Without Consent:
A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime
By Sarah Weinman (Ecco)
It is odd when I want to treat a history book as having spoilers, but what happens here in fact and as it is structured as a book is designed to surprise. It is designed to do so in what happens, but the sort of premise of looking back at a world that failed to consider spousal rape as criminal is itself meant to shock.
You could say that this is a book about the history of rape within a marriage becoming a crime in the United States, but it is still not a crime, not federally.
The book is focused on Oregon v. Rideout, a 1978 trial that was one of the first trials (and the first major trial) under a spousal rape criminal statute. This would give it a celebrity status, making the trial a major public event with talk show appearances and a made-for-TV movie.
The facts of the Rideout case are not simple. Or they are simple, but the story frustrates the narrative, a conflict between what we expect from stories, such as in fiction, and the messy way that they are in real life with real people. This reverberates with why the question of spousal rape as a possible crime was contentious in the first place. The imagination of what marriage is in an ideological sense does not comport with the actual violence done to people.
This is sort of the book’s problem, in that the focus is so much on the case, and what comes afterwards, and what continues to come, that there is not a broader look at the topic. But this is no real complaint, in that it makes the book much more captivating and readable. The only other problem is something that author cannot do anything about, namely those people who are involved who will not (and sometimes cannot) comment on what happened.
My thanks to the author, Sarah Weinman, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Ecco, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 