A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial

by Peggy Reeves Sanday

In this bracing study of American sexual culture and the politics of acquaintance rape, esteemed anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday identifies the sexual stereotypes that continue to obstruct justice and diminish women. Beginning with a harrowing account of the St. John's rape case, Sanday reaches back through British and American landmark rape cases to explain how, with the exception of earliest Colonial times, rape has been a crime notable for placing the woman on trial. A ground-breaking work of scholarship, A Woman Scorned brings a broader perspective to our understanding of acquaintance rape and envisions, finally, a new paradigm for female sexual equality.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Law, Womens

338 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used this to help write my thesis: Justifiable Homicide as a result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Battered Women. Got an A.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sanday does a good job looking at how American society has interpreted and comprehended rape victims which ties in to how we interpret sex and romance: the idea of man/woman as aggressive hunter/coy prey who secretly wants to be caught led to assumptions a woman's "no" means yes and a focus on whether the victim was chaste enough or careful enough to avoid it being "her fault." Writing in the 1990s, Sanday shows how late 20th century feminists pushed to change that, despite the backlash that argued to criminalize date rape and acquaintance rape was anti-sex.
An excellent book, though 30 years later the presence of so many rapists and alleged rapists in the White House and the even louder right-wing support for letting rapists be rapists makes a sad contrast to Sanday's hope we were getting our shit together.

[Wosny · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very moving book, and I felt it was an excellent study of how our attitudes to rape and to victims of rape is often ambiguous. I am a rape victim and yet I have also been guilty of victim blaming. She helps us understand this paradox in the looking at the history and anthropology of Western culture, and gives some helpful suggestions to bring about change in both men and women's attitudes to sexual behaviour.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read. great historical review and analysis of date rape, with regards to law and the social/political attitudes (biases) which shape them.