Rape & Race in the Nineteenth-Century South

by Sommerville, Diane Miller

• ISBN13: 9780807855607
• ISBN10: 080785560X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Sommerville analyzes black-on-white rape cases of the 19th-century South, challenging the notion that race was the sole agent in shaping white ideology on this issue. She shows that race competed with other forces--especially gender and class--to shape the ways southerners related to each other.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(18)
1 Not So Heinous as at First Might Be Supposed: Slave Rape, Gender, and Class in Old South Communities	19	(23)
2 A Manifest Distinction between a Woman and a Female Child: Rape Law, Children, and the Antebellum South	42	(30)
3 He Shall Suffer Death: Black-on-White Rape Law in the Early South	72	(14)
4 The Very Helplessness of the Accused Appeals to Our Sympathy: Rape, Race, and Southern Appellate Law	86	(16)
5 Against All Odds?: Free Blacks on Trial for Rape in the Antebellum South	102	(18)
6 Rarely Known to Violate a White Woman: Slave Rape in Civil War-Era Virginia	120	(27)
7 Our Judiciary System Is a Farce: Remapping the Legal Landscape of Rape in the Post-Emancipation South	147	(29)
8 Foul Daughter of Reconstruction?: Black Rape in the Reconstruction South	176	(24)
9 The Old Thread-Bare Lie: The Rape Myth and Alternatives to Lynching	200	(19)
Epilogue	219	(4)
Appendix. Rape, Race, and Rhetoric: The Rape Myth in Historiographical Perspective	223	(38)
Notes	261	(88)
Bibliography	349	(46)
Index	395