Responding to Rape: Contesting the Meanings of Sexual Violence in the United States, 1950-1980

Between 1950 and 1980, extraordinary and unprecedented changes occurred in the legal, medical, and social understandings and responses to sexual violence against women in the United States. These changes were largely driven by civil rights and second wave feminist mobilizations around sexual violence. The dissertation focuses on how social movement understandings of race and gender informed activism and proposed solutions to rape. I argue that anti-rape activism of the time period is characterized by complex intersections of movement politics around rape. The dissertation also highlights how social movements make change as activists negotiated one another’s politics on race and gender and negotiated and responded to significant state limitations and frameworks.