Dawn Rae Flood. Rape in Chicago

For decades, women's historians avoided the topic of rape, perhaps because it seemed to define and treat women as victims rather than agents. So for a field of study built on women's agency, the appearance in recent years of a growing body of scholarship on rape may signal a historiographical shift. In the past ten years, Diane Miller Sommerville, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Crystal N. Feimster, Danielle McGuire, Catherine Jacquet, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Dawn Rae Flood have all produced works that investigate the history of rape. That each also focuses on race raises important questions about why the historical study of rape brings race to the fore. Unique to Rape in Chicago is its focus on Chicago and attention to rape convictions that were appealed between 1936 and 1976. Within these parameters, Flood aims to test her assumption that “women were rarely believed if they came forward with rape allegations.” As a self-described “white feminist from the Midwest,” she also hopes to complicate her and our “understanding of the racial rape myths embedded in American society” (p. 4).

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• Shadow Trials, or a History of Sexual Assault Trials in the Jim Crow South

  Scott W Stern•UCLA Women s Law Journal•2022

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