Yesterday I discovered that the myth that women are mostly/only raped by strangers outside of the home first appeared in the eighteenth century. Turns out the emergence of the middle class in Britain and the way in which families began to change led to all this thinking that it was "natural" for women to stay at home while men went out working - and this also led to the removal of servants from the notion of the 'family' and the development of the idea of the 'housewife', which made marriage an employment contract whereby women did the work the servants would have done, except they weren't paid. So obviously it was desirable that women did not leave the physical confines of the home, and rape lies were a good way of ensuring this happened.
It's amazing to me that this myth flourishes so today when it's so OLD. Also (obviously this makes a lot of sense, but I'd never considered it this way before) it came out of a(nother) totally misogynistic and reductive imposed theory of social practice. Essentially, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING slash this is quite interesting.
I found it fascinating reading about the development of 'separate spheres' too (however contentious the notion has actually become)! What has been particularly enlightening is the way early feminist campaigners often ended up entrenching that public/private divide, especially when it came to things like sex and rape -- Josephine Butler's reponse to the Contagious Diseases Acts basically culminated in the marginalisation of female prostitutes, the removal of sexual autonomy from young women, and a more explicit belief in the idea that they only really safe place a woman could be was within her (particularly middle-class) domestic setting. Anyway, reading histories like that have certainly driven home to me the need for feminists to take into account class issues, and cultural relativism (for want of a better term, blegh).
ReplyDeleteIf you wanted, it be really cool if you wrote some of your thoughts on rape/women/feminism/gender/sexuality in our blog - we're advertised on ladyfestten and stuff and also will be making a hard copy of the zine next term compiled of articles written on the blog, so it would be a good way to communicate your opinions to the wider world (I mean, of course, the cambridge feminist world. which has a readership of billions, obv).
oh yeah, and the blog address is: http://www.gender-agenda.org.uk
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