Gender, Race, and Rape During the Civil War - Julie Beck - the Atlantic
There’s a sort of double standard, especially if you think about the idea of what was considered “being a lady” at the time. Now you have to be able to fight off a man—even though normally society thought you should be dainty.
Even if it was an upper-class white woman, who was more likely to believed, sometimes judges would dismiss it because they would feel, “Oh, [if she were really a lady] she would have been too ashamed to actually come forward.” So everything was stacked against the woman.
That’s the other thing: both the North and the South rarely thought it was rape when it was a black woman. It wasn’t until the Civil War when black women were actually able to come forward and call it rape. Before that time, even in the North, they would make it a lesser charge [for black women], if at all. I do have at least one record where a black woman was able to testify about a sexual assault in New York or someplace like that, but that was very rare. For the most part, black women’s voices went unheard.
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