “asked for it.” In “Rape: The All-American Crime,” a groundbreaking essay published in Ramparts magazine in 1971, Susan Griffin argued that rape was not an act of lust but an assaultive act of power in which a man attempted to gain complete control over a woman. Rape, she pointed out, not only occurred all the time but targeted females of all ages, from small girls to women in their nineties. Griffin was the first person to make clear how “just one rapist” could keep all women off the street at night, keep women from taking night classes, prevent women from taking night jobs. The streets and the night belonged to men, even to men who wished it weren’t so.99

  At the time, rape was dealt with as a rare occurrence—partly because so few women dared report it. To publicize the high incidence of rape, the New York Radical Feminists held a public “speak-out” on rape in January 1971. Soon, feminists began to criticize the treatment of rape victims. Why did police and hospital personnel treat rape victims like perpetrators or sinners? Why did New York require two witnesses for a woman to be credible? Why did a woman have to prove that she resisted in order to be believed? Why could a defense attorney use a woman’s sexual history to discredit her accusation? Who, they asked, was on trial, the raped woman or her assailant?

  In 1975, Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking book Against Our Will revealed the universality of rape—of women, children, and prisoners in war, in peace, at home, on the streets, in the country, in the city, in every part of the world, in all periods of history. Brownmiller’s exhaustive book put rape onto the political agenda. During the next few years, networks of rape-crisis centers and antirape advocacy organizations sprang up across the country. Prodded by feminists, police departments began to teach officers to treat traumatized raped women with greater sensitivity. Hospitals began to teach doctors and nurses to regard raped women as traumatized patients, not female sinners. Many states altered their rules of evidence, making a rape victim’s sexual past inadmissible in court. All of these changes, which took less than two decades to accomplish, encouraged more women to report rape to the police.100

  As is often the case in modern American culture, a criminal trial helped publicize the seriousness of rape. In 1974, two men raped thirty-year-old Inez Garcia. Married at fifteen, she had lived in Miami until authorities sent her husband to a California prison. With her eleven-year-old son, Garcia moved to California in order to work in the fruit fields near the prison. After being raped, she took a rifle and went out looking for her two assailants. When she found the men, one drew a knife. She fired the gun several times, killing the man who had held her down during the rape. Charged with homicide, Inez Garcia found herself a cause célèbre among feminists and radical sympathizers. Defended by Charles Garry, an attorney for the Black Panthers and other movement groups, Garcia argued that she had “a right to protect her integrity when violated.” While out on bail, she briefly joined a feminist commune that had supported her, but felt manipulated and used by feminists, radical groups, and the media. In the end, the jury found her guilty. Two years later, however, she was acquitted and released. The case caused considerable debate among feminists and the public in general. Did a woman have the right to self-defense hours after she was raped?101

  One year later, in 1975, the nation witnessed yet another rape-murder trial. Joanne Little, an African-American prisoner in a North Carolina jail, stabbed to death Clarence Alligood, a white county guard who attempted to rape her. The trial of Little became another cause célèbre. Both feminists and black activists argued that white men would always be acquitted for raping a black woman. William Kunstler, another well-known movement lawyer, defended Little and reframed the case as a trial of “the Southern justice system.” A jury of six blacks and six whites took exactly seventy-eight minutes to acquit Little of second-degree murder. Like the Inez Garcia case, the Little acquittal ignited fierce public debate. Widely covered by the national media, these two cases not only helped publicize the ubiquity of rape, especially among minority women, but also raised the question whether a woman had a right to kill her assailant after she was raped, in some cases, hours or days after the event took place.102

  Inevitably, feminists discovered that sexual violence did not occur only between strangers. Husbands raped their wives, but the law, as well as conventional wisdom, held that a man could rape neither a wife nor a prostitute—in essence, they belonged to him.103 As Bob Wilson, then chair of the Judiciary Committee of the California Senate, joked, “If you can’t rape your wife, then who can you rape?”104

  Diana Russell, whose pioneering book The Politics of Rape reached a wide audience in 1975, should be credited as the major archaeologist who unearthed the secret of marital rape. Russell was a friend of Laura X, the founder of the Berkeley Women’s History Library. After learning from Russell that several foreign countries had outlawed marital rape, Laura X launched a campaign to redefine marital rape as a sexual crime. In 1979, she organized the National Clearinghouse on Marital Rape in Berkeley and then spent the next two decades speaking at college campuses and at professional associations, and lobbying state legislatures to reclassify marital rape as a crime.

  Once again, an important trial helped publicize the crime of marital rape. In 1978, a jury in Salem, Oregon, acquitted John Rideout of beating and raping his wife. At the time, Oregon was one of three states that actually classified marital rape as a crime. During the trial, the national media parachuted into tiny Salem, riveting the nation’s attention with the details of the legal proceedings. For the first time, many Americans heard about “marital rape” in a context that criminalized it, and people began to debate whether such a crime actually existed.

  By “naming” such hidden crimes, feminists generated the kind of debate that could turn a “custom” into a crime. Less than two decades after Laura X launched her campaign, the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995 passed a resolution recognizing marital rape as a violation of women’s rights. By 1997, all fifty states in the United States had criminalized marital rape. Laura X could look back at a campaign that had successfully provided married women with greater protection from male violence.

  Whenever Laura X lectured at colleges, she immediately noticed that women students naturally showed far more interest in rape on campus than in marital rape. Rape by a date, like that by a husband, proved difficult to corroborate. The “his” and “her” versions never matched and there were rarely witnesses. A college woman went out, got drunk, landed in a bedroom, perhaps with the desire to engage in some sexual activity, but not intercourse. If she suddenly refused, the young man often interpreted her refusal as a tease or as an “old-fashioned” way of saying yes. No one was sure how to describe, let alone prove, the existence of what was then called “stranger rape.” But these men were not, in fact, strangers. In her 1987 book Real Rape, law professor Susan Estrich created quite a stir when she introduced the phrases “date rape” and “acquaintance rape.” During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, campuses all over the country held debates on date rape, teaching young women to be clear about their intentions and instructing young men to seek consent.105

  To publicize violence against women, feminists also invented new rituals. “Take Back the Night,” for instance, became an annual symbolic march, held after dark, to protest women’s fear of male violence at night. In March 1982, three hundred undergraduates at the University of California, Davis, participated in the annual “Take Back the Night” march. When they passed “fraternity row,” they encountered a shocking display of gross hostility. While one young man backed a car straight into the crowd, another urinated on the marchers; several “mooned” the women; some men threatened to rape them later; still others hung out of windows shouting obscenities. Though the university disciplined them, such incidents reminded women that even at a liberal researc
h university, a peaceful march for a rape-free society still threatened some men.106

  For black women, the subject of rape brought up similar, but also different, injuries. White planters had raped black women for their own pleasure, as well as to reproduce a slave class. White men had lynched black men, ostensibly for their violation of white women’s purity, but actually for sport and to prop up white supremacy. During the last century, more black women had experienced rape—by relatives, white masters, and black men—than white women could ever imagine. For black women, rape was not only a sexual violation, it was also a symbol of white power and their double subordination as black women.107 Yet, the rape of black women remained invisible to an indifferent white majority. What stayed in the American imagination was black male attacks against white women, the exact opposite of historical reality.

  Nor did most white—or black—Americans ever discuss the incest that had scarred the lives of so many young girls. Sandra Butler, the author of The Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest (1978), helped end the silence that surrounded the subject of incest. Behind the doors of both affluent and impoverished homes, fathers, brothers, and other relatives sexually abused young girls with remarkable frequency. Sworn to silence, many of these victims of incest grew up guilty, confused, traumatized, fearing men or compulsively searching for sex as a sign of love. Many women functioned only by repressing their memories of these incidents. Later, as adults, some recovered these painful memories and faced the ordeal of integrating them into their adult lives.108

  What had been unspeakable, unthinkable, and unimaginable became, by the nineties, the subject of popular memoirs and a staple on talk shows. Before the women’s movement, few Americans had realized how many relatives sexually violated young girls. Afterward, it would become the stuff of controversy as the public questioned whether memories were, in fact, recalled or “induced” by overly eager therapists.

  Like incest, wife-beating was another secret carefully hidden behind the charade of a happy marriage. It turned out that women had no particular proclivity for walking into doors, falling down stairs, or smashing their faces on the ground. Men from all classes and races slugged their wives—when they drank too much, when their dinner arrived late, when they felt jealous, when they became impotent, when high on drugs, when in withdrawal, when the boss laid them off, when their job frustrated them. Typically, a man would later beg for forgiveness, but forgiveness seldom ended such domestic violence. Studies showed that violent men tended not to blame themselves but the women they lived with for provoking their rage and violence.109

  Before the seventies, few women ever dared to admit that they had been beaten. The police, who regarded domestic violence as a private matter, rarely interfered. During the 1970s feminists renamed wife-beating—which sounded more like a traditional custom than a crime—“battering.” As the plight of battered women received growing attention, law enforcement officials—prodded by feminist activists—helped reframe domestic violence as a crime.110

  Most Americans had a hard time grasping the reality of battered women. Why did they remain with abusive men? Why did they refuse to testify against them in court? Wasn’t it their fault that the situation continued? Why didn’t they just leave? No one had ever heard of “battered women’s syndrome.” They didn’t understand that violent husbands or boyfriends regularly stalked or hunted down women who fled their grasp and killed them and their children. They did not know that battered women generally had no safe refuge and no money with which to restart their lives.

  Between 1974 and 1980, feminists created battered women’s shelters all over the country. Brandishing the motto “We will not be beaten,” thousands of women activists, joined by social workers, created grassroots organizations that lobbied for social and legal reforms. By 1977, the phrase “battered woman” had entered public discourse. By 1982, feminists had established three hundred shelters and forty-eight state coalitions of service providers for battered women, while offering countless women refuge from violent men. In the process, they helped to redefine wife-beating as neither a custom nor a private matter, but as a felony.111

  If homes were not always safe havens for women, neither was the workplace, where a boss might hold absolute power over a woman’s livelihood. The idea that a man’s sexual predatory habits on the job should be illegal had simply never occurred to most women. That’s the way it was. When harassed, women tended to feel guilty, blame themselves, and wonder what they had done to deserve such attention. At first, no one even knew what to call this abuse of power, except perhaps sexual blackmail. In 1975, a group of women at Cornell University banded together to expose the sexual behavior of a male professor and coined the term “sexual harassment.” Almost immediately, Nadine Taub and other feminist lawyers began to file suits using the term as well. In 1979, law professor Catharine MacKinnon’s groundbreaking book The Sexual Harassment of Working Women publicized both the term and the way in which such male behavior prevented women from achieving true economic independence. As Susan Griffin had once argued that rape was a matter of power and control, so MacKinnon now argued that sexual harassment was also about power and control and constituted sex discrimination at work.112

  Once named, sexual harassment seemed to be everywhere. Hollywood’s faded casting couch was not the only site where sexual harassment occurred. At colleges and universities, male faculty sometimes demanded sexual favors from students in return for high grades or letters of recommendation. In business, men often made promotions contingent on a woman’s willingness “to put out.” In factories, foremen gave special favors to women who treated them “right.”

  In 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission added sexual harassment to its “Guidelines on Discrimination.” Once unwelcome sexual advances were redefined as a violation of a woman’s rights, working women could file grievances against their employers. As a result, men discovered that certain kinds of behavior were illegal, as well as unacceptable.

  But change did not occur overnight. The good old days when men could abuse or harass women with impunity were fast disappearing. But a new national consensus had not been reached. When does “no” really mean “no”? Can and should a society legislate affairs of the heart? Men were confused and no longer knew how to behave around women. Women were baffled as well. And feminists vehemently disagreed whether new policies should protect women or defend their newfound sexual freedom.113

  During the 1990s, the subject of appropriate sexual conduct suddenly burst into public consciousness in the form of national hearings, trials, and scandals. It wasn’t until 1991, when Judge Clarence Thomas was nominated for a Supreme Court vacancy, that his former aide Anita Hill accused him of all kinds of sexual harassment. How was it possible to distinguish friendly flirtation on the job from a sexually hostile work environment? What evidence was necessary to prove sexual harassment?

  When the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas, most Americans disbelieved Anita Hill’s testimony. Yet, just one year later, a majority of citizens had changed their minds and believed her. Why? Because the hearings spurred countless personal and formal debates about the nature of sexual harassment. Afterward, many women, both black and white, privately remembered and publicly recounted their own experiences of being sexually harassed.114 As a result, more men and women began to appreciate why a genuinely hostile work environment interfered with a woman’s ability to support herself. Just four years later, the Senate forced Bob Packwood, one of its members accused of compulsive sexual harassment, to resign from office. Some of his colleagues, who now viewed him as an embarrassment, seemed downright eager, even desperate, to prove that yes, they had finally “gotten it.”

  Through these widely publicized political soap operas, Americans began to learn about some of the “gender crimes” feminists had identified during the 1970s. In addition to the Clarence Thomas hearings (1991), the public followed the Navy’s Tailhook sex scandal (1991), the William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson d
ate rape trials (1992), the Spur Posse sexual athleticism in Lakewood, California (1993), the trial that publicized the gang rape of a retarded girl in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1993, the furious debate over homosexuals in the military (1992-1996), the O. J. Simpson trial and verdict (1994-1995), and the Army’s and Navy’s scandalous sexual harassment incidents (1996—1997), all of which informed millions of Americans that some kinds of behavior were no longer socially acceptable. These media circuses gradually had a cumulative impact on American political culture. Although many of the accused were acquitted, the nation became immersed in debates over date rape, battering, and sexual harassment. Once hidden, these “sex crimes” now became part of common discourse, so common that they began to enter mainstream culture and politics.115

  SEX WORKERS—PROSTITUTION AND PORNOGRAPHY

  It took a while, but a majority of feminists eventually agreed that rape, incest, battering, and sexual harassment violated women’s rights. But no such consensus existed about whether misconduct in the sex industry violated the rights of the women who worked as prostitutes or in the pornography industry. On the issue of prostitution, American feminists found it difficult if not impossible to agree whether they should protect the rights of sex workers or simply abolish the industries that employed them.