What do you think?
Rate this book
Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929
Why do men rape women? This is a question for which there are many political, psychological, and sociological answers, but few historical ones. Improper Advances is one of the first books to explore the history of sexual violence in any country. A study of women, men, and sexual crime in rural and northern Ontario, it expands the terms of current debates about sexuality and sexual violence.
Karen Dubinsky relies on criminal case files, a revealing but largely untapped source for social historians, to retell individual stories of sexual danger—crimes such as rape, abortion, seduction, murder, and infanticide. Her research supports many feminist analyses of sexual that crimes are expressions of power, that courts are prejudiced by the victim's background, and that most assaults occur within the victims' homes and communities.
Dubinsky distinguishes herself from most feminist scholars, however, by refusing to view women solely as victims and sex as a tool of oppression. She finds that these women actively sought and took pleasure in sexuality, but they distinguished between wanted and unwanted sexual encounters and attempted to punish coercive sex despite obstacles in the court system and the community.
Confronting a number of key theoretical and historiographic controversies, including recent debates over sexuality in feminist theory and politics, she challenges current thinking on the history of women, gender, and sexuality.
Karen Dubinsky relies on criminal case files, a revealing but largely untapped source for social historians, to retell individual stories of sexual danger—crimes such as rape, abortion, seduction, murder, and infanticide. Her research supports many feminist analyses of sexual that crimes are expressions of power, that courts are prejudiced by the victim's background, and that most assaults occur within the victims' homes and communities.
Dubinsky distinguishes herself from most feminist scholars, however, by refusing to view women solely as victims and sex as a tool of oppression. She finds that these women actively sought and took pleasure in sexuality, but they distinguished between wanted and unwanted sexual encounters and attempted to punish coercive sex despite obstacles in the court system and the community.
Confronting a number of key theoretical and historiographic controversies, including recent debates over sexuality in feminist theory and politics, she challenges current thinking on the history of women, gender, and sexuality.
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
26 people want to read
About the author
Karen Dubinsky
10 books1 followerKaren Dubinsky teaches in the departments of Global Development Studies and History at Queen's University. She has published and edited books on a wide variety of topics, including the history of gender and sexuality in Canada (Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 and The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooners, Heterosexuality and the Tourist Industry at Niagara Falls; the global 1960s (New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness; adoption and child migration in Canada, Cuba and Guatemala (Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas); the politics of music in Cuba (My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela). She has co-edited two recent anthologies about Canada and the world (Within and Without the Nation: Transnational Canadian History and Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories). Her most recent book is Cuba Beyond the Beach: Stories of Life in Havana.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 2, 2023
Improper Advances is a classic in the field of gender studies and Canadian social history, and rightfully so. The breadth and depth of Karen Dubinsky’s research is quite remarkable. As an historian, Dubinsky has a real knack for highlighting regional nuances and exploring the myriad ways in which sexualities – and the normative expectations around gender, race, and class – change with our sense of geography.
On that note, my favourite chapter was the heavily geo-spatial one, titled “Sex and the Single-Industry Community: The Social and Moral Reputation of Rural and Northern Ontario”. Through careful research, this chapter shows historians that they need to be clear about what they mean when they refer to a province as a “place” and an object of study. Ontario was far from homogenous then as it is now, and during the period in question, it was also parsed up sexually along regional lines. As Dubinsky illustrates, different communities followed different norms and codes of conduct, and this led to regional variations in the expression of sexual vulnerabilities, anxieties, and criminality.
While I respect this work and its relation to the wider historiography, I take serious issue with Dubinsky on a theoretical level. I think her social constructivist approach is wholly inadequate and fails to grasp not only gender identities and sexualities, but humans as complex beings with inherited material and historical realities.
In her introduction, Dubinsky boldly claims: “Sexuality does not reside in the hormones of biological men and women; it is constructed socially and historically.” Philosophically, there is a lot at stake in defending this claim. This sort of social constructivism – let's call it 'hard' social constructivism – treats human beings as if they were a tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon which sensory data is passively received and inscribed. Kant showed the inadequacies of this view of the mind over two centuries before Dubinsky published Improper Advances. Furthermore, Piaget’s experiments in developmental psychology provided an empirical basis for grounding some of Kant’s theory of innate ideas. A wealth of evidence supports the idea that human beings are products of both nature and nurture.
At best, hard social constructivism tells only part of the story. At worst, it completely misunderstands human beings and their relation to history and the physical world. Dubinsky privileges the social and discursive to the exclusion of everything else, leaving her analysis incapable of interrogating the whole range of internal and external determinants of human thought and behaviour. Society, discourse, and culture matter, but they are not the only things that matter. Unfortunately, it seems that Dubinsky either does not recognize the physical, biological and psychological dimensions of gender and sexuality as legitimate determining factors, or she does not appreciate their function in shaping human history.
My question to the hard social constructivists like Foucault, Butler, and Dubinsky is the following: how can our physiological and genetic constitution be entirely a social construct? In our appreciation for the socially constructed and discursive aspects of the human experience, we must not lose sight of the other restraints and constraints placed on human life as a matter of material necessity. It is because of the ontological givens which characterize human existence – what Heidegger described as our “thrownness” (geworfenheit) – that we are not merely what we make of ourselves and others. We are more than our constructs; we are not, as it were, pure cogito or sheer will. We are before we are this or that. The fact of our births and deaths exist by necessity, independent of our consent and choosing. We find ourselves thrown into being and we must cope with the fact that we are here, in this body, of this mind, and for this finite time. Our being is characterized first and foremost by our “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein) and our “being-toward-death” (Sein-zum-Tode). Neither of those fundamental qualities are constructed by the self. Only our relation to those qualities are, perhaps, within our social, cultural, and discursive field of agency.
However, in Dubinsky’s view, all sexualities and gender identities are reducible to social constructions. Moreover, she asserts that social constructions are nothing more than power dynamics. “Rape and related crimes are not acts of individual pathology”, she concludes, “but rather expressions of asymmetrical relations of power between women and men.” Sex is certainly connected to power, as are sex crimes. Yet that is clearly not all they are. For instance, psychological and neurological factors – including, but not limited to, cognitive functioning, emotional regulation, social reasoning, trauma, and mental disorders – are obviously connected with the expression of normative and deviant sexualities. We cannot begin to make sense of sexuality without taking the mind and the brain into serious consideration. Contrary to what Dubinsky wants us to believe, rape and related crimes are often acts of individual psychopathology.
Not every heterosexual relationship is based on a conscious or unconscious power struggle, nor are they necessarily based on coercion. Yet that seems to be precisely what Dubinsky means when she says: “Relations between the sexes were and are complicated. I have also used stories of sexual conflict to explore pleasure, and I have argued for the possibility for a noncoercive heterosexuality.” Is the implication here that all heterosexualities are inherently coercive? Is she claiming that heterosexuality could potentially become non-coercive, if expressed under the right conditions as she understands them? If my interpretation of that passage is correct, then her claim is not only offensive, it’s flat-out wrong.
In my estimation, Dubinsky’s inability or refusal to see gender and sexuality as more than a power-play or a human construct is what prevents her analysis from being definitive. It is also what leads her to hold indefensible views, such as the belief that heterosexuality is intrinsically coercive. The result is an historiographically important – yet theoretically impotent – piece of scholarship.
On that note, my favourite chapter was the heavily geo-spatial one, titled “Sex and the Single-Industry Community: The Social and Moral Reputation of Rural and Northern Ontario”. Through careful research, this chapter shows historians that they need to be clear about what they mean when they refer to a province as a “place” and an object of study. Ontario was far from homogenous then as it is now, and during the period in question, it was also parsed up sexually along regional lines. As Dubinsky illustrates, different communities followed different norms and codes of conduct, and this led to regional variations in the expression of sexual vulnerabilities, anxieties, and criminality.
While I respect this work and its relation to the wider historiography, I take serious issue with Dubinsky on a theoretical level. I think her social constructivist approach is wholly inadequate and fails to grasp not only gender identities and sexualities, but humans as complex beings with inherited material and historical realities.
In her introduction, Dubinsky boldly claims: “Sexuality does not reside in the hormones of biological men and women; it is constructed socially and historically.” Philosophically, there is a lot at stake in defending this claim. This sort of social constructivism – let's call it 'hard' social constructivism – treats human beings as if they were a tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon which sensory data is passively received and inscribed. Kant showed the inadequacies of this view of the mind over two centuries before Dubinsky published Improper Advances. Furthermore, Piaget’s experiments in developmental psychology provided an empirical basis for grounding some of Kant’s theory of innate ideas. A wealth of evidence supports the idea that human beings are products of both nature and nurture.
At best, hard social constructivism tells only part of the story. At worst, it completely misunderstands human beings and their relation to history and the physical world. Dubinsky privileges the social and discursive to the exclusion of everything else, leaving her analysis incapable of interrogating the whole range of internal and external determinants of human thought and behaviour. Society, discourse, and culture matter, but they are not the only things that matter. Unfortunately, it seems that Dubinsky either does not recognize the physical, biological and psychological dimensions of gender and sexuality as legitimate determining factors, or she does not appreciate their function in shaping human history.
My question to the hard social constructivists like Foucault, Butler, and Dubinsky is the following: how can our physiological and genetic constitution be entirely a social construct? In our appreciation for the socially constructed and discursive aspects of the human experience, we must not lose sight of the other restraints and constraints placed on human life as a matter of material necessity. It is because of the ontological givens which characterize human existence – what Heidegger described as our “thrownness” (geworfenheit) – that we are not merely what we make of ourselves and others. We are more than our constructs; we are not, as it were, pure cogito or sheer will. We are before we are this or that. The fact of our births and deaths exist by necessity, independent of our consent and choosing. We find ourselves thrown into being and we must cope with the fact that we are here, in this body, of this mind, and for this finite time. Our being is characterized first and foremost by our “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein) and our “being-toward-death” (Sein-zum-Tode). Neither of those fundamental qualities are constructed by the self. Only our relation to those qualities are, perhaps, within our social, cultural, and discursive field of agency.
However, in Dubinsky’s view, all sexualities and gender identities are reducible to social constructions. Moreover, she asserts that social constructions are nothing more than power dynamics. “Rape and related crimes are not acts of individual pathology”, she concludes, “but rather expressions of asymmetrical relations of power between women and men.” Sex is certainly connected to power, as are sex crimes. Yet that is clearly not all they are. For instance, psychological and neurological factors – including, but not limited to, cognitive functioning, emotional regulation, social reasoning, trauma, and mental disorders – are obviously connected with the expression of normative and deviant sexualities. We cannot begin to make sense of sexuality without taking the mind and the brain into serious consideration. Contrary to what Dubinsky wants us to believe, rape and related crimes are often acts of individual psychopathology.
Not every heterosexual relationship is based on a conscious or unconscious power struggle, nor are they necessarily based on coercion. Yet that seems to be precisely what Dubinsky means when she says: “Relations between the sexes were and are complicated. I have also used stories of sexual conflict to explore pleasure, and I have argued for the possibility for a noncoercive heterosexuality.” Is the implication here that all heterosexualities are inherently coercive? Is she claiming that heterosexuality could potentially become non-coercive, if expressed under the right conditions as she understands them? If my interpretation of that passage is correct, then her claim is not only offensive, it’s flat-out wrong.
In my estimation, Dubinsky’s inability or refusal to see gender and sexuality as more than a power-play or a human construct is what prevents her analysis from being definitive. It is also what leads her to hold indefensible views, such as the belief that heterosexuality is intrinsically coercive. The result is an historiographically important – yet theoretically impotent – piece of scholarship.
December 11, 2025
Analyzing 400 legal cases involving women in Ontario between 1880-1929, Dubinsky examines the nature of rape, harassment, and female agency in legal discourse and what these legal cases tell us about the state of heterosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this text, Dubinksy examines the historic construction of rape as seen through the Ontario legal court system, and how ideas around gender, class, space, and respectability play into perceptions around sexuality, masculinity, and domination. Building on 1970s feminists' theories around rape as an act of power, Dubinsky complicates this notion through the examination of cases that involved "seduction" and/or "abduction" to demonstrate the ways women expressed desire and agency within late Victorian and Edwardian society. Dubinsky concludes her book by examining how these legal cases have also served to define space, specifically rural and Northern Ontario, as "imagined geography" where ideas of wildness, civility, and morality heavily shape how people perceived the victims and nature of the crimes.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews