Improper advances : rape and heterosexual conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929
This book provides a study of women, men, and sexual crime in rural and northern Ontario, expanding the terms of current debates about sexuality and sexual violence. Karen Dublinsky 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 violence: that crimes are expressions of power, that courts are prejudiced by the victim's background, and that most assaults occur within the victim's homes and communities. But she refuses to view women solely as victims and sex as a tool of oppression, demonstrating that these women actively distinguished between wanted and unwanted sexual encounters, and that they attempted to punish coercive sex despite obstacles in the court system and the community
History
ix, 228 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780226167534, 9780226167541, 0226167534, 0226167542
27187500
Ch. 1. Sex, Shame, and Resistance: The Social and Historical Meaning of Rape
Ch. 2. Discourses of Danger: The Social and Spatial Settings of Violence
Ch. 3. Maidenly Girls and Designing Women: Prosecutions for Consensual Sex
Ch. 4. Spectacle, Scandal, and Spicy Stories
Ch. 5. From the Parlor to the Kitchen: Courtship, Popular Mores, and Regulation
Ch. 6. Sex and the Single-Industry Community: The Social and Moral Reputation of Rural and Northern Ontario