A Woman Scorned Hardcover – February 1, 1996 by Peggy Sanday
 
A study of American sexual culture and the politics of acquaintance rape identifies and examines the sexual stereotypes that obstruct justice and considers such topics as the St. John's University rape case and the Violence Against Women Act. Tour.
 
Amazon.com Review
According to University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, half of all women who have been raped are victims of a crime committed by someone they knew. Her book charts America's attitudes towards sex and rape from the time of the Puritans (who Sanday says led spirited sex lives) when the incidence of rape was low; through the 18th century, when the number of rapes rose as masculinity came to be equated with sexual aggression and femininity with passivity; to the present, when male sexual violence is often condoned and juries would rather believe that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," than accept that a woman can be raped by an acquaintance.
From Publishers Weekly
Our responses to acquaintance rape, anthropology professor Sanday (Fraternity Gang Rape) proposes, are products of a complicated history of beliefs about human sexuality. Victorian standards helped foster the practice of using a rape complainant's past to undermine her character and credibility, while our culture's attraction to rugged masculinity often generates more sympathy for defendants in rape trials than for their accusers. Here Sanday traces the often contradictory beliefs about female sexuality and female autonomy that emerged from different eras of American history and discusses their impact on contemporary evaluations of accusations of acquaintance rape. Taking up recent controversial cases such as those of Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith, Sanday explores the various ideologies of gender and sexuality that made America's responses to these cases both heated and ambivalent. Her analysis of past and present attitudes toward acquaintance rape is insightful and persuasive.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
4.18