From Purity to Independence

I wrote a while ago about my own past and struggle as I grew up, the victim of a sexual assault, with the societal pressures of gender roles that are so prominent today.

I thought that before we went any deeper, it would be beneficial to look at Feminism’s role in the public opinion about sexual assault.  Our current understanding of sexual assault was actually born during the women’s movement, and resulted in a great deal of legal reform.

“The revival of the feminist movement during the 1960s, and its growing influence over the following decades, moved the public conversation about rape from silence to exposure and political activism. Second-wave feminists tried to put women’s experience of sexual violence at the center of a new political analysis of rape”

The black freedom movement and the sexual revolution brought a new analysis of rape into the public.  Black women pressed charges against white men, young women spread the concept of personal empowerment, and the purity ideal began to decline. This idea that sex was acceptable as an individual pleasure (apart from any reproductive goals), and the availability of contraception both encouraged non-marital sex and the standard for consent was no longer so cut and dry.

“In the new sexual order, the standard for consent had to be renegotiated. Why would a woman say no if sex presumably resulted in no harm? And who would believe that a woman had withheld consent, given new expectations of participation in the sexual revolution?”

Feminist groups across the country then sprang up, creating sexual assault hotlines and crisis centers. By 1976, there were over 400 centers that provided counseling, social, and legal services.

“The anti-rape movement redefined women as “survivors” rather than “victims” and renamed behaviors once associated with the masher as “street harassment.” While they often targeted men as the source of the problem of sexual assault, they also called on male allies to organize to help change gender conventions that contributed to sexual violence”

In 1973, the National Organization for Women (NOW), created a Rape Task Force that proposed state law revisions.  They also helped to revise police and hospital procedures following sexual assaults.

Feminists helped to get the death penalty for rape, non-marital exemption, identify the underlying responsibilities for assaults, and expose the prevalence of sexual assault among children.

“In language that incorporated the new feminist definition of rape, the judge explained that a “married woman has the same right to control her own body as does an unmarried woman.”

Internal disagreements among feminists persisted, but their overall analysis moved beyond the earlier focus on protecting women’s purity, beyond demands for formal political rights such as suffrage and jury service, and toward the assertion of women’s right to sexual independence.

As you can see, what we think and how we think about sexual assault has been shaped heavily by feminist groups and opinion.  It’s crazy to think where we’d be  today if these groups never fought for public change. It would probably still be legal for husbands to rape their wives and judges would still be ruling that the women’s clothes “asked for it”. Sexual Assault in both the legal and public spheres have drastically changed and definitely in a better direction, however, there is still a very far way for it to go. And men and women alike still struggle with the lasting psychological effects.