White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960.

White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960. By Lisa Lindquist Dorr. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. viii, 327. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5514-6; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2841-6.)

In the past ten years a new generation of southern historians has rewritten the history of segregation, revealing change and conflict under the surface of the "solid" twentieth-century South. With this book, Lisa Lindquist Don joins that effort to understand segregation as a contested system of gender, class, and racial order.

Black-on-white rape might seem the least likely place to explore the complexities of segregation, given the prevalence of lynching and the pervasiveness of white southern rhetoric about rape. Yet by examining clemency files alongside trial records and newspaper accounts of such rape cases, Dorr uncovers a gap between the familiar racial "script" promising protection to white women and draconian punishment to black rapists, and the actual disposition of these cases (p. 5). Although the vast majority of the accused men in Dorr's study were convicted (and 22 percent of those were executed), most were convicted of a variety of lesser offenses, received widely disparate sentences, and, most revealing, frequently were pardoned before serving full sentences. In these pardon papers, Dorr discovers not only conflicting white responses to rape accusations but a range of "behind the scenes" efforts by African Americans to influence the outcome of cases as well (p. 204). What the author does not find is unquestioning acceptance of white women's words. Indeed she discovers an entire absence of women's accounts in pardon deliberations, replaced by white men's interpretation of events, including speculation about women's character and sexual conduct even long after the alleged assault.

Departing from the chronological analysis promoted by southern political historians, Dorr argues that white responses and black strategies of resistance to rape accusations were "remarkably consistent" until after World War II, a period she treats as a watershed and in a separate chapter (p. 14). The very success of that chapter, which charts how new social attitudes about women's sexuality, together with the budding civil rights movement, altered southern responses to white and black women's charges of rape, accentuates the absence of attention to change and political context in the earlier chapters. If changing sexual behavior and attitudes after World War II raised suspicion about white women's sexual activity, as Dorr argues, then it stands to reason that dramatic changes in sexual mores and gender relations around World War I might have influenced the dynamics and disposition of rape cases in some ways as well. A long-term perspective on women's own varied, changing, and sometimes organized responses to the issue of rape--from Ida B. Wells's open challenge to southern sexual myths, to black clubwomen's legal reform strategies, to white reformers' oblique discussion of interracial sex in the women's anti-lynching campaign of the 1930s, to commentary about rape in black women's oral traditions--would have deepened and qualified the author's argument that only after World War II did the issue of rape take center stage in the struggle for civil rights. Such a chronological perspective would help make better sense of the traditions not only behind the modern civil rights movement but also behind the feminist analyses of rape that soon followed (and on which Dorr builds).

Dorr's study points the way toward a comprehensive study of rape in the South in the twentieth century, one that considers and compares how southern courts and communities handled rape cases involving white men accused of raping black and white women and black men accused of raping black women. Historians engaged in any aspect of that project as well as anyone interested in race, gender, and law more generally must certainly reckon with Dorr's analysis.

Willamette University 

LESLIE DUNLAP