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Navigating gendered relationships: change and inertia in U.S. activism against sexual assault

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Content i

NAVIGATING GENDERED RELATIONSHIPS:

CHANGE AND INERTIA IN U.S. ACTIVISM AGAINST SEXUAL ASSAULT

by

Kari Storla

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctorate of Philosophy (COMMUNICATION)
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

December 2017

Copyright 2017 Kari Storla
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my committee (Randy Lake, Alison Trope, Tom
Hollihan, and Vincent Farenga) for all the time and effort they dedicated to helping me
with my dissertation. I would also thank the University of Southern California Annenberg
School for Communication and Journalism for the funds it provided to allow me to travel
back and forth to the UCLA library. In that same vein, I acknowledge the contributions of
the library staff at both USC and UCLA, whom provided expert assistance in locating
resources, utilizing archive materials, letting me reformat my USB drive on their
computer so I could save my research files properly, and more.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff at the University of Southern
California’s Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center for the support and
education they continue to provide the USC community.

Thanks are also due to the members of my cohort and program at USC Annenberg,
especially those who provided feedback and advice. In particular, I would like to extend
my thanks to Marcia Allison and Lena Uszkoreit. I would also like to thank Leslie
Bertnsen for the support and guidance she has provided.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends (especially Justin Gibbins, Haley
Russell, Kristin Storla, and my parents) who have contributed in various ways to my
dissertation, including letting me bounce ideas off them, supporting me, and always being
ready with a funny meme to distract me from my research when necessary.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ii
List of Figures v
Abstract vi
Chapter One 1
Introduction 1
Establishing the Problem 3
Sexual Violence: Then and Now 7
Purpose of the Present Study 20
Overview of the Current Project 35

Chapter Two 46
Introduction 46
Establishing the Context 47
Views of Children and Girls in the Late Nineteenth-Century 49
United States
History of the Age of Consent 50
Contemporaneous Views of (Statutory) Rape and the Age 51
of Consent
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 56
The Union Signal 66
Agent and Idealism 67
Analysis of The Union Signal and the Age of Consent Campaign 70
Emphasis on Education 71
Mothers’ Responsibility to Create “New Men” and “New 76
Women”
Girls’ Ineligibility as Agents 83
Conclusion 89

Chapter Three 94
Introduction 94
Context for the 1970s Antirape Movement 95
Legal Views of Sexual Violence 95
Contemporaneous Research on Sexual Violence 99
Response of Women’s Movements 109
Sources 114
Against Rape 114
Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women 115
Agency and Pragmatism 116
Analysis of Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women and Against Rape 117
Scope and Goals Are Broad but Resources and Time Are Limited 119
Tension Between Short-Term and Long-Term Solutions 123
iv
Conclusion 130

Chapter Four 133
Introduction 133
Current Research on Sexual Violence 135
Cultural and Gender Norms 136
Sexual Violence on College Campuses 143
Preventing Sexual Violence: Bystander Intervention 150
Online Campaigns 153
It’s On Us 155
Theory: Scene and Materialism 161
Analysis of It’s On Us 162
The Scene of College Campuses 164
Gender as Scene 170
Situational Intervention Rather than Prevention 175
Conclusion 183

Chapter Five 187
Introduction 187
Summary of Each Movement 188
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 188
1970s Antirape Movements 189
It’s On Us 190
Connections Among Movements 191
Rhetorical Resonance 197
Where Do We Go From Here? 204
Attitude 204
Kenneth Burke’s Attitude (and Others’ Attitudes Towards It) 205
Use of Attitude in Previous Sexual Violence Research 208
Adopting an Attitude-Centered Approach in the Future 212
Other Takeaways 217
Conclusion 218

References 220

v
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Screenshot of itsonus.org, showing how the campaign
provides digital tools to combine your social network profile
picture and the IOU logo 157

Figure 2: IOU 2016 highlights, posted on Twitter 166

Figure 3: IOU campaign image encouraging bystander intervention 167

Figure 4: Screenshot of tweet that honors Arndt and Jonsson 179

Figure 5: Screenshot of looikdifferent.org/itsonus, the website linked
in the tweet from Figure 4 180

vi
ABSTRACT
Both the problem of sexual violence and movements that seek to provide
solutions to that problem have existed for generations. Despite the work done by anti-
sexual-violence movements (anti-SV movements), however, sexual violence remains a
serious problem. The success of social movements is also often difficult to measure, with
the gains of previous movements often dismissed because of the limitations of those
successes. In this dissertation, I examine the way that anti-SV movements over time in
the United States have had to both push for change while still trying to persuade
audiences who identify with the very ideologies that the movements are attempting to
alter.
I employ a dramatistic social movements approach to the study of anti-SV
movements. In particular, I look at the nineteenth-century campaign to raise the age of
consent, driven by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the 1970s antirape
campaigns and the awareness literature they produced, including the New York Radical
Feminist’s book Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women (1974) and a book written by
two women prominent in Chicago Women Against Rape titled Against Rape (1974), and
finally the recent It’s On Us campaign, which was spearheaded by a coalition of
organizations and groups that included former President Barack Obama’s White House.
Each of these movements can best be understood through its use of a particular pentadic
framework; in understanding the pentadic framework adopted, we can also understand
how anti-SV movements at different times and stages adapted to the ideologies of their
time in order to push for social progress.
vii
Ultimately, I argue that anti-SV movements should not be viewed as a
discontinuous set of discrete movements but rather as connected parts of a larger,
overarching continuous movement. While the work done by an earlier movement may
seem counterproductive by later standards, this is only because their work must
rhetorically resonate with both the time in which they are producing their movement and
the imagined future which they are pursuing. The movements in later eras, which to have
some extent achieved this imagined future, no longer see the need to identify with the
beliefs of the past and so therefore may view past movements as detrimental to their own
goals. Current and future anti-SV work, then, should build on what was accomplished by
earlier movements. I suggest that an attitudinal-based approach, rather than the agent,
agency, and scene-based approaches of earlier movements, should be considered for the
future.
1
CHAPTER ONE

Introduction
Within the past few year, dozens of high-profile cases of sexual violence have
featured in newspapers and flooded Facebook feeds: national media highlighted Bill
Cosby’s long history of drugging and sexually assaulting women (Malone & Demme,
2015)
1
; prosecutors charged a male student at a prestigious boarding school with felony
rape after he pursued a younger female student as part of a sexist “senior salute” tradition
(Bazelon, 2015); David Bowie’s death ignited debates about the cultural acceptance of
rock stars engaging in statutory rape (Williams, 2016); the Department of Education
investigated over 100 schools for potentially mishandling sexual assault cases (Kingkade,
2015); a Florida jury acquitted a police officer of raping a woman at gunpoint because
they determined she probably fantasized about having sex on the hood of a cop car
(Freeman, 2015); the CEO of Thinx period panties faced accusations of sexual
harassment from a former employee (Malone, 2017); the University of California system
released details on over 100 sexual harassment and assault investigations that it
considered to have enough evidence to be founded (Pickoff-White, Lagos, & Shafer,
2017); car-sharing service Uber settled a lawsuit out of court about their drivers sexually
assaulting customers (Kokalitcheva, 2016); and a college student convicted of three
felony counts related to sexual assault served only half of his initial six-month sentence
before being released on parole (Pan, 2016). Such a litany of horrifying events is both
shocking and exhausting when put together.

1
A trial regarding one such incident ended in a mistrial in June 2017 (Chen, 2017).
2
At the same time, however, each individual event does not come as a surprise.
Sexual violence in its varied forms is an everyday occurrence, appearing everywhere
from our television shoes to our commutes. But sadly none of this news is particularly
shocking. We are, after all, only a few decades beyond all fifty states criminalizing
spousal rape in some form (McMahon-Howard, Clay-Warner, & Renzulli, 2009), and a
substantial number of states still maintain spousal allowances today, diminishing the
severity of one spouse raping another (Levine, 2017). Furthermore, the previous
examples are only a small handful of the cases that gained widespread attention; sexual
violence itself is far more common. If we were to extend our range beyond the past few
years, countless stories of sexual violence could be included, not to mention those that
were never reported in the first place. This is not to say, of course, that sexual violence
has been allowed to continue, ignored. On the contrary, activists have been working for
decades towards the eradication of sexual assault.
Despite the recognition of sexual violence as a problem, however, it persists. This
begs (in the anthropomorphic sense of the term) the question: If sexual violence has been
long-recognized as a problem, why hasn’t it yet been fixed?
2
To address this question, the
current project investigates not the issue of sexual violence itself, but rather the rhetorical
history of anti-sexual-violence movements (anti-SV movements). In doing so, I
investigate how work against sexual violence operates not as a single event, but rather as
a series of continuous, connected movements.

2
While the same can be said of many social issues, sexual violence is unique by virtue of
its duality: it is both a form of gender-based violence, often used to exert control, and
something to which all people are potentially vulnerable.
3
Establishing the Problem
Of course, actions such as sexual assault and rape are part of a larger system of
sexual violence based on cultural norms and how we see gender (Conaghan & Russell,
2014; Gavey, 2005). This is one factor that has led to variances in how sexual assault is
defined and therefore measured. It is important to remember, therefore, that despite any
discrepancies in research data, any cases of sexual assault indicate that there is a problem
that must be addressed. In other words, to establish sexual violence as a problem requires
a demonstration of its existence in some manner, even though the exact incidence may be
a matter of dispute. To do that, we simply have to examine current sexual violence
statistics, especially those focused on sexual assault and rape. While this is not the only
way to substantiate the matter of sexual violence, it does allow us to begin to see the
issue’s outlines.
There are three principal sources for data on the rates of sexual violence in the
United States: The National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS), administered
between 1995 and 1996 (Tjaden et al., 2000), the National Intimate Partner and Sexual
Violence Survey (NISVS), administered in 2010 (Black et al., 2010), and the annual
National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), with the most recent report published
using data from 2015 (Truman & Morgan, 2016). Each survey defined acts of sexual
violence such as rape slightly differently. For the NVAWS, rape was “an event that
occurred without the victim’s consent, that involved the use or threat of force to penetrate
the victim’s vagina or anus by penis, tongue, fingers, or object, or the victim’s mouth by
penis. The definition include[s] both attempted and completed rape” (Tjaden et al., 2000,
4
p. 4). The NVAWS had no categories for other types of sexual assault, such as non-
consensual sexual contact. Similarly, the NISVS defined rape as:
Any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal
penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down,
or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when
the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent. Rape is
separated into three types, completed forced penetration, attempted forced
penetration, and completed alcohol or drug facilitated penetration. (Black et al.,
2010, p. 17)
Unlike the NVAWS, however, the NISVS also collected data for events they categorized
as “being made to penetrate someone else,” “sexual coercion,” “unwanted sexual
contact,” and “non-contact unwanted sexual experiences” (Black et al., 2010, p. 17). The
discussion of incidences of sexual violence below, however, only considers the NISVS
statistics on events they define as rape.
In contrast to the NISVS and NVAWS, the NCVS created a distinction between
rape and sexual assault, despite often combining the two into one category in reports. On
the NCVS, rape was:
The unlawful penetration of a person against the will of the victim, with use or
threatened use of force, or attempting such an act. Rape includes psychological
coercion and physical force, and forced sexual intercourse means vaginal, anal, or
oral penetration by the offender. Rape also includes incidents where penetration is
from a foreign object (e.g., a bottle), victimizations against male and female
5
victims, and both heterosexual and homosexual rape. Attempted rape includes
verbal threats of rape. (Truman & Morgan, 2016, p. 15)
while sexual assault was:
Defined across a wide range of victimizations, separate from rape or attempted
rape. These crimes include attacks or attempted attacks generally involving
unwanted sexual contact between a victim and offender. Sexual assault may or
may not involve force and includes grabbing or fondling. (Truman & Morgan,
2016, p. 15)
The NCVS definition for rape, then, was broader than the NISVS definition, given that it
included acts such as psychological coercion, a separate category for the NISVS. Since
the NCVS included the category of sexual assault in its combined statistical reports of
“rape/sexual assault,” while the NISVS and NVAWS measured rape as distinct from
other acts of sexual violence, and might not have reported other such acts at all, it would
be expected that the NCVS would have reported the highest reported rates of rape.
Surprisingly, this was not the case. In fact, the NCVS’s reported prevalence of
“rape/sexual assault” was lower than either the NISVS’s or the NVAWS’s reported
prevalence of rape (0.08% for the NCVS versus 1.1% for women in the NISVS
3
, and
0.3% for women and 0.1% for men in the NVAWS). Obviously, the different
methodologies, years, and questions of each survey can account for some of these
differences. For example, the determining factors in whether each of an individual’s
multiple experiences of sexual violence “counted” as a unique incidence or was grouped

3
Although there are no statistics for rape for men in the NISVS, the roughly analogous
category “made to penetrate” (which was not calculated for women) has a yearly
prevalence of 1.1% as well.
6
with others varied from survey to survey (Tjaden et al., 2000). It should be kept in mind,
then, that not only have there been critiques made of all these surveys themselves, but
that caution must also be made when attempting to compare the results from such
disparate surveys (Bachman, 2015). Of course, this does not mean that the results are
worthless.
According to the NCVS, “the total rate of sexual violence committed against U.S.
female residents age 12 or older” fell almost two-thirds between 1995 and 2005, and
remained stable through the end of their analysis in 2010 (Planty et al., 2013, p. 1).
However, later NCVS results found that the rate of rape and sexual assault increased
from 1.1 to 1.6 victimizations for every 1000 people between 2014 and 2015 (Truman &
Morgan, 2016, p. 2). The authors were cautious of actually deriving meaning from such a
finding, however, and warned that although this difference is significant “at the 90%
confidence level, care should be taken in interpreting [it] because estimates of rape or
sexual assault are based on [the] small number of cases reported to the survey” (p. 15).
This would seem, then, to point more to an issue with the NCVS methodology for
measuring sexual violence from year to year than it would anything else. Additionally,
comparing the NVAWS and NISVS numbers actually shows an increase in the
prevalence of rape between 1995 and 2010, from 0.3% to 1.1% yearly for women (Black
et al., 2010; Tjaden et al., 2000). While the two surveys do use different questions and
methods, something that, as previously mentioned, must give us pause in attempting to
compare them, both do find remarkably similar lifetime prevalence of rape for women:
7
17.6% and 18.6%, respectively. In contrast, the lifetime prevalence for men is under 2%,
according to the NISVS (Brieding et al., 2014).
4

Even going with the most conservative figures, then, means that in 2015 over an
estimated 431,000 people were raped and/or sexually assaulted (Truman & Morgan,
2016). Using the less conservative—and likely more accurate, given the fact that rape is
incredibly under-reported (National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2015)—estimates,
women in the United States are raped at nearly three times that rate, given the estimated
1,270,000 female
5
victims every year (Black et al., 2010).
Ultimately however, the exact statistics themselves are not the important thing.
Instead, the people those statistics represent and the harms done to them are the issue at
hand. As Andrea Dworkin (2005) pointed out, “we use statistics not to try to quantify the
injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist” (p.14). Anyone who has
been sexually assaulted does not need surveys to tell them that there is a problem; they
are all too aware. Instead, the numbers serve to demonstrate to the problem of sexual
violence to those who are unaware of either its existence or its extent.

Sexual Violence: Then and Now
In response to the problem of sexual violence, then, numerous anti-sexual
violence movements (anti-SV movements) have focused on decreasing the prevalence
and incidence of sexual assault. Dating back to at least the nineteenth century, anti-SV
movements have petitioned, protested, and picketed to work towards decreasing sexual

4
Statistics for other genders are harder to find and were not reported in these three
surveys.
5
In many of the studies of sexual violence, the terms woman and female are used more or
less interchangeably.
8
violence. However, this raises the question of how sexual violence can still be so
prevalent if people have been working to stop it for so long. The answer is that sexual
violence can be seen as two distinct but connected problems: sexual violence as an act
and sexual violence as a culture. It may be impossible to stop all individual acts of rape;
what can be stopped, however, is rape as a cultural form of gendered sexual violence.
It is important to recognize, of course, that saying the focus should be on stopping
gendered sexual violence rather than all acts of sexual violence does not mean that
addressing sexual violence towards women is more important than addressing sexual
violence towards other genders. Rather it is to say that gendered sexual violence is a
problem more likely to be successfully addressed by a social movement than acts of
sexual violence; the former operates on the social level while the latter does not.
Furthermore, tackling the underlying social structures of gendered sexual violence will
not just improve life for women. Dismantling essentialist notions of gender, for example,
can help alleviate issues when men are raped, such as their lacking resources or being
disbelieved.
Whether or not rape has been addressed as an act or as a gendered special issue
has varied over the years. Laws, beliefs, and campaigns about sexual violence have
differed as well. It is, in fact, important to define how we are using the term sexual
violence more precisely. This study uses the World Health Organization’s definition of
sexual violence as:
any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or
advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality
using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any
9
setting, including but not limited to home and work. (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy,
Zwi, & Lozano, 2002, p. 149)
Such a definition encompasses a range of acts ranging from rape to sexual harassment.
The two important factors in whether or not something is considered sexual violence is
whether or not it is (a) sexual in nature and (b) nonconsensual, meaning that one of the
people involved does not want to engage in the act, is not properly informed as to the
nature of the act, has changed their mind, or is incapacitated in such a way as to be unable
to consent.
What is more difficult to pin down, however, is how the term sexual violence can
be applied across historical periods, given, as previously stated, that understandings of
what rape, sexual assault, and consent are have varied over time. For example, the crime
of seduction does not exist today, but in the nineteenth-century involved cases where a
man convinced a girl or woman to consent
6
to “premarital sex on the false promise of
marriage or by using other duplicitous means, such as a drugged drink” (Freedman, 2013,
p. 38). On its face, seduction therefore does not seem to fall within the category of sexual
violence, given that it was not considered nonconsensual at the time. Buts Freedman
(2013) pointed out, “the boundary between seduction and rape, however, was not always
a clear one” (p. 42); seduction was often used as a euphemism for rape. In addition, given
rape charges had to be backed up by indisputable physical evidence that the woman had
struggled against overwhelming physical force, charges of seduction were often brought
when a woman had been raped but could not prove it (Freedman, 2013). Even seduction,
then, often falls (and fell) under the umbrella of sexual violence. The term sexual

6
Using the understanding of consent for the time. Today, a person being incapacitated by
drugs or alcohol means that legally they are incapable of consenting to sexual activity.
10
violence thus includes the cultural and legal views of acts such as rape and sexual assault
over time without eliding them. In other words, the use of the term sexual violence still
allows us to attend to differences in how each era viewed distinct acts and crimes.
In the late nineteenth-century United States, laws concerning sexual assault and
consent were complex and (like today) varied widely depending on the state. In general,
sexual activity with females below the age of consent (which ranged from seven to
fourteen years of age, although ages ten to twelve, the onset of puberty, was most typical)
was illegal (Bullough, 2006). Once a female reached the age of consent, however, any
sexual activity in which she was involved was presumed mutually consensual until
proven otherwise (Smith, 2001). Non-consensual sex, legally, was only that in which
there was evidence of force (Cocca, 2006; Smith, 2001). While newspapers at the time
did report such rapes and “were almost universally sympathetic” to the victims in such
cases, they simultaneously depicted rape as something that happened only to white,
middle class girls (Freedman, 2015, p. 484). Women who were adults, poor, and/or black
were not seen as “rapeable” (p. 484); even those whose families were seen as impure and
immoral could not be seduced, since they were inherently lustful by association
(Freedman, 2013).
Thus, newspapers not only reflected society’s attitudes towards sexual violence
but also served to constrain its perceptions. This worked to define the boundaries of an
anti-sexual violence movement. If rape were something that could only happen to young,
middle class, white girls, then any movement to address rape would therefore need to
focus on that demographic to the exclusion of all others.
11
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) adopted this approach
towards sexual violence, focusing on the age of consent. As a social purity movement
they attempted to address moral issues through education (Moque, 1898). In particular,
the WCTU and the social purity movement fought against what they saw as a double
standard, where the expectations for women were higher than those for men insofar as
their generally moral and virtuous behavior, as well as their sexual chastity, were
concerned (Kraditor, 1981). The WCTU explicitly stated their stance on social purity and
the gendered double standard in their declaration of principles:
We believe that God created both man and woman in His own image, and,
therefore, we believe in one standard of purity for both men and women, and in
the equal right of all to hold opinions, and to express the same with equal
freedom. (E. P. Gordon, 1924, p. 24)
For the WCTU, both men and women were capable of engaging in the public and
political spheres as well as leading virtuous lives, despite these behaviors’ typical
associations with each respective gender. While women’s participation in the public may
have been the more transgressive of these two concepts, given that “the nineteenth
century reserved the term ‘public men’ for socially engaged males and the derogatory
epithet ‘public women’ for females who transgressed gender boundaries in flagrant
ways,” (Antoniazzi, 2014), arguments that men could always be sexually pure and
restrain themselves were still not commonly accepted at the time.
Despite these rather egalitarian goals, the WCTU’s discourse often mirrored
traditionally gendered notions. Marilley (1993) argued that Willard and the WCTU
promoted a “feminism of fear” rather than the “feminism of rights” for which the
12
suffragists advocated (p. 127). On the other hand, Slagell (2001) was less condemning,
seeing the WCTU’s work not as linear but rather like a “spiral” (p. 8), interweaving
“gradual reform” (p. 13) with contemporaneous ideas of gender and women’s place in
society (i.e. not having one). The WCTU, therefore, often seemed contradictory in their
methods and outreach; they simultaneously talked about the good they could do if they
gained suffrage while sometimes denying the need for it. They also proclaimed women’s
modesty and submissiveness while aggressively and publically fighting for age of
consent laws. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1989) explained how one of the reasons Willard
could address issues such as the age of consent, particularly as a woman during the late
nineteenth-century, was that even though she “discussed the most controversial sexual
issues in public” she did so using “a language of delicacy and circumlocution” (p. 130),
taking special care to make sure that “no blame was attached to males” (p. 127). In other
words, it was not that sexual violence was never discussed until relatively recently, as
some assume, but rather that the ways it has been discussed have differed. Willard, for
example, focused on standing up against what would today be called statutory rape
specifically rather than sexual violence more broadly.
The WCTU’s rhetoric in both their petitions and their newsletter, The Union
Signal, positioned women as sexually pure and submissive, furthering conceptions of
gendered bodies used to justify men’s “right” to women’s bodies. Still, the WCTU
ultimately succeeded in their work to convince legislatures to raise the age of consent
laws. However, those same laws were hamstrung within a few years (Cocca, 2006;
Ehrlich, 2014), something that points to the dangers and difficulties in gendered
13
ideologies that assume that rape is inevitable while simultaneously working to counteract
sexual violence (Storla, 2016).
After the WCTU’s efforts to increase the age of consent, organized efforts against
sexual violence decreased, remaining in the background until over half a century later. In
January 1971, the New York Radical Feminists held a “rape speakout,” “the first time
women began to tell their stories publically” (New York Radical Feminists, 1974, interior
cover). Later that same year, they held the first conference on rape. These were among
the first organized efforts of the second wave feminist movements’ antirape activist work.
The proceedings from these events were later published in Rape: The First Sourcebook
for Women (ibid). Numerous other groups, rape crisis centers, and similar organizations
soon coalesced (Buchwald, 2005; Orton, 2005). Women also began to discuss related
issues such as sexual harassment, as well as the intersection of class and gender (Baker,
2004, 2007). The efforts of these groups were many and varied, ranging from
consciousness-raising (CR) groups to rape crisis hotlines to providing education on the
issue of rape to police and public alike to speakouts and protests.
These endeavors were spurred by the zeitgeist of the times, including the sexual
revolution, the civil rights movement, and the broader women’s rights movement.
Despite this social progress, however, much of the situation remained much the same.
The burden of preventing boys and men from both pressuring girls and women into sex
and from sexually assaulted them was placed on girls and women (Dorr, 2008). Just as in
the nineteenth-century, women were expected to keep to a higher sexual moral standard.
Given that age of consent laws had been in effect for decades, however, anti-SV
movements in the 1970s focused more on sexual violence towards women regardless of
14
their age. Women who were assaulted in the 1970s soon learned that the law was not on
their side. Statutes that covered sexual assault generally only covered forced vaginal
penetration, often specifying that the penetration must be done by a penis; intoxication,
coercion, and other forms of unwanted sexual contact (e.g. forced oral sexual contact)
were not considered (Brownmiller, 1990). The woman’s relation to the assailant also
determined the (il)legality of the act; spousal rape was considered an impossibility.
1970s feminist groups kickstarted antirape awareness and activism. In very visible
ways, they laid the groundwork for antirape work today. Organized social movements
from women’s groups in the 1970s began to push back against sexual violence, raising
awareness, developing women’s centers and crisis hotlines, and publishing literature
related to sexual violence. However, like the WCTU, they, too, were limited. While they
argued that sexual assault could be eradicated altogether, a greater focus was often placed
on short-term goals. In other words, even radical feminists had difficulty articulating the
precise ways in which rape might be truly prevented, rather than simply accommodated;
they focused too often on the act rather than the culture. Thus, though the 1970s antirape
movements were certainly not to blame, sexual violence continued on to still be a
problem today.
While the 1970s anti-SV movements were and are often seen as relatively
unconnected from their nineteenth-century analogues, much stronger links exist between
the 1970s anti-SV movements and today. While the recent increase in anti-sexual assault
activism has led to some people pointing out the “forgotten feminist roots of today’s anti-
rape activism” (Johnson, 2014), it is more that individual events and organizations, such
15
as the NYRF and their 1971 conference, have faded from memory. The broader impact of
the women’s rights movement of the 1970s is undisputed.
Today, the issue of sexual violence has become one that is more openly spoken
of, including by and as a part of the government. While sexual assault laws, however
inadequate they were initially, have been “on the books” since the founding of the United
States, issues of sexual violence are increasingly becoming a part of political discourse
and campaigns. Senators Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have
each sponsored bills (the Campus Accountability and Safety Act and Military Justice
Reform Act, respectively) to reform national sexual violence laws in the past several
years, adjusting the way the military and colleges handle sexual assault cases (Abdullah,
2016; Gillibrand, 2015; McCaskill, 2014).
7
While these bills were ultimately defeated,
they still represent an increasing awareness of and willingness to address sexual violence.
These are only the most recent legislative efforts, of course; due to the work of previous
activists, sexual violence laws are now greatly improved. While statutes still vary greatly
from state to state, a wider range of sexually violent acts are recognized as criminal,
including spousal rape and assaults that entail something other than penile penetration of
the vagina.
At the same time, however, non-governmental and non-official resources have
faded, struggling for funding and legitimacy (Corrigan, 2013). Groups such as the NYRF
that flourished in the 1970s now must struggle to work with(in) a system they are

7
It is worth noting that these bills were introduced by women, lending credence to earlier
suffragist arguments that women’s issues were not being addressed due to a lack of
representation. This is not to say that men never advance such efforts; men co-sponsored
some of McCaskill and Gillibrand’s bills, and former Vice President Joe Biden sponsored
legislation to reform campus sexual assault in the 1990s.
16
simultaneously attempting to critique (Corrigan, 2013). Often, they must disown any
associations with the label “feminist” to get anything done. This means that people who
are sexually assaulted today are often left with the legal system as their only means of
recourse, rather than a women’s center
8
or crisis hotline. This is not to say that such
dedicated groups do not exist; the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN)
offers resources across the United States, and many cities and colleges do maintain some
organizations, such as Los Angeles’ Peace Over Violence. Local community resources,
however, are fewer and further between, particularly in less populated areas. Today,
activism against sexual violence is a mixture of grassroots efforts, officially organized
and sponsored operations, and government campaigns. Multiple methods are used to raise
awareness and protest, including social media, in-person protests, and official programs.
Social media are among the newest methods used to both raise awareness and to
protest. Technology has allowed for people who have experienced sexual violence to take
action in multiple ways, calling for others to mobilize: “Using the tools of mobile and
social media, young feminists not only expose rape culture, its supporters and
perpetrators, they also affectively represent their experiences in online spaces that enable
broad distribution and response-ability” (Rentschler, 2014, p. 79). In particular, the
internet allows people to draw attention to instances that are relatively unknown,
particularly ones where the victims are not from privileged groups (Rapp, Button, Fleury-

8
Generally speaking, there are not rape crisis centers devoted specifically to men like
there are for women or LGBTQ/GSRM populations. Many organizations do offer online
resources that direct men to groups that offer services to men, rather than to women
exclusively. In addition, there is beginning to be some recognition for the need for
gender-specific sexual violence services for men: Sweden opened the first rape clinic
focused on men a few years ago (Oyler, 2015), and the first men’s domestic violence
shelter opened in Arkansas a year later (A. Spencer, 2016).
17
Steiner, & Fleury-Steiner, 2010). On the other hand, social media can still repeat old
patterns of inequality (Salter, 2013). People who disclose experiences of sexual violence
online are more likely to receive their desired response when they have many of the same
characteristics of women
9
from previous eras—being middle class, white, seen as chaste,
relatively young, etc.
College campuses in particular are loci of activism. In the past few years, sexual
assault on college campuses has been a well-publicized problem, although reports of
women taking action in response to men’s harassment in academic environments dates
back at least a century (Segrave, 2014) and was a matter of national interest in the 1980s
and 90s (Alcoff & Gray, 1993). College students use numerous methods, from walkouts
to marches to more innovative techniques (Mantilla, 2011). For example, anonymously
authored lists of the names of accused rapists have appeared in women’s bathrooms
across the country (E. G. Ryan, 2014; Seawell & Ekpo, 2014).
There are also official efforts by institutions to fight sexual violence. Recently, the
executive branch of government has become involved in efforts to address sexual
violence, though it continues the trend of attempting to prevent sexual violence without a
clear idea of how to do so. “It’s On Us” (also stylized as #ItsOnUs, the hashtag used to
indicate the campaign on Twitter) is an anti-SV campaign that began in 2014. Unlike the
WCTU and the NYRF, “It’s On Us” (IOU) is not a grassroots effort by a feminist
organization. Instead, it is a joint venture spearheaded by Vice President Joe Bide that is

9
While men can be, and are, sexually assaulted, as has been previously mentioned,
disclosing sexual assault as a man is likely to gather negative or disbelieving reactions.
18
comprised of several organizations, including the White House under President Barack
Obama.
10

The White House announced IOU in September 2014 (Somanader, 2014). In
many ways, the project is a continuation of a prior project, 1is2Many, sponsored by the
White House as part of their White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual
Assault; IOU continues the focus on preventing campus sexual assault. The IOU
campaign involves the content of their website, PSAs involving celebrities, as well as
official White House press releases. IOU tries to get visitors to its website to take a
pledge that “is a personal commitment to help keep women and men safe from sexual
assault,” which they see as “a promise not to be a bystander to the problem, but to be a
part of the solution” (n.d.) The IOU pledge asks those who endorse the petition to
“recognize that non-consensual sex is sexual assault,” “identify situations in which sexual
assault may occur,” “intervene in situations where consent has not or cannot be given,”
and “to create an environment in which sexual assault is unacceptable and survivors are
supported.” In sum, IOU says that it is possible to stop sexual assault and that all of us are
responsible for doing so.
IOU programmatically focuses on bystander intervention training (BIT). BIT
trains people in how to intervene in situations that might lead to sexual assault. Many
colleges, businesses, and other organizations utilize BIT programs with the aim of
decreasing incidences of sexual violence. Common BIT programs are Campus Clarity,

10
While this is different from the other campaigns studied in this project, it also serves as
a marker of the allegedly “post-feminist” era in which the campaign is situated; an anti-
SV campaign organized by the government itself adds weight to the argument that
feminism has “won” and is no longer needed (despite, as the statistics regarding sexual
violence discussed above show, this obviously not being the case).
19
Step Up!, and Green Dot. Even if a group (e.g. a university) does not use one of these
programs, BIT is a common component in any sort of contemporary sexual assault
awareness training.
BIT, however, may not be entirely effective, at least not in all circumstances. Part
of the problem is that most BIT focuses on helping people recognize and intervene in the
moments immediately preceding a potential sexual assault, such as one person pulling
another, obviously intoxicated person away from everyone else and into a bedroom. But
as Tabachnick (2009) pointed out, “if we limit our interventions to a culminating ‘event,’
we miss multiple opportunities to do something or say something before someone is
harmed” (p. 10). Instead, people need to realize that “each situation is an opportunity to
intervene by reinforcing positive behaviors before a behavior moves towards sexual
violence” (p. 10).
The push for BIT programs is supported by studies that indicate that it can work
in cases where people can recognize a situation as sexually violent (Banyard, Plante, &
Moynihan, 2004; Koelsch, Brown, & Boisen, 2012; Moynihan & Banyard, 2008; A.
Powell, 2012). However, it is much less likely to be effective in situations where there is
more perceived ambiguity or in which actions are less blatantly threatening (Koelsch et
al., 2012). This is a problem because, as mentioned previously, sexual violence and
culture are inextricably linked. So, while bystander intervention may be more successful
in stopping an imminent sexual assault, it—and the IOU campaign— is potentially much
less successful in stopping the cultural and ideological factors that are associated with
sexual violence.

20
Purpose of the Present Study
Over the years, then, while there have been improvements in the realm of sexual
violence, there are also striking similarities between the way sexual violence has been
viewed over time. According to Freedman (2013), “the way we understand rape helps
determine who is entitled to sexual and political sovereignty and who may exercise fully
the rights of American citizenship” (p. 11). This is not a small issue. Just as women in the
nineteenth-century viewed the struggle for suffrage and the fight against sexual violence
as intertwined, so too do women today view the struggle for educational access and the
battle against campus sexual assault. As each of the movements discussed above has
shown, raising awareness alone is not enough. Instead, each of them pushed for tangible
changes such as legislation. However, in order to enact change more effectively, we need
to understand exactly what such change means.
In this dissertation, then, I will analyze past and current anti-SV movements to
figure out how future movements can improve. Of course, this work in and of itself
certainly is not going to solve the problem of sexual violence. It can, however, provide
new insights and suggest best practices for anti-SV movements in particular and social
movements in general. By focusing on addressing a culture that supports gendered sexual
violence, rather than on individual acts, we can work towards practicable solutions. Using
a pentadic analysis of anti-SV movements over time, I argue that addressing a culture of
sexual violence is a long-term process. Anti-SVMs need rhetorical resonance, or the ways
social movements’ discourse simultaneously identifies with the cultural beliefs of their
current time and of the hypothetical future for which they are advocating, to gradually
shift social structures over time, resolving the aporia of needing to simultaneously accept
21
and reject the existing social order. Social movements cannot jump from point ‘A’ to
point ‘Z,’ in other words. To do so would be too great a cultural shift. Instead, social
movements must gradually move, synthesizing the current cultural ideologies they are
trying to change with the projected ideologies for which they are aiming. Resonating in
such a way with the current ideology allows social movements to identify with their
audience, allowing for change, albeit slow change.
This study examines three different anti-SV movements: the Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union’s fight for higher age of consent laws in the late nineteenth-century,
feminist groups’ work to organize anti-rape resources and spread awareness of sexual
violence in the 1970s, particularly through the publication of guidebooks, and the current
“It’s On Us” campaign started by the Obama administration that uses social media and
celebrity endorsements to convince people to intervene in situations that might lead to
sexual assault. More accurately, in accordance with my view of social movements, this
study views three separate time periods in an overarching social movement that addresses
sexual violence. While such a characterization may not be entirely accurate, in that there
is not a direct line from the anti-sexual violence work in one period of time to the anti-
sexual violence work in another, each was another step along the path towards further
social change.
My approach to this study is not that of a scientist but rather one that attempts to
“embrace the vocabulary of creation and art” (Dow, 2001, p. 339). I am not simply
uncovering something buried in the texts I am studying, but using them to engender and
explore new ideas. Such creation cannot—and should not—be removed from my own
positioning in relation to the issues of sexual violence. Feminist practices, especially
22
when dealing with rape, must be self-reflexive (Mardorossian, 2002). To that end, in this
dissertation I do not seek to remove myself from my own personal connections to the
issue. As a woman in the United States, I have been affected by the continuum of
gendered sexual violence. Other aspects of my identity likewise have an impact on my
approach to the issue of sexual violence. While a full accounting of these could, perhaps,
provide useful context for my work, I will stick to the two most relevant to the study at
hand. I am a woman who has experienced sexual violence. I am also a white woman, and
as such my experiences of sexualized violence have not been negatively affected in a
manner related to my race; if anything, I have benefited from being white (e.g. fitting the
image of a “legitimate” victim of sexual violence). Since in feminist theory practice and
theory are intertwined (Buchanan & Ryan, 2010; hooks, 1994), so too is my writing in
this dissertation as much an embodiment of theory as, in many ways, the practices of the
campaigns I am studying can be viewed as theory. My own identity and standpoint thus
cannot be ignored when considering this work.
For similar reasons, this study is a longitudinal rhetorical analysis.
11
The problem
of sexual violence is ongoing and long-term. So, too, should our analysis of it be. In other
words, a study of a persistent problem must employ a theoretical approach that matches
the practical status of that problem. A cross-sectional view of single moment in time will
not allow us to fully understand the complexities of anti-SV movements and look at how
sexual violence has been addressed (Lucas, 2013). Instead, by viewing anti-SV
movements as continuations of previous efforts, a more complete picture is gained. This
requires that we establish a firmer theoretical grasp of the situation. In the following

11
For lack of a better term
23
paragraphs, I will establish how language complicates social movements’ attempts to
address the problem of sexual violence, what forms of rhetorical analysis are particularly
useful to the study of social movements, and how the discursive barriers faced by social
movements can be understood and overcome by viewing movements as extended efforts.
Our language affects our ability to discuss rape. The struggle of how to define
words such as rape or sexual assault is a core rhetorical problem of addressing sexual
violence. Thus, one of the main areas of sexual violence research has been the need to
figure out how, exactly, the various forms of sexual violence should be defined. There
has been a particular focus on defining rape. Feminist researchers and activists
12
have
struggled to redefine rape, trying to change people’s understanding of it away from the
cultural meanings implicitly demonstrated in earlier laws. One of the ways this has been
done is by linking rape to gendered power and violence rather than simply bodies.
Marcus (1992) claimed that “rape could best be defined as a sexualized and gendered
attack which imposes sexual difference along the lines of violence” (p. 397, emphasis
original). Similar to Marcus, Cahill (2000) also viewed rape as gendered but
distinguished it “from other types of assault not solely because of the body parts involved
in the act, but more importantly, because of the role which rape (or more precisely, the
threat of rape) plays in the production of the specifically (and socially recognizable)
feminine body” (p. 46). Sexual violence, in its cultural form, is thus viewed as an act that
works to divide women from men, subordinating the former to the latter.

12
And activist-researchers
24
There are, of course, difficulties with even these theoretical definitions, given that
there are many cases of rape that do not fit within their parameters (Malinen, 2013).
13

This serves to highlight the difficulty we have in both developing and using language that
addresses sexual violence. Marcus (1992) contended that:
a feminist politics which would fight rape cannot exist without developing
language about rape, nor […] without understanding rape to be a language. What
founds these languages are neither real nor objective criteria, but political
decisions to exclude certain interpretations and perspectives and to privilege
others. (p. 387)
People who have experienced sexual violence often lack the vocabulary to properly talk
about their experiences. Even in court cases in which people who have experienced
sexual violence relate what happened to them, they often use words and phrases such as
“we had sex,” indicating a consensual encounter when it instead was coerced or forced
(Ehrlich, 2001). We simply do not have an adequate lexicon to properly address issues of
consent and sexual violence. Much of the discourse that we do have serves to reinforce
patriarchal, inherently gendered views (Mardorossian, 2002).
In fact, much of the anti-SV movement rhetoric ends up simultaneously utilizing
and cementing patriarchal discourse and ideologies. Going back go Francis Willard and
the WCTU and even before (Dow, 1991), anti-SV women’s movements have had to try
to change the system from within that same system. According to Carlson (1992), “moral
reformers [like the WCTU] were placed in an untenable position—attempting to punish
the same group upon which the success of their movement depended” (p. 30). In other

13
For example, instances of rape that involve two men or two women.
25
words, women’s freedom from sexual violence often depends on the very same men who
are committing—or at least perpetrating the systematic nature of—that sexual violence.
Even the language anti-SV movements use is not their own, leading to difficulties in even
fully discussing the problem (Lim, 1990).
Part of the difficulty here is that sexual violence is in and of itself incredibly
complicated. Movement forward on the issue is partially prevented by people assuming
the matter is simple and binary (Cuklanz & Moorti, 2006; Dow, 1996; Horeck, 2004;
Projansky, 2001). Such oversimplifications range from pretending that sexual violence is
the same for all women
14
, ignoring factors of race, class, and sexuality, to seeing sexual
violence as an extreme category of acts separate from other gendered, sexualized
interactions (Gavey, 2005). Anti-SV movements (and most social movements) face the
uphill struggle of trying to fight to gain a foothold while simultaneously dealing with
their own internal use of the ideologies they are fighting against and those whom they are
trying to change. They move ever upwards, but the progression is slow and halting.
Rhetoricians have developed numerous rhetorical methods for analyzing the
progress of social movements such as anti-SV movements, collectively referred to as
(social) movement studies. According to Leland Griffin (1969), considered the founder of
rhetorical movement studies, “to study a movement is to study a progress, a rhetorical
striving, a becoming” (p. 461). The study of social movements themselves can similarly
be thought of as “a rhetorical striving.” Social movement studies has been an extensive
area of research since their inception with “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements” (L.
M. Griffin, 1952). In that article, Griffin defines a historical movement as:

14
Let alone that it happens to people who aren’t women.
26
when, at some time in the past: 1. Men [sic]
15
have become dissatisfied with some
aspect of their environment; 2. they desire change—social, economic, political,
religious, intellectual, or otherwise—and desiring change, they make efforts to
alter their environment; 3. eventually, their efforts result in some degree of
success or failure, the desired change is, or is not, effected. (p. 184)
While Griffin originally focused on what he called “historical” movements, the focus on
change was obvious from the beginning. Thus, social movement studies in the fields of
rhetoric and communication was born.
16

Soon, however, a divide grew among those scholars who studied social
movements. Some scholars focused on the leaders and phases of social movements,
wanting to create generalizations about movements themselves. Zarefsky (2013) for
example, argued that a movement study is “fundamentally a contribution to history”
rather than a contribution to the study of movements (p. 121). Similarly, McGee (McGee,
2013) held that in order for there to be a movement, change must have occurred,
something we can only determine after the fact. Others adopted a dramatistic approach to
studying movements (Cox & Foust, 2013).

15
Griffin’s use of the word “men” here is consistent with that of many of his
contemporaries, including Kenneth Burke. Throughout their work, they use the term
“man” in a manner that is intended to be inclusive of all people, rather than a gender-
neutral noun. Likewise, they use “he” as a third person gender neutral pronoun. I have
retained these forms of address throughout my own work when referring to Burkean
terminology or quoting Burke and others, indicating that they are not intended to refer
solely to men but are the author’s original wording by the use of “[sic].”

16
This is, of course, an oversimplification, focusing only on the field of communication
and ignoring the work that had been done on what was essentially social movements in
other areas such as psychology and sociology.
27
The dramatistic approach to movement studies adapts Kenneth Burke’s central
theory of dramatism to the examination of social movements. Dramatism as a whole
“invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from
the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (Burke,
1969a). Essentially, human action is viewed as if it is a play, with the rhetorical critic
being able to understand human motivation by analyzing each interconnected element.
Dramatism is particularly applicable to social movements. In his essay “A Dramatistic
Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements” Leland Griffin (1969) explained that social
movements originate when people become disenchanted with the social order:
Perversely goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, moved by the impious dream of a
mythic new Order—inspired with a new purpose, drawn anew by desire—they are
moved to act: moved, ingenious men [sic] (‘inventors of the negative’) to rise up
and cry No to the existing order—and prophesy the coming of the new.
And thus, movements begin. (p. 460, emphasis original)
The inevitable fall of hierarchies, despite their simultaneous inevitability, is what opens
the door for social change. Essentially, Griffin argues that in some cases “a ‘good’ order
may turn faulty” (p. 459), meaning that people no longer accept the division. This move
away from identification with the current Order and towards division with it leads to
social change.
Hierarchy in and of itself is not the problem, however. For Burke (1969b), “the
hierarchic principle is inevitable in systematic thought” (p. 141). To say that hierarchy is
inevitable, however, seemingly implies that inequality is inevitable. Foss and Griffin
(1992) interrogated the problematic nature of Burke’s view of hierarchies. In particular,
28
they argued that hierarchy entails domination, “assum[ing] a particular kind of rhetor—
one who employs a particular kind of power. The rhetor is viewed as someone who seeks
power over others by striving to gain higher status on various hierarchies. Burke (1969b),
in fact, saw the desire to achieve such status as a basic motive for communication” (p.
343). The centrality of hierarchy to Burke’s work highlights a view of rhetoric as focused
on power and control. For Foss and Griffin (1992), Burke’s work became “an exemplar
of a mainstream rhetorical theory simply to demonstrate that many of our rhetorical
theories have a patriarchal terministic screen, one that highlights the masculine
communicative experience and encourages a treatment of it as universal” (p. 345). In
other words, hierarchy establishes not only some people as superior to others, but some
ways of looking at the world. This thus represents an especially large stumbling block
when considering applying Burkean theories to discussions of sexual violence, an issue
mired in inequality and the dismissal of people’s lived experiences.
However, according to Klumpp (1999), hierarchy being inevitable does not mean
that inequality is inevitable. Instead, hierarchy is “what social scientists would call a
‘variable,’ one of the alterable dimensions of ongoing social life through which social
relations are accomplished” (p. 210, emphasis original). Such a view of hierarchy “opens
the possibility of the richest morality of choice by individuals and societies […] based on
what is done with hierarchy rather than the fact of hierarchy” (p. 210, emphasis original).
Klumpp, in other words, did not deny hierarchy’s existence. Instead, he interpreted
Burke’s discussions of hierarchy to mean that some things will always be “valued” over
others (p. 213, emphasis original). What is valued, however, can differ greatly. Since
“language neither dictates a particular hierarchy nor precludes relationships of equality”
29
but instead “merely dictates that ordering will follow from the inevitable hierarchical
principle,” it is possible for equality to be at the top of the hierarchy (pp. 216-217). In
other words, one group does not necessarily have to dominate over another (being placed
above it in the hierarchy), but a principle can (including one that values all groups
equally) (Klumpp, 1999). While there are still certainly issues with Burke and plenty of
feminist critiques that could be
17
—and have been
18
—made, his use of the term hierarchy
in and of itself is not the issue it initially appears to be, a point Burke (1969b) himself
made when he noted, “to say that hierarchy is inevitable is not to say that any particular
hierarchy is inevitable; the crumbling of hierarchies is as true a fact about them as their
formation” (p. 141).
All of this is to say that social movements are often not about the dismantling of
hierarchies as a matter of fact, but rather of the remodeling of existing hierarchies. The
current Order is no longer suitable and so must be transformed into a new one. People
must identify with the hierarchy, in that they are a part of it (Fogarty, 1969). However,
that same hierarchy simultaneously divides them from each other. This makes
persuasion difficult, since “you persuade a man [sic] only insofar as you can talk his

17
And should be made. Among other things, Burke’s discussions of hierarchy,
identification/division, and the pentad all lean heavily on incredibly traditional (read:
sexist) notions of gender (e.g. he explains the difference between agency and purpose as
being that between the “maternal woman and the erotic woman,” the maternal woman is
“the principle of utility” and the erotic woman is “the principle of purpose, in the form of
the desired,” a form of “symbolic incest” and disassociation that Burke claims is not
overcome until “the woman as wife becomes ‘useful on a new level, not directly to the
husband […] but in her ministering personally to their joint product, the family” (Burke,
1969a, p. 284, emphasis original)). While this was not atypical by any means for people
of his times, it does mean that much of his theory is based in problematic notions and
therefore, while it by no means needs to be abandoned, does need to be carefully
considered in this light.
18
See, for example, Foss & Griffin (1992), Foss & White (1999), and Japp (1999).
30
language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways
with his” (Burke, 1969b, p. 55, emphasis original). Such identification can be
accomplished by appealing to the greater order to which you both belong. However,
problems can arise when people become dissatisfied with (divided from) the current
hierarchy. Identification and division, in other words, are a crucial part of social
movements (Gregg, 2013; Scott & Smith, 2013).
The degree to which social movements are identified with or divided from the
social hierarchy impacts their approach; those who identify to a greater degree seek to
reform rather than revolutionize (Gregg, 2013; Scott & Smith, 2013). Gregg (2013) in
particular argues that the majority of social or protest movements are, in fact, simply
“adjustments to the existing order” (p. 79) that maintain “the basic acceptance of the
system [hierarchy/order] as the system, along with its moral imperatives and ethical
code” (p. 80, emphasis original). For Gregg, true social movements involve the complete
rejection of the existing hierarchy. Whether or not such a complete rejection is feasible
for social movements is a matter of debate. Less complete rejection, however, does still
serve to divide people from the current hierarchy and help identify them with an altered
version. Through social movements, people can “demystify” (to use Burke’s term) the
current social order, revealing the relations between orders for what they are and
critiquing the problems they see underneath. These tensions between just how much
demystification should be done—whether or not the fundamental social order should be
revealed and challenged—can be seen in the dilemma faced by many rape crisis centers
today (discussed above). If they reveal the hierarchy that positions masculinity as
superior, those at the top of the hierarchy, including institutions, will reject their work
31
due to its feminist nature and they may be unable to convince others to likewise reject the
current order. On the other hand, if they operate within the hierarchy, accepting it, that
hierarchy remains; they receive funding and support but cannot fully reveal how
masculinity is valued at the expense of other orders. To be most effective in achieving
social change, each social movement must decide what approach will be most effective
for them.
The question of how closely a social movement identifies with the hierarchy also
brings up the question of whether or not a social movement can originate at the top of the
hierarchy. In other words, is social movement rhetoric even an applicable theory for this
study, given that one of the three campaigns being studied, “It’s On Us,” is promoted by
and associated with the government, functioning more as a health awareness campaign?
After all, those at the top of the hierarchy are those who presumably benefit the most
from it—why should they change it?
The majority of social movement literature that addresses social movements from
the perspective of institutions or authorities does so by discussing their response to a
social movement that originates outside that institutional structure (King, 1999; e.g.
Murphy, 1992; Windt, 1982). Almost exclusively, social movement studies have focused
on institutions changing in response to outside pressure. However, social movements, to
return to Leland Griffin’s (1952) original definition, are about change “social, economic,
political, religious, intellectual, or otherwise” (p. 184). Limiting discussions of social
movement rhetoric to “insurgent campaigns” is therefore unnecessarily limiting
(Zarefsky, 1977, p. 370). Zarefsky examined President Johnson’s War on Poverty to
determine whether or not “the rhetorical characteristics of movements may be replicated
32
within the political power structure” (p. 352), ultimately finding that “sometimes the
status quo not only is not resistant to change but may actively seek to change itself” (p.
370). Such is the case with “It’s On Us.” A social movement lens is thus an appropriate
one with which to view all three eras/campaigns.
In order to evaluate social movements, regardless of whether or not they are
insurgent, a methodological apparatus is still required. The dramatistic pentad is a useful
tool for understanding the motives of a social movement. The pentadic elements are “the
five key terms of dramatism” and offer a way to figure out “what is involved, when we
say what people are doing and why they are doing it” (Burke, 1969a, p. xv). The pentad,
in other words, allows for the discernment of human motives. According to Burke, “any
complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answer to these five questions:
what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he [sic]
did it (agency), and why (purpose)” (p. xv). Each of these terms is associated with a
particular philosophic school; respectively, these are realism (act), materialism (scene),
idealism (agent), pragmatism (agency), and mysticism (purpose). This is particularly
important noteworthy because to say that an act took place is not the same as saying that
human motives are described in terms of an act. The former merely describes what
happened, while the latter explains the motivating force behind what happened. In other
words, pentadic terms themselves are not the important thing but rather how they are
featured in order to show how the world is viewed.
The name of the book in which the pentad is fleshed out, A Grammar of Motives,
provides us with a hint as to its function. The pentad is essentially a set of rules for how
different elements interact. Each of the terms of the pentad are interrelated and cannot be
33
entirely separated from one another; Burke (1969a) explained this by describing them as
five fingers, all of which are attached to the same hand. Pentadic elements are often put in
relationship with one another in the form of pentadic ratios. These are “formula[e]
indicating a transition from one term to another” (p. 262); this can also be thought of as
instances where one pentadic element “is a fit ‘container’ for” another (p. 3). There are
20 ratios, each pairing two different terms of the pentad (with, for example, scene-act and
act-scene each being a different ratio). In the case of the former, the situation determines
what actions people take; in the case of the latter, what actions people take determine the
situation. Thus, the primary term in a pentadic ratio is seen as the main motivation for
helping us understand the rhetorical “play.”
It is important to note, however, that “the ratios may often be interpreted as
principles of selectivity rather than as thoroughly causal relationships” (Burke, 1969a, p.
18). Just as the elements of the pentad cannot be separated from one another, all existing
simultaneously in a statement of motives, so too will there never be only one “kind” of
each pentadic element. In a scene-act ratio, therefore, it is not necessarily a matter of a
scene “creating” an act. Instead, in a scene-act ratio the scene emphasizes certain acts that
best correspond with it. The full spectrum of acts remains, but those that are “most
representative of” the scene are those that are heard; “one set of scenic conditions will
‘implement’ and ‘amplify’ given ways and temperaments which, in other situations,
would remain mere potentialities” (p. 19). The pentad can thus not be reduced to any
single element or a single facet of any element(s). Instead, some elements are stressed in
relation to others.
34
The “grammatical” relations between the parts of the pentad do not change. What
does change is what Burke (1969a) called “philosophies,” or “any statements in which
these grammatical resources are specifically utilized” (p. xvi). Actors always act in a
scene (the grammar of the pentad) but the actor may or may not be depicted as the
originator of the scene (the philosophy). The grammatical tool of the pentad provides us a
way to understand human motives by seeing which pentadic relationships are highlighted
and which are dismissed as unimportant.
For example, in their examination of a case in Maine where a woman was
mistakenly shot and killed by a hunter, Tonn, Endress, and Diamond (1993) demonstrate
how division can lead to the apportioning of the blame. The woman, who was not
originally from the area; while the hunter fired illegally, she wore white gloves (which
might could be mistaken for a deer sign) and ventured into the woods immediately behind
her backyard (which locals claimed she should have known better to do). Because she
was divided from the scene, which was the guiding pentadic element among local
hunters, she was to blame. To clarify, hunters (agents) fit within the woods (scene) while
the woman (also an agent) did not. Due to both her outsider status and her act of wearing
white gloves (the agency of her death), the hunters are innocent and she is responsible.
Why she died—the motive behind her death—is thus her infringement into an area where
she did not belong.
This is similar to the ways people (particularly women) who are sexually
assaulted are often blamed for others’ actions in attacking them. Their decisions to go to
clubs, drink, and go to someone’s apartment are construed as the woman becoming a part
of and therefore subordinate to that scene. The situation becomes the overriding factor;
35
since she “should have known” that such scenes essentially cause, or at the very least are
associated with, sexual assault, anything that happens is her fault.
People will often create divisions so as to distance themselves from attitudes that
are socially unacceptable in public (Klumpp & Hollihan, 1979). This does not mean, of
course, that those attitudes do not exist. Such a distance between the public face of
someone and their private beliefs, in fact, creates a problem for social change—the order
is never demystified and remains unchallenged. Social change is, of course, possible
through the pentad; Burke describes “a circular possibility in the terms” where an agent
“may change the nature of the scene” according to “his [sic] nature as an agent […] and
thereby establish a state of unity between himself and his world” (Burke, 1969a, p. 19).
However, just as one part of the pentad cannot stand for the entirety of human motives, so
too can this correspondence only “produce but partial transformations” (p. 19). Pentadic
possibilities for social change are thus possible but not immediate.

Overview of the Current Project
In the following chapters, I will present an exploration of women’s anti-sexual-
violence-movements in the United States since the late nineteenth-century, focusing on
the work of the WCTU, second wave feminists, and the Obama administration.
19
The

19
It is perfectly true that the Obama administration does not, technically speaking, count
as a women’s movement. However, the particular program they developed that I am
focusing on is very much in line with that work. In addition, my switch from more
grassroots, self-organized efforts to more or less official government action is intentional;
in making this choice, I wish to highlight a further way in which anti-SV movements
have changed. Whether or not IOU can constitute a social movement at all is also
debatable, since it is is a government-sponsored campaign. However, there is no reason
why the government is mutually inclusive with hierarchy. While this is undoubtedly the
case the majority of the time, modern governments are complicated enough that such
36
following three chapters will each be dedicated to one of these eras. The final chapter will
focus on summarizing the work, tying everything together and offering suggestions as to
where we can go from here.
In the second chapter, I will focus on the WCTU-led fight for higher age of
consent laws. I will discuss the ways in which the WCTU, while saying that they were
fighting for gender equality and the same moral standard for men and women, actually
often reinforced inequality and a dual moral standard. Similarly, they also often
reproduced raced and classed notions of womanhood, glorifying white, middle class
mothers above other women. To conduct this study, I will examine the WCTU’s weekly
newsletter, The Union Signal, from the years of 1885-1899, the height of the fight for
higher age of consent laws.
20

In this chapter, I will examine how the WCTU’s approach as an anti-SV
movement was agent-centered, reflecting the philosophy of idealism. In effect, by
focusing on the actors in the drama and arguing that men (and women) needed to be
moral, the WCTU argued that acts of sexual violence, especially those directed towards
young girls, were by no means pre-determined and instead were under the control of
men.
21
Such an approach was revolutionary in its quest to place the impetus for sexual

simple distinctions cannot easily be drawn; hierarchies are about ideologies, not political
parties.
20
While the fight for higher age of consent laws started before even the formation of the
WCTU and continued after the end of the nineteenth-century, this period of time
represents a period of time when it was a main focus for the WCTU, particularly in the
late 1880s when they worked to pass a national age of consent law (Larson, 1997). This
work will be discussed in the following chapter.
21
Given the WCTU’s arguments about consent, an interesting future analysis would be to
explore action and motion in terms of the ability to give consent based on age. Namely, if
the WCTU viewed adults as sexual actors but children (especially girls) as sexual movers
(or, perhaps more accurately, sexual moved-bys).
37
violence on men rather than blaming young girls. On the other hand, however, the
WCTU’s moral arguments also positioned women as the purveyors of moral knowledge,
ultimately positioning them as the agents responsible for stopping sexual violence. By
understanding the idealist nature of the WCTU’s position, we can begin to understand the
ways the call to end the double standard simultaneously reinforced it.
In the third chapter, I will look at the works of second wave feminist groups to
establish resources to combat sexual violence. In particular, I will conduct an analysis of
Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women (RSW) (New York Radical Feminists, 1974) and
Against Rape (AR) (Medea & Thompson, 1974). RSW focuses on methods of raising
awareness about sexual violence, while AR is more concentrated on practical advice.
Both books, along with many other materials from their era, have a heavy focus on both
self-defense and interrogating how, exactly, rape occurs.
In this chapter I will argue that RSW and AR, as representative texts from their
era, show that the anti-SV movements of the time used a strategy that highlighted
agency. This pragmatic approach helps us to understand the emphasis on self-defense;
discussing how rape happens also means discussing how to make it not happen. The
pragmatic focus puts a practical, short-term solution filter on the rhetoric produced, while
not ignoring the larger social problems. By understanding 1970s anti-SV movements as
pragmatic and agency-focused, we can resolve some of the contradictions inherent in
claiming that victims are not responsible for rape while simultaneously meticulously
instructing potential victims in how to avoid it.
In the fourth chapter, I will examine the recent “It’s On Us” campaign, launched
in 2014 by a coalition headed by the Obama White House. A social media campaign
38
aimed at addressing issues of campus sexual assault, IOU advocates a bystander
intervention approach. IOU puts a heavy emphasis on potentially dangerous situations in
which people can intervene to stop sexual assault. This scenic focus represents the
philosophy of materialism.
Such a materialist view helps us to resolve the contradiction of a social movement
that aims to eradicate sexual assault but does so through an approach that holds this is
only possible once a potential assault has already reached its initial stages. In its focus on
the scene and the physical circumstances, IOU is focused on motion rather than action,
implicitly arguing that things cannot be changed.
In the final chapter, I will weave together the various strands from each
movement. This chapter will include a summary of each of the previous three chapters,
followed by a discussion of how these movements compare and connect. From here, I
will use the examples provided by these three movements in conjunction to argue for the
concept of rhetorical resonance as a way to resolve the aporia social movements face in
needing to simultaneously identify with and disrupt hierarchies.
Finally, I will conclude by offering suggestions as to what steps anti-SV
movements can take in the future to further shift hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that
adapting an attitudinal approach will allow anti-SV movements to further disrupt social
hierarchies and move toward social change by focusing on incipient action. In this final
section of this dissertation, I will overview the way attitude has already been covered in
studies of sexual violence, review Kenneth Burke’s work on attitude as an expansion to
the pentad, turning it into a hexad, and show what some possibilities are for the future of
anti-SV movements.
39
My argument centers around resolving the aporia of social movements: how do
you make arguments based on a hypothetical future to a present-day audience? An
Ancient Greek word meaning something like impasse or difficulty, aporia can be thought
of as a paradox. In rhetoric, an aporia is “a pragmatic figure of speech that states the
author’s pretended inability to speak competently about a certain topic [….] often used as
a topos of affected modesty” (Grün-Oesterreich, 2001, p. 28). The concept of aporia has
also often been linked to the field of trauma studies. Caruth (1996), for example, argues
that trauma “suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may
occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the
form of belatedness” (pp. 91-92). Trauma is aporetic because it is impossible to
understand it at the time we experience it; later, we cannot ever fully express that
experience, even as it returns time and time again (e.g. in the form of flashbacks). Others,
however, view trauma as potentially narrative rather than aporetic, claiming it is
“therapeutic, enabling a ‘working through’ and eventual resolution of trauma” (Visser,
2011, p. 274). Luckhurst (2008) defines this debate in trauma studies as “a flat
contradiction” (p. 82). Whether trauma can be expressed, and, if it can be, if that
expression is comprehensible to anyone who has not experienced trauma (Tal, 1996),
raises an interesting question for anti-SV movements who rely on identification when
discussing a traumatic subject. If people who have not experienced sexual violence
cannot understand that experience, how can an anti-SV movement work to identify its
interests with those of its audience?
Aporetic discourse can be thought of as the metaphor of swimming through water
(Kofman, 1988); you have to make your way through somewhere when there is no path
40
but instead a constantly shifting world around you. Essentially, aporetic discourses
involve the need to navigate an impassible path. In some cases, this can mean trying to
integrate the past with the present, bringing the old into the new (Gamson, 1989).
However, the inconsistencies between these two can lead to difficult tensions, such as
when the WCTU incorporated “old” notions of gender into the “new” idea that men and
women were equal (discussed later in Chapter 2). This, in turn, reinforces many of the
same practices they were trying to dismantle, since although “discourses establish
themselves in ways which seem to be self-perpetuating, they are in fact sustained by a
continual process of self-investment” (Sampson, 2006, p. 532). Anti-SV movements,
then, must find a way to navigate past this aporia, stopping the recurring cycle and
allowing forward movement.
In his article “Coming to Terms with Movement Studies” (2013), Stephen Lucas
concluded that the “movement” part of social movement cannot be ignored. Specifically,
Lucas argued that:
the role of rhetoric in social movements cannot be explained either by looking
solely at the formal properties of movement discourse or by applying a priori
premises about the importance of rhetoric in the construction of social reality, but
only by careful investigation of the interplay between discourse and the other
factors that condition the process of social movements. (p. 129)
To properly examine social movements in Lucas’ view, we need to examine the
“objective material conditions, rhetorical discourse, and the perceptions, attitudes, and
values—the ‘consciousness’—held by members” (p. 129). All these factors work together
41
to influence social movements; we cannot look at any one (or two) of them to the
exclusion of the others.
To further highlight these points, Lucas (2013) asserted that the most crucial
movement studies to undertake are those that look at “the rhetoric of individual
movements from inception through culmination,” something that helps us truly
understand the movement (p. 129). In other words, by viewing not just an individual
moment but an entire movement, we can understand the relationship between their
rhetorical discourse, attitudes, and the changes in conditions they are able to effect.
Corresponding to these views, my own work will examine the women’s anti-sexual-
violence-movements in the United States over the past one-and-a-half centuries. In doing
so, I will be able to draw conclusions not just about an individual instance of a social
movement but about the interconnected web of factors that influence a continuing series
of movements. Importantly, this will help move beyond the perennial question of
movements’ ambiguously defined efficacy (or, more recently, resistance) in social
movement studies (Cox & Foust, 2013) by looking instead at movements’ temporal
relations. Measuring social movements by social progress over time, rather than by any
individual campaign’s contributions, offers a fuller picture of the “success” of a social
movement.
The relationship between social movements and the current hierarchy tis therefore
extremely important. While social movements attempt to effect change (being divided
from the hierarchy), they must, to be persuasive, still identify to at least some extent with
that hierarchy: “The most powerful symbols for rhetorical appeal are the most familiar,
and they are most familiar because they are performed incessantly to order our mundane
42
daily experience” (Klumpp, 1999, p. 223). Large shifts in hierarchy—what Scott and
Smith (2013) called radical, totalistic confrontations—are therefore unlikely, given that
“radical [i.e. pure] division” from the hierarchy means those “most powerful symbols for
rhetorical appeal” will be inaccessible (p. 30). Without utilizing symbols that support the
current hierarchy, a movement cannot hope to identify enough with its potential
constituents to supplant the hierarchy. Social movements are thus mired in an aporia:
either they seek to create powerful social change, but lack the symbolic means to do so,
or they seek to utilize the symbolic means of the current order but, in doing so, sacrifice
their ability to create systemic change on a grand scale.
I propose that the solution is rhetorical resonance. In some ways, rhetorical
resonance functions similarly to Slagell’s (2001) notion of social movements operating
along a spiral pattern rather than a straight line. Social movements cannot charge
forward, heedless of the current climate in which they exist. Instead, they must temper
their rhetoric and account for the ideologies of the day—the same ideologies they are
trying to alter. Rhetorical resonance can explain how social movements, over time, are
able to effect change by creating identification with both the current hierarchy and by
striving to have people identify with a new (or at least altered hierarchy). In the case of
anti-SV movements, this means they both identify with the current gendered order and
persuade people to identify with that which they are promoting.
Resonance, however, has not been mentioned often in previous rhetorical
literature. Most of the work that has been done is in the field of advertising.
Stathakoupolos, Theodrakis, and Mastoridou (2008), for example, posited resonance as a
rhetorical figure. Here, resonance is framed in terms of the visual-verbal dimension and
43
largely only applied to marketing efforts. For the authors, “resonance can be considered
as a twist within the advertisement that ends in an echoing of ‘doubleness’ of meaning”
(p. 631). In contrast, Martin (2015) found that rhetorical resonance is essentially “a
context of shared belief” that needs to happen before you can be persuasive, an idea that,
although based on the work of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecha, is quite similar to
Burke’s identification (p. 45). Martin argued that evangelical mega churches during the
recession could simplify their messages based on “presumptions” they already shared
with their audience; this explains why audiences accept arguments that contradict their
personal experiences or which they find too simple (p. 54). The term rhetorical resonance
itself, however, was only used twice in the paper and is most explicitly defined only as
something that “reinscribes […] power and legitimacy” (p. 65).
More related to my use of the term rhetorical resonance is work on “cultural
resonances,” which are “preexisting cultural assumptions and narratives that make certain
messages or ideas appear natural and familiar” (as cited in Fahey, 2007, p. 133). In
particular, Fahey (2007) argued that “idealized forms of masculinity become hegemonic
when they become widely unnoticed in a culture and then that acceptance reinforces the
dominant gender ideology” (p. 134). Examining the language used to “frenchify” and
feminize 2008 presidential candidate John Kerry, Fahey pointed out that the lack of
objection to these associations shows how language is naturalized. This shows the strong
connection between the language used and the cultural ideologies underlying them;
people may not think their words really “mean” anything, but such beliefs are at least
partially due to the naturalization of language.
44
In order to bring about change, anti-SV movements must therefore recognize and
respond to the influence of language on the social order. Adopting a totally new
vocabulary, while it might be consistent with the movement’s goals, will not sway
audiences; instead, linguistic connections to the current social order are needed. The
metaphor of arpeggios and chords, I argue, is useful for viewing social movements in
such a way as to make these discursive identifications evident.
Burke (1973) explained that chords have notes that are played all at the same time
whereas arpeggios have notes that are played sequentially. An arpeggio can sound lovely,
but if the exact same notes are played as a chord, it may sound jarring and discordant. In
other words, what does not work when temporally abbreviated can work when
temporally elongated.
Viewing anti-SV movements as a “series of notes” spread out over time allows us
to see the progress being made. If we were to examine the entirety of the movement at
once, rather than as a progression, it can seem as if what earlier groups were doing was
counterproductive, producing a discord. Viewing solely a cross section of a social
movement amounts to “attempt[ing] the union of contradictory aims, in trying to make
the passing note of an arpeggio fit as concord in a simultaneity” (Burke, 1973, p. 100).
However, when we can view the anti-SV movements as movement—an arpeggio rather
than a chord—we can resolve this discord of contradictions and, in turn, work towards
more effective strategies for the current moment in time, strengthening each upcoming
note.
Just as each note in the arpeggio must work with the next, so too must the
rhetorical resonance of social movements work. Each step of the movement is in
45
harmony with that which comes before and that which comes after. However, if the entire
timeline of the movement is viewed at once (i.e. as a chord), these resonances will clash;
the note of movement point A is not going to resonate with the note of movement point
C. Consequently, we need to look at social movements as a protracted and connected
series of movements rather than a set of single, isolated movements.
46
CHAPTER TWO

Introduction
While the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s (WCTU) efforts to raise the
age of consent were by no means the first time anyone had dealt with issues of sexual
violence—there were, after all, laws that set an age of consent and defined consent in the
first place—the WCTU’s efforts to raise the age of consent marked the first sustained
organized effort in the United States to combat sexual violence. The WCTU wanted to
increase the age at which sex with a girl could be presumed to be consensual. This put the
WCTU “in an untenable position—attempting to punish the same group upon which the
success of their movement depended” (Carlson, 1992, p. 30). The WCTU’s age of
consent campaign focused on the role that agents played in preventing sexual violence
towards young girls; they called for men to change their behavior and raise their moral
standards to what had been expected of women all along. At the same time, however, the
WCTU was very aware of the resistance their attempts to push for change faced. While
“Willard wanted young women to be able to determine the course of their own lives
rather than be confined by what were, in her estimation, outdated customs and traditions,”
the WCTU still had to work alongside those same “outdated customs and traditions”
(Gifford & Slagell, 2007, p. 100).
In this chapter, I will establish a foundation for my analysis of the WCTU’s age of
consent campaign by examining the historical context of the late nineteenth-century,
focusing on age of consent laws, women’s limited role in politics, and an overview of the
WCTU’s actions regarding the age of consent. After that, I will review Kenneth Burke’s
47
pentadic term of agent and its connection to the philosophy of idealism. From there, I will
analyze how the WCTU’s work on the age of consent campaign adopted an idealistic
perspective. By focusing on the power of moral education and advocating for the need for
a ‘new man’ and ‘new woman’ that would live up to these moral standards, the WCTU
argued that the best way to approach issues of sexual violence was through our ideas
about them. People were the ones who were ultimately in control. Such an idealistic
approach was a double-edged sword, however, given the relative lack of power that
women had: people might be the ones to bring about change, but in many ways women
weren’t quite considered people (in the sense that they did not have the full rights of
citizenship, being denied suffrage and other means of participation in the political
process). An idealistic approach, therefore, had to also contend with a time that saw men
as, at the very least, more capable of being agents than women. In their attempts to
identify with their audience, especially men, the WCTU’s agent-centered method
unfortunately undermined their own intentions to hinder sexual violence.

Establishing the Context
As Smith (2001b) reminded us, “The study of rape can and should be put into a
historical context” since “what individuals thought about rape and how it was prosecuted
depended very much upon their society and backgrounds” (pp. 1-2). We cannot attempt
to study the WCTU’s age of consent campaign if we only take modern perspectives into
account. It would be impossible, for example, to discuss the WCTU’s approach to
increasing the age of consent without first knowing something about girlhood in the late
48
nineteenth-century and what actions led to the push for age of consent reform, in addition
to needing information about how the age of consent was viewed at that time.
Before proceeding to that discussion, however, it is important to consider whether
I have myself neglected historical context by applying the term sexual violence to the
issue of a low legal age of consent. To a certain extent, such neglect is the case: the
WCTU talked about rapes, outrages, and seductions, not acts of sexual violence. The
phrase sexual violence was not used. However, this does not mean my use of it here is
inappropriate.
First, the meaning of the term sexual violence is broadly consistent with the issues
the WCTU addressed regarding both the age of consent and prostitution.
22
For example,
the WCTU spoke in terms of the “actual and cruel wrongs [that] are every day inflicted
on women” (Blackwell, 1890, p. 3) and women “set apart for the unholy and sacrificed
upon the altar of lust” (A. M. Powell, 1890, p. 3). Furthermore, other articles in The
Union Signal correlated “the violation of a child under the age of sixteen years” with
violence (Gerry, 1893, p. 3). One writer even labelled a wealthier man courting and
attempting to seduce a naïve girl as “murdered love”; the betrayal of the girl’s trust by
attempting a sexual violation is described as if she had been “stabbed” (W.P.J., 1890, p.
2). While the term sexual violence itself may not have been used, sexual violations such
as men having legally-consensual sex with young girls were associated with violence.
Second, such a use of the term sexual violence is consistent with the views of
other researchers (c.f. Larson, 1997; Odem, 1995). Jane Larson (1997), for example,

22
These two issues were linked fairly consistently; immoral people seducing girls was
depicted as a sort of gateway to prostitution (Gerry, 1893; A. M. Powell, 1890; The
Woman’s and Children’s Protective Agency et al., 1893; W.P.J., 1890).
49
stated, “like their contemporary counterparts, these early rape reformers forced the public
to acknowledge the sexual danger, abuse, and violence that lay underneath cherished
myths about love and romance, to question female security within the sanctity of the
family or in the hands of male protectors” (p. 4). So while the WCTU themselves may
not have used the exact phrase sexual violence, its use in this context is both established
and consistent with much of the terminology the WCTU did use when discussing girls,
women, and the age of consent.

Views of Children and Girls in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States
The conceptualization of children as something other than smaller versions of
adults was still something relatively new in the nineteenth-century. In the early 1800s,
children were seen as entirely innocent and free from sin; not acting perfectly meant they
had been corrupted (Plante, 1997). Over the course of the century, however, this view
shifted. While still innocent, children’s misbehavior was no longer considered the
equivalent to a fall from grace; instead, they simply needed to have their behavior
corrected (Plante, 1997). This view of childhood correlates precisely with the WCTU’s
approach to moral reform (discussed below). Since teaching children the right way to
behave would help them to remain pure and innocent, in the sense that they would be free
from sin, it was likewise the best way to advance social change. Children who grew up
being taught the correct way to act would not allow for immoral actions such as sexual
violence.
Of course, at the same time, childhood education was not entirely focused on
moral behavior. For young girls in particular, much of their education focused on
50
learning how to properly behave in the sense of adhering to gendered standards of
behavior. While all children learned these rules, the education was unambiguous in the
case of young girls, who were told by those around them, the stories they read, and other
learning materials that it was important for them to be ladylike and docile. Girls were
expected to demonstrate good manners and to know their place. While the exact lessons a
girl learned did vary depending on her situation, including her race and class, particularly
for the white, middle class Christian women that the WCTU focused on, “these strict
laws of etiquette and deportment to a great extent limited their involvement with the
world at large and served to reinforce the notion that their place was in the home”
(Plante, 1997, p. 106).
Furthermore, girls were trained into the “cult of true womanhood,” governed by
the “four cardinal virtues” of “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity”; together,
these “spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman” (Welter, 1966, p. 152). Femininity
was associated with sitting down and shutting up, not standing up and speaking out. The
WCTU, then, also had to contend with these expectations for what women and girls were
supposed to be, either using them to advance their goals or countering them. As we shall
see below, they were able to do so with varying rates of success.

History of the Age of Consent
Although age of consent laws varied from state to state and from territory to
territory, they were all established based on English common law (Larson, 1997). None
of these laws changed from the time they were established until the age of consent reform
campaigns in the late nineteenth-century, which similarly originated in England (Larson,
51
1997). What finally prompted the demands for change was the scandal and subsequent
reform caused by a journalist’s exposé “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,”
published in England’s Pall Mall Gazette (Bordin, 1986; Donovan, 2006; Mulpetre,
2012a). William T. Stead arranged to buy a thirteen-year-old girl he called “Lily”
23
“to be
effected for moral purposes” (Mulpetre, 2012a, sec. I).
24
The people of England were
outraged, and the age of consent in the country was quickly raised from thirteen to
sixteen.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, many Americans were horrified as well. They quickly
became even more appalled when they realized that their own age of consent laws were
even lower than England’s had been before the increase (Donovan, 2006; Larson, 1997).
In response, Frances Willard, the leader of the WCTU, immediately moved to make the
age of consent one of the organization’s central issues, highlighting it in her 1885
presidential address (Bordin, 1986). To many scholars, this move is analogous with later
feminist anti-SV movements. Bordin argued that “in many ways Willard’s position in this
speech was similar to the attitudes of the woman [sic] movement toward sexual crimes a
century later” (p. 132), while Larson (1997) contended that “the [WCTU and their allies’]
age-of-consent campaign should be viewed as the first American women’s rape reform
initiative,” one that set the stage for later pushes to address broader forms of sexual
violence that affected more people that just young girls (p. 4).

Contemporaneous Views of (Statutory) Rape and the Age of Consent

23
Lily was a pseudonym. Her real name was Eliza Armstrong.
24
While Stead describes this encounter as if it were merely related to him, he was, in fact,
involved. Though he did not commit any acts of sexual violence towards the girl, he was
later charged for his role in the incident, specifically for abduction (Mulpetre, 2012b).
52
The age of consent movement was able to gain momentum precisely because it
dealt with sexual violence towards children. Many of its contemporaneous reform
movements focused on children as well, so addressing the issue of sexual violence by
framing it as a children’s issue tied the age of consent to other changes such as the push
for child labor laws (Freedman, 2013). In doing so, raising the age of consent was made
more socially acceptable. While cases involving sexual violence towards adult women
were often discounted because of the victim’s past character, this was less likely
(although certainly not impossible) to be the case with a young girl (Goldman, 2001). By
the late nineteenth-century the majority of charges being brought for rape involved child
victims
25
(Freedman, 2015). Sexual crimes against other demographics were still
occurring, of course, but they were incredibly difficult to bring forward for prosecution,
often not even being covered under the laws. Social attitudes, then, were more opposed to
the rape of girls than they were to the rape of adult women. Pivar (1973) recognized at
least part of this attitude, and the desire for more stringent age of consent laws, as being
due to “social developments [that] had made existing legislation anachronistic” (p. 104).
Higher average marital ages and urbanization meant that girls were seen as facing greater
risks to their sexual purity (Pivar, 1973). In other words, girls now faced a span of time
between when they lost the protection of being under the age of consent and gained the
protection of being married, given that rape was determined to have occurred only if it
met the prerequisites of either (a) the victim was under the age of consent or (b) use of
force could be proved and the perpetrator was not the victim’s husband.

25
The majority of these victims were white girls, although there were also not infrequent
cases involving black girls. Several of these involved white perpetrators, although these
cases being brought to court was rare (Freedman, 2015).
53
At the same time, however, even those cases of rape where the victim was under
the age of consent were not considered “real” rapes. Sometimes, the line between
childhood and adulthood could be drawn in such a way as to mean that the perpetrator
would not be charged with a crime or would instead be charged with a lesser offense; in
an Arkansas case, for example, “not only the age of the victim, but the level of her
maturity was also deemed of material interest to the high court” (Sommerville, 2001, p.
139). Even the language the victims used was considered; defense attorneys argued that
any girl capable of using non-euphemistic terms such as “sexual intercourse” was clearly
also capable of consenting to sex, having obviously done so before. In response,
prosecutors either advised victims on the witness stand to be more indirect or held that
more “adult” vocabulary was the consequence of their innocence having been ruined by
the defendant (Robertson, 2002). There were additionally several cases where the lawyer
of a black man convicted of raping a white girl argued that that since the victim was not,
in fact, a woman, their client had not actually raped her (as rape was a crime that in many
states could only be carried out against an adult woman) and therefore their client should
not be subject to the death penalty that rape could carry (Robertson, 2002). While this
latter example is certainly more complicated, given the factor of race, it does still point to
the mutable nature of age and rape in respect to one another in the late nineteenth-
century.
As indicated by the previous example, however, age alone was not the only factor
that played into views of rape and age of consent; beliefs about race were an influence as
well. “White slavery,” or the idea that young white girls were being kidnapped and sold
to brothels, was a pervasive, if unfounded, fear (Donovan, 2006; Dubois & Gordon,
54
1983). Any non-white men and certain white immigrant men were seen as an inherent
threat to white girls’ purity. Newspapers repeated stories of “the doll-toting baby
prostitute,” a “trope” that was “often conjured up to exaggerate the youth, innocence, and
lack of direction that supposedly characterized the white slave” (Antoniazzi, 2014, p. 76).
White girls, then, were viewed as an entirely innocent group, entirely defenseless in the
face of lusty immigrant and non-white men. Black girls (and to a lesser extent non-
black
26
immigrant girls), however, were seen as licentious; neither white men nor anyone
else were seen to hold the same sort of threat towards them. While white men could be
perpetrators, they were also the only ones who could be (white) women and girls’
protectors and were not inherently lusty and threatening because of their race. Immigrant
men and black men, however, were seen as little more than a threat (Donovan, 2006).
At the same time that they were invested in protecting white girls from black and
immigrant men, white men were also engaged in securing their own sexual privileges.
Several states maintained lower ages of consent for white girls than they did for black
girls, meaning that a twelve-year-old white girl would be protected under an age of
consent law while a twelve-year-old black girl would not (Freedman, 2013; Sommerville,
2001). Furthermore, Tennessee and Mississippi both had a lower legal age of consent if
the adult man was white or black; a white man could have legally consensual sex with a
ten-year-old girl, but a black man could not until that girl turned either twelve or
fourteen, depending on the state (Sommerville, 2001). As Sommerville (2001) argued,
although the reason behind such variances “is not explicit, it is not difficult to “imagine
that lawmakers sought to be more diligent in the policing of the sexual relations of young

26
The term “non-black” is used here as a simplification, since racial categories have
since shifted.
55
girls with [former] slaves than with white men” (p. 138).
27
While even the idea that a
black man could have sex with (to use perhaps the most neutral term
28
), a white girl was
seen as abhorrent to white society at the time, fewer people felt qualms about a white
man having sex with a girl regardless of her race.
Legislators often had to be more circumspect, however, when actively
safeguarding their access to girls on a less explicitly raced basis. Freedman (2013) claims
that “the absence of an organized protagonist also advantaged” the age of consent
movement since “white men could openly claim drinking as a privilege worth defending,
but few of them could openly identify with the sexual assailant” (p. 127). In other words,
while supposedly consensual sexual relations might be accepted, it was difficult for
legislators to argue for even those based on the existence of non-consensual sexual
relations between men and girls.

27
One justification for lower age of consent laws that was not racially-motivated was the
correspondence between the age of consent and the age of marriage, both of which were
roughly equivalent according to English common law (Grossberg, 1988). However, the
age of marriage began to be reformed several decades before the age of consent; in many
cases, the age of marriage was older than the age of consent by the mid-to-late-nineteenth
century (Syrett, 2016). For example, girls’ marriageable age in the state of Georgia was
set to fourteen in 1873; Georgia’s age of consent remained at ten years-old for another
two decades (Pivar, 1973; Syrett, 2016). Furthermore, the vast majority of people married
closer to the age of legal majority (twenty-one) than they did the age of marriage
(Grossberg, 1988). While the age of actual marriage did tend to be slightly lower for
working class people (Grossberg, 1988), overall neither practice nor many states’ laws
supported a justification for low age of consent laws based on the age of marriage. In
addition, since nearly all statutes addressing sexual assault precluded marital relations,
there was no need for a lower age of consent in order for people married at a young age
to have legal sexual intercourse. Race was thus likely a major factor for maintaining the
low age of consent laws, although it was certainly not the only one.
28
Though not, it is important to note, entirely neutral. Saying that people “had sex”
conveys the idea that both were equal participants, therefore precluding the idea of the
interaction between an adult and a child as non-consensual.
56
However, legislators (read: white men) were still very much interested in
protecting their previously undisturbed sexual access to girls and women. Multiple
arguments were offered in opposition to the burgeoning movement for higher age of
consent laws:
The legislators who opposed rape reform made the following arguments: (A)
‘designing and dissolute’ girls and women will blackmail boys and men if
stronger laws are enacted; (B) sexual access to prostitutes, promiscuous girls, and
nonwhite women is a man’s traditional prerogative; (C) physical maturity is moral
maturity; girls need only to reach puberty in order to be ready for their adult
sexual function; (D) the penalty for forcible rape is too harsh for the lesser offense
of statutory rape; (E) rape law is not women’s business; (F) gender equality
means no special sexual protection; and (G) protective sex laws limit the personal
liberty of women as well as of men. (Larson, 1997, p. 53)
In addition, “some legislators were simply offended that women were attempting to
dictate men’s sexual conduct” (Larson, 1997, p. 56). The WCTU’s fight for higher age of
consent laws, then, was up less against white male legislators and more up against
generations of beliefs on “natural” gender roles and the desire to maintain that power
distribution. Even for such a large, well-organized group as the WCTU, this was no small
task.

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
Of course, as is apparent by their name, the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union was not originally organized to push for higher age of consent laws. Instead, the
57
WCTU was formed over a period of several days in November 1874 during a nationally
convened convention in Cleveland, Ohio as a sort of spiritual successor to the Ohio
women’s crusade against alcohol
29
in the winter of 1873 (E. P. Gordon, 1924). Like their
predecessors, the WCTU was dedicated to fighting the evils of alcohol, doing so through
abstinence and “fidelity to a standard set in the home and by women” (Parker, 1997, p.
186). For the women of the WCTU, the movement’s “declaration of principles […] was a
new Declaration of Independence—creating a higher level of thought for American
manhood.” (E. P. Gordon, 1924, p. 13):
We believe that God created both man and woman in His own image, and,
therefore, we believe in one standard of purity for both men and women, and in
the equal right of all to hold opinions and to express the same with equal freedom.
(E. P. Gordon, 1924, p. 14)
Although the WCTU was an organization of, for, and by women, they were nonetheless
equally
30
focused on men’s behavior. Adopting a social purity approach, the WCTU
believed that by educating men and women to rise to a single, high moral standard,
society’s issues could be solved. The WCTU approached social change by thinking that
they “would lift up a fallen society in the same ways that women in charitable work had
sought to raise up the individual drunkard or prostitute” (Gifford & Slagell, 2007, p. 22).
However, while it was socially permissible for women of the time to engage in charity

29
This event, which began in December 1873, goes by several different names, including
the Temperance Crusade, the Women’s Crusade, the Women’s Temperance Crusade, etc.
30
The equality of this focus is not exact. It is more accurate to say that the WCTU
addressed both men and women but did so differently. The WCTU most often framed
men’s sins as acts of drinking and debauchery, while women’s transgressions were those
of falling prey to seduction or failing to morally educate others.
58
work to fulfill social expectations of femininity (Cruea, 2005), participating in politics
was not likewise supported (Zaeske, 2002).
Other than in a few select territories such as Colorado, women did not have the
right to vote. Occasionally, they might have limited suffrage elsewhere and were able to
vote on a few local issues, usually those relating to children and education. However,
their voice in politics was limited. This is especially the case given that they were
generally not welcome to speak publically to those who could vote. In Susan Zaeske’s
(1995) examination of women speakers in the nineteenth-century, she explained how it
was considered improper for women to speak to promiscuous audiences, or groups that
were comprised of both men and women. The issue of the promiscuous audience became
further complicated if women wanted to speak on issues of sexual violence. Given that
the women—but not the men—who spoke to promiscuous audiences were accused of
being promiscuous in the sexual sense, attempting to speak on an issue in which any
accusations of being unchaste would lead to their being discredited was almost destined
to fail from the beginning.
Indeed, any attempts to address male legislators about the age of consent led to
derision, including such mocking acts as the introduction of bills that suggested that all
women must consent to sex after they were over the WCTU’s proposed age limit of 18
(Larson, 1997). One WCTU member who was asked to speak to the Tennessee
legislature about a pending age of consent bill in that state, “but the large majority of that
honorable body, not having been elected on reform issues, ‘didn’t want no wimmin a
meddlin round among thar business’” (Meriwether, 1889, p. 11). And while women
themselves found it difficult to speak up—or more accurately to be listened to—about the
59
age of consent, it was likewise difficult for any men who supported the WCTU’s efforts.
A Minnesotan WCTU member noted of that state’s legislature:
There were a few good and true men in the legislature who stood for the right and
bore all manner of ridicule and coarse ribaldry and who have to share the general
stigma carried by the body. The gentlemen who championed the bill for the
protection of women and girls were a special target for rude jokes. (Clark, 1889,
p. 12)
Any men who attempted to support the WCTU faced a double burden of derision from
both sides: men taunted them for their betrayal of their comrades and groups such as the
WCTU often did not do enough to set their male legislative allies apart when critiquing
men and governmental bodies as a whole. In order for their desired age of consent
legislation to even gain a fair hearing, then, the WCTU first needed to employ tactics to
make men willing to listen to arguments about the age of consent, whatever those
arguments’ source.
One of these methods was the publication of popular literature that advanced a
social purity view of the world (Donovan, 2006). Novels centered around seduction
narratives, where a naïve young girl is tricked (to varying degrees of success) into a life
of impurity and perhaps even sold into a life of prostitution, were intended to garner
sympathy for WCTU’s cause. Helen Hamilton Gardner, the author of several of such
novels, “said that she hoped the depiction of ‘fallen women’ in [her novel] Pray You, Sir,
Whose Daughter? would generate the same outrage accomplished by the depiction of
African Americans in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Donovan, 2006, p. 35). These “cultural
templates” offered by seduction novels helped the WCTU and other similarly-minded
60
organizations to raise public support for higher age of consent laws (Donovan, 2006, p.
18). The WCTU’s creation of the Department of Social Purity, largely focused on the age
of consent and similar issues, helped with this goal.
Beyond their use of fiction to spread awareness about the issues of the
simultaneously too-low moral standards and age of consent laws, the WCTU and their
Department of Social Purity also engaged in broader political action. According to Pivar
(1973):
Age of consent legislation served admirably for purity reform as a vehicle into
mass politics. Action to win ‘legal protection for purity’ was an excellent
educational technique since it reminded Americans of their traditional social
missions [….] A successful age of consent campaign might reestablish norms of
behavior, counter immorality and reorient people in socially desirable directions.
(p. 139)
While the WCTU had existed for over a decade prior to their involvement in the
movement for higher age of consent laws, people were more likely to support restrictions
on what age girls could consent to sex than they would on the WCTU’s original focus on
liquor prohibitions, as mentioned above. Starting with the inception of the campaign in
1885, then, the WCTU began to pursue age of consent legislation alongside temperance
laws. Like with the WCTU’s approach to temperance, which included trying to limit the
sale, distribution, and consumption of any alcoholic beverages, the WCTU’s attack on
low ages of consent was similarly multi-pronged. An example is the following legislation
from Rhode Island in 1889, as reported in the WCTU’s newsletter, The Union Signal:
61
SECTION 1: Whoever shall unlawfully and carnally know or abuse any girl
under the age of fourteen years shall be imprisoned for not less than ten nor more
than twenty years.
SEC. 2. Whoever shall attempt to have unlawful carnal knowledge of any
girl under the age of fourteen years shall be imprisoned not exceeding ten years.
SEC. 3. Whoever by threats or intimidation procures or induces or attempts to
procure or induce any woman or girl to have any unlawful carnal connection
either with himself or with any other person; or by false pretences [sic], false
representations or other fraudulent means procures or induces any woman or girl,
not being a common prostitute or of known immoral character, to have unlawful
carnal connection with either himself or with any other person; or applies,
administers to, or causes to be taken by any woman or girl any drug, matter or
thing, with intent to stupefy or overpower, so as thereby to enable himself or any
other person to have unlawful carnal connection with such woman or girl; or
being above the age of eighteen years, shall, by any means whatsoever, procure or
induce any girl under the age of eighteen years, and not of known immoral
character, to have any unlawful carnal connection either with himself or with any
other person, shall be imprisoned not exceeding five years.
Provided, however, that no person shall be convicted of an offense under
this section upon the evidence of one witness only, unless such witness be
corroborated by other evidence. (Babcock, 1889, p. 7)
Different sections of the law addressed different circumstances. Girls under the age of
fourteen were protected under all circumstances, being under the newly established age
62
of consent. A girl between the ages of fourteen and seventeen had some additional
protection, so long as she was “not of known immoral character” and whomever
attempted to coerce or force her into sexual activity was above the age of eighteen.
Additional rules applied to forced or coerced sexual activity for women eighteen and
older. The caveat, however, is that “no person shall be convicted […] upon the evidence
of one witness only, unless […] corroborated by other evidence” (Babcock, 1889, p. 7).
In other words, regardless of the girl or woman’s age, her word alone was not considered
sufficient testimony. Positive legislative changes were thus tempered by statutory
provisions based on notions of women’s inherent untrustworthiness.
While WCTU members in Rhode Island kept working to continue improving the
law, the overall national WCTU was heavily engaged in the push for national age of
consent legislation both before and after the Rhode Island law was passed. National age
of consent legislation did not mean an age of consent law that would apply uniformly to
all states and territories. Instead, the WCTU was aiming for the United States Congress to
pass a law that would apply to the District of Columbia. The idea here was that laws set
by Congress for D.C. were seen as the national standard that other states could be
expected to follow (Larson, 1997); by having D.C. increase their age of consent, the hope
was that other states would do likewise (Pivar, 1973). In 1889 the age of consent was
raised to sixteen in the District of Columbia. Unlike the WCTU had hoped for, however,
after Congress pass the initial legislation the campaign for higher age of consent laws
slowly tapered off; by the end of the nineteenth-century, even during the 1898 push to
amend the national law to make seduction illegal in D.C. if a woman was under 21, there
were far fewer mentions in The Union Signal.
63
Regardless of the stage or state of the campaign, however, the WCTU used
petitions as one of the primary ways in which they pressured politicians, an art which
they “perfected,” being “well aware of [their] harassment value” (Larson, 1997; Pivar,
1973). While telegrams and letters were also sent, the WCTU prized the petition above
all (E. P. Gordon, 1924). According to a written history of the WCTU published on their
fiftieth anniversary, “as soon as a person had signed a petition, the sentiment became
reflexive. He
31
[sic] became more interested in the passage of a bill” (ibid, p. 91). Due to
their confidence in the power of petitions, the WCTU offered a standard petition template
that all their members and like-minded organizations could use:
PETITION of the WOMEN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION for the
PROTECTION OF WOMEN
To the Senate and House of Representatives: The increasing and alarming
frequency of assaults upon women, the frightful indignities to which even little
girls are subject, and the corrupting of boys, have become the shame of our
boasted civilization. A study of the statutes has revealed their utter failure to meet
the demands of that newly awakened public sentiment which requires better legal
protection for womanhood and childhood; Therefore we, men and women of
[blank left for organization], State of [blank left for individual state] do most
earnestly appeal to you to enact such statutes as shall provide for the adequate
punishment of crimes against women and girls. We also urge that the age at which
a girl can legally consent to her own ruin be raised to at least eighteen years; and

31
The use of “he” here is interesting and may be quite intentional, given that at the time
of much of the WCTU’s petitioning efforts, only men were able to vote. Women did still
sign petitions, but often these were separate from men’s petitions, demonstrating the
difference in influence between the desires of non-voters and voters.
64
we call attention to the disgraceful fact that protection of the person is not placed
by our laws upon so high a plane as protection of the purse. (A. A. Gordon, 1898,
p. 128)
This petition “became the organization’s most effective lobbying tool” (Larson, 1997, p.
39). In this petition, the WCTU worked to educate not only legislators but also those who
signed it about issues surrounding age of consent laws.
Not all members of the WCTU, however, were equally supportive of the ideas put
forth in such petitions. Both Frances Willard and the WCTU had long been accused of
racism (Bordin, 1986; Donovan, 2006; Freedman, 2013; Larson, 1997; Odem, 1995), and
rightly so. While many of their racist attitudes were relatively mild for the time, the
WCTU nonetheless took on, at best, a paternalistic attitude towards women of color.
Many black women’s organizations were not involved in the fight for higher age of
consent laws due to, among other reasons, fears that such laws would be used to falsely
accuse and execute black men (Freedman, 2013; Larson, 1997; Odem, 1995). Black
women individuals, however, who were in the WCTU often did support higher age of
consent laws, seeing it as a way to protect young black girls from immoral men (Larson,
1997). White women individuals in the WCTU, who made up the majority of the
organization’s members, however, saw higher age of consent laws as a way to stop
immoral young black girls from engaging in further immorality (Larson, 1997). This
racial divide was further deepened by the WCTU’s publication, whose:
Use of moral metaphors of ‘dark’ and ‘light’ and ‘black’ and ‘white’ easily slides
into descriptions of race [….] The WCTU argued that the vice trade eroded racial
boundaries by drawing people together in sin and suggested that the sexual sins of
65
white girls gave them a common ‘black purpose of heart’ with black prostitutes,
blurring the moral distinction between white and black girls.” (Donovan, 2006, p.
48)
In this way, the WCTU perpetuated many of the same racist ideas about sexuality and
race that the legislators who named a higher age of consent for black girls than white girls
did; while sometimes the cause of black girls’ immorality was attributed circumstances
rather than to a girls’ inherent nature, black girls were nevertheless viewed as less moral
and more sexual due to their race (Donovan, 2006). While the WCTU wanted to protect
all girls, they only wanted to do so in a way that required girls to fit into the ideal of
white girlhood; black girls had to be protected by white women just as white women had
to be protected by white men.
All told, then, the context in which the WCTU was attempting to promote their
higher age of consent campaign was a complicated one, steeped in racist and sexist
ideologies. The WCTU was limited not just in what they could say but also in how they
could say it. The women of the WCTU had to work to make men identify with a cause
they were culturally engrained to oppose. However, the WCTU became adapt at “playing
on the gender identity of middle-class men—an identity otherwise challenged by the
women’s movement—[and] turning the ideology of masculinity against itself” (Larson,
1997, p. 45). By calling on men to protect women, including through their publication
The Union Signal, the WCTU was able to pass higher age of consent laws. At the same
time, however, they reinforced the cultural systems that upheld sexual violence against
women and girls in the first place.

66
The Union Signal
The WCTU originally published a newsletter titled Our Union. However, this
publication is little-discussed and has largely faded from memory. Frances Willard, while
still in her role as President of the Illinois chapter of the WCTU, suggested that the state
organization start “a weekly organ of its own” (Burgess, 1889, p. 10); The Signal soon
began publication. Within a few short years (and likely not coincidentally also a few
years after Willard became National WCTU President), the two publications merged to
become The Union Signal. Although technically owned by the Woman’s Temperance
Publishing Association rather than the WCTU themselves, The Union Signal was
essentially the latter’s official newspaper (Lewis, 1996). By 1885, 15,000 people were
receiving the paper; by 1891, that number had more than quintupled to 85,000, although
subscriptions later dropped off to around 67,000 people in 1894 (Lewis, 1996). Like its
circulation numbers, the focus of the newspaper also varied depending on the year and
was largely contingent on whom the editor was. For the first several years of its
publication, The Union Signal was focused almost solely on temperance. Starting in late
1885, however, a much broader, progressive agenda became apparent; it wasn’t until over
a decade later and the death of Willard in 1898 that The Union Signal largely returned to
its original exclusive focus on prohibition.
Although the content of The Union Signal was not consistent from issue to issue,
there were sections that tended to recur. The paper normally started off with updates on
brief news items “Since Our Last Issue.” Updates from WCTU chapters and members
around the United States and world were common and comprised a large section of each
issue. Additional materials include essays, short stories, “Special Difficulties” (i.e.
67
questions and answers), official announcements, a small section for children,
advertisements for WCTU materials, and promotions for commercial goods.
Analyzing such a multifarious paper that spans a number of years is no small task;
there were thousands of pages. In my study of The Union Signal, I concentrated on
looking for several key phrases, including: (age of) consent, (age of) protection
32
,
prostitute/prostitution, seduction/seduce, rape, and outrage. All of these terms either
directly refer to or euphemistically imply sexual violence, particularly against young
girls. While there were certainly uses for all of these terms that did not match up with the
content of my study (e.g., the phrase “consent of the governed” popped up frequently,
and “ruin” was often used to describe locations), I only considered those uses that related
to the age of consent or sexual violence more broadly. In examining these terms, the
agent-centered approach of the WCTU to advocating for a higher age of consent became
clear.

Agents and Idealism
At first glance, any of several of the pentadic terms could fit the WCTU, as is the
case for many rhetorical texts. Upon looking closer, however, the focus on agent—
although obviously as a controlling term rather than to the exclusion of other pentadic
elements—begins to emerge. The agent is, simply put, the person who acts; as a pentadic
term, agent is associated with the philosophy of idealism. Idealism is very much the
opposite of materialism (which will be discussed later, in Chapter 4), and is focused on

32
Age of protection is a term that was used more or less interchangeably with age of
consent. Each phrase, however, does have very different rhetorical implications, which
will be discussed below.
68
the human mind. The WCTU, likewise, placed a large emphasis on the power of humans
to act. According to Walters (2000), reform groups such as the WCTU:
Took some responsibility off God, but only to place it upon man [sic]. Individuals
could regulate erotic drives, so the message went, if they practiced rigorous self-
discipline and allowed science and morality to shape personal habits. (p. 113)
Education, science, and self-discipline were the keys to social change; these are all things
that are controlled by an agent, originating in the mind. An agent-centered approach thus
frames other pentadic elements in terms of agent, or who is acting; situations, then, do not
influence agents but rather the other way around.
33

Similarly, Burke (1969a) defines idealism by citing the Baldwin dictionary,
saying that idealism “is described thus: ‘In meta-physics, any theory which maintains the
universe to be throughout the work of reason and mind’” (p. 171); later, he references the
Encyclopedia Britannica, claiming that “an epistemological factor is considered
uppermost, as idealism is said to hold that ‘Apart from the activity of the self or subject in
sensory reaction, memory and association, imagination, judgment and inference, there
can be no world of objects’” (Burke, 1969a, p. 171). Our material reality, in other words,
is at the very least heavily influenced by the way we think. Burke associates idealistic
philosophies with the “terms of the ‘ego,’ the ‘self,’ the ‘super-ego,’ ‘consciousness,’
‘will,’ the ‘generalized I,’ the ‘subjective,’ ‘mind,’ ‘spirit,’ the ‘oversoul,’ and any such
‘super-persons’ as church, race, nation, etc.” (Burke, 1969a, p. 171). The focus is very
heavily put on humans and their perceptions. The surroundings in which they find
themselves matter less than what people themselves think, believe, and choose.

33
An example of this in terms of the WCTU is outlined in the final chapter.
69
It becomes easy to understand why a social movement would adopt an agent-
centered, idealistic approach, then: “Because of its stress upon agent, idealism leads
readily into both individual and group psychology. Its close connection with
epistemology, or the problem of knowledge, is due to this same bias. For to approach the
universe by asking ourselves how knowledge is possible is to ground our speculations
psychologistically, in the nature of the knower” (Burke, 1969a, p. 172). Change can occur
because of how we, both individually and collectively, see the world. Burke explains this
idea by relating it to contract law cases; when lawyers argue that what someone said in a
contract means something than what it appears to materially mean, they are idealistically
shifting “our very notions of reality” (Burke, 1969a, p. 1972). In other words, as more
and more case law builds up, our perceptions of the way the world work likewise shifts;
change accrues from the accumulation of individual agent-centered changes. Of course:
If deception were the only result of the relation between the ideal and the real,
ideas would long ago have ceased to deceive. But just as a lie is ‘creative’ in the
sense that it adds to reality, so there is the powerfully and nobly creative aspect of
idealism, since an ideal may serve as standard, guide, incentive—hence may lead
to new real conditions [….] and so an idea of justice may make possible some
measure of its embodiment in material situations. (Burke, 1969a, p. 1972)
Agents, whether individual or collective, do not just imagine that conditions change.
Instead, their conception that conditions have or should change causes them to act as if
they have, leading to the manifestation of those changes. For the WCTU, their idealistic
viewpoint meant that they concentrated on the role individuals could play by improving
their morals. By teaching women about their role as moral guardians and educators using
70
The Union Signal, the WCTU hoped to effect material change in the world, reordering
the hierarchy. In particular, doing so meant that they could leverage the opportunity to
establish themselves as agents during a time that decreed women’s place was in the
home.

Analysis of The Union Signal and the Age of Consent Campaign
Unfortunately, it is difficult to easily keep track of how effective the WCTU was
at affecting this social change when it comes to age of consent laws. Nationally,
adjustments to age of consent laws were reported via newspapers. However, there were
often false and/or conflicting reports, such as in 1895 when both Delaware and New
Hampshire were mistakenly reported to have increased their age of consent, with New
Hampshire supposedly also including boys under the age of protection (“Since Our Last
Issue,” 1895a, p. 1). A note titled “Newspaper Reform” from a later issue of The Union
Signal in that same year acknowledged that there had been multiple false reports while
highlighting the importance of morality and religion, explaining how “even religious
papers share these errors because they rely upon the careless, haphazard newspapers and
their news agencies, whereas religious and reform papers should have an associated press
of reforms of their own to gather good news and tell it accurately” (Craft, 1895, p. 3).
Even explanations of news inaccuracies, then, were connected back to the need
for a higher moral standard. This idea that it was through human morality that problems
could be overcome played out in The Union Signal in several ways: the emphasis on
education, how mothers had a responsibility to eradicate the moral double standard and
bring forth “new men” and “new women,” and finally how girls themselves were not
71
fully competent agents. Collectively, these three features of The Union Signal’s rhetoric
emphasized the role of individual actors in explaining the drama (in the Burkean sense)
of age of consent laws. While agent is by no means the only pentadic term that must be
examined to gain an understanding of the WCTU’s motives, it is the featured term to
which all other pentadic elements are subordinate. Who is acting is thus more important
than where or when they are acting, what they are doing, for what purpose they are doing,
and by what means they accomplish it; furthermore, the scene, act, purpose, and agency
can all be understood in terms of who it is that is undertaking action (i.e. the agent). In
analyzing these aspects of the WCTU’s age of consent campaign, we can get a clearer
picture of why the WCTU’s efforts were able to secure a higher age of consent across the
United States but ultimately could not push for more reforms on sexual violence towards
women.

Emphasis on Education
Previous scholars have noted the importance the WCTU placed on instruction,
noting that they “had a pervasive faith in education, in the schools, in the family, and in
general society” (Pivar, 1973). The WCTU described temperance as “the fight for a clear
brain” (E. P. Gordon, 1924, p. 15); society had to be educated in order to understand how
alcohol clouded intellectual abilities. This task was made more difficult since alcohol
deadened sensibilities, making it harder to instruct people about temperance. In the case
of the age of consent, however, ignorance was the larger issue. While people were often
aware that alcohol could cause problems, even if they disagreed with or denied the extent
72
of them, many were in the dark entirely about age of consent laws. According to a
WCTU member who was asked to deliver a series of lectures in Pennsylvania, she:
Found a large majority of the women in every audience uninformed as to the
laws under which they were living; I would ask, ‘How many know what is meant
by the legal term, ‘age of consent’?’ and but few hands would be lifted. As I
explained, the faces before me would beam with indignation, eyes would fill with
tears, and sobs would sometimes be heard. (Henry, 1889, p. 5)
With this lack of knowledge, the laws remained unchallenged. It was through an
idealistic challenge to ignorance that the WCTU could move people to act.
For those engaged in the age of consent campaign, “education and public
opinion” were “co-extensive with human life” (Stead, 1890, p. 2); altering the latter
required working on the former. This idealistic stance, where people were not to be
blamed but educated,” involved multiple aspects, including an awareness of educational
objectives, recognition of the power of debate, and holding “mothers’ meetings” that
instructed women in how to raise their children morally (“Legal Work,” 1895, p. 8).
If change was to come from learning about issues of morality and age of consent,
the WCTU realized that such education could not be haphazard. Instead, educational
efforts must be intentional. In an answer to a “Special Difficulties” section question about
what types of age of consent and temperance literature were most effective for women to
use in their efforts to persuade others, the provided answer is more involved than simply
pointing the questioner to one pamphlet over another:
That depends.’ An artist selects a delicate sable brush for the fine hair lines of his
painting, and one of very different size and shape when ‘washing in’ an undertint.
73
Shall we be less careful when dealing with souls, when helping the Master-Painter
to bring out the marvelous picture of the ages? Throwing out of account—because
all are so reasonable in price—the question of finance, two queries remain: 1.
What purpose do we wish to accomplish by this distribution of literature? 2. What
are the best leaflets to fulfill this purpose? But few of the many possible answers
can be suggested here, and these are all based upon W.T.P.A. [Woman’s
Temperance Publishing Association] publications. (Guernsey, 1892, p. 9)
While they then do list a number of suggestions, each of these is directed towards a
specific purpose or audience. By this, then, we can understand that the WCTU views the
impetus for social change as coming from ideals. In other words, people have to be
persuaded in order for change to happen, and persuasion is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Instead, it is only through recognizing that minds must be transformed that the WCTU
can work towards real change.
Similarly, the WCTU’s ads that asked people to order “Protection Posters” that
displayed WCTU positions on issues such as the age of consent acknowledged the
importance of learning about issues in order to create reform:
And yet you want your place to have a healthy time of agitation and stir-up-
edness? Such times don’t ‘jist grow’ or rain down from above! They come about
when men [sic] see—stop—reason and assent or dissent—dismount from the
fence of indifference, in other words. Given, a fence of ignorance and
indifference, the top rail full of voters, the means (Protection Posters) of tipping
the rail. (“You have not sent for samples of protection posters? Well! Well!,”
1890, p. 13)
74
Debate and discussion over topics such as the age of consent was encouraged; ultimately,
this is what would lead to improvements. Since the WCTU saw themselves as morally on
the side of right, it made sense to them that instructing people about the issues and
encouraging them to deliberate on them would induce heartfelt realizations. Here, we can
see how agent is emphasized, governing other pentadic terms such as scene and purpose.
The ad for Protection Posters directly asked, “and yet you want your place to have a
health time of agitation and stir-up-edness?” (emphasis added). This place, however,
could only be reached through the work of agents. Even the scenic elements of posters
themselves were ultimately subordinate to agents. By this, I mean to say that the poster
alone was not what accomplished re-ordering; it could not explain why someone changed
their mind. Instead, education and debate—idealist features—were the impetus for
change; the scene is changed to a state of “stir-up-edness” via agents. The poster is only
the tool (the agency) which agents use to change their minds and the world around
them.An agent-purpose ratio is also apparent in the protection posters. The ultimate
purpose of Protection Posters is to increase moral behavior; this is accomplished through
people’s actions (e.g. ordering the posters and fostering discussions around moral topics).
People remain the focus, with the other pentadic elements relating back to agents as the
superordinate term.
Indeed, the WCTU even modelled such conversations as those proposed by the
Protection Posters in The Union Signal, creating mock dialogues between three well-
educated male friends who (of course) all came to espouse the WCTU’s convictions
(Bird, 1893, p. 2). Through a conversational style similar to the Socratic method, one of
the men would prod the others towards realizations about the need for women’s suffrage,
75
higher age of consent laws, and similar matters. The Union Signal thus suggested that
change,both explicitly and implicitly, sprang from people. Although education and debate
were viewed as the agencies through which such changes were accomplished, ultimately,
agent, not agency, was still the governing term. Those agencies that were most
appropriate to an agentic-approach were those that were highlighted. In other words,
education was not the only agency used by the WCTU to promote its goals but, due to its
correspondence with the idealistic frame of their agent-centered campaign, it was the
agent that was given the most prominence.
The WCTU made sure that its agents were properly prepared to work towards the
reordering of the social hierarchy. In order to train individual women to educate others,
the WCTU’s Social Purity Department prepared materials for and strongly recommended
the formation of “mothers’ meetings” to prepare women to be moral leaders for their
families and “to take charge of the development of their children’s sexual values,
particularly the values of their sons” (Larson, 1997, p. 41). Thus, calls for education were
equally calls for women to provide moral instruction to boys and men.

Mothers’ Responsibility to Create “New Men” and “New Women”
It was the mothers’ responsibility, in other words, to enlighten everyone else as to
the perils and pitfalls of the dual moral standard where men were not held to the same
moral measures as women. Ironically, of course, it was only women who were capable of
spreading this message. Women were responsible for men’s morals; mothers, not fathers,
were seen as the best moral educators of young boys and girls (Mother Experience, 1895,
p. 5). As the previously mentioned Tennessee WCTU member who was prevented from
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speaking to that state’s legislature asserted, “Our Legislature needs ‘mothering’ and
needs it badly” (Meriwether, 1889, p. 11). While such an approach was attempting to fix
the dual moral standard, it unfortunately simultaneously reinforced the idea that women
were and must be more innately morally accountable (Welter, 1966).
With the double standard, women were held “responsible for policing sexual
boundaries for both sexes”; while girls were supposed to remain virginal until marriage
they were simultaneously seen as able to legally consent to sexual activity once they
reached the age of ten or twelve (Larson, 1997, p. 8)
34
. With this dual standard that
“tolerated men’s indulgence, it was inevitable that someone’s daughter, sister, or mother
would be ‘sacrificed to lust’” (Larson, 1997, p. 8). In other words, it was not just that the
age of consent laws left young girls vulnerable. Rather, the WCTU recognized that, when
combined with the fact that men were “supposed to be” immoral, young girls were little
more than sacrificial lambs to sate men’s lust. This is not to say, to be clear, that men’s
lust is intrinsically uncontrollable, nor is it to say that their lust, regardless of its quality,
will always fall on young girls. Rather, it is to point out that a system that believed men
were sexually insatiable when combined with a set of laws that left young girls
susceptible to anyone who might wish to prey on them helped sustain such beliefs. The
burden and responsibility for frustrating attacks on young girls was left to women; men
could not be expected to protected them.
The common belief that the WCTU was fighting against, in other words, was that
men and boys did not commit assault, but instead women and girls allowed assaults,

34
Given the discrepancy between the age of consent and the age at which girls did (or
even legally could) marry, there was often some time between when girls could legally
consent to sex and when it was socially acceptable for them to do so (Grossberg, 1988)
77
effectively causing men to sin. The Union Signal did call out these relationships quite
clearly, pointing out that until the United States realizes the evils of permitting laws that
allow young girls to be “consensually” sexually assaulted by older men, young girls will
be burdened with and blamed for men’s sins. The WCTU adopted such a stance on a
variety of issues, for example arguing that the social and legal acceptance of alcohol
would mean that:
People will be saying, ‘Oh, if his wife had been a different woman he might not
have fallen!’ We protest—while in our hearts we wish that the wives and the
mothers of this land were all that they ought to be, all that they might be, while
we would that they were stronger, wiser, and less conservative upon questions of
reform and more set against iniquity—yet we ask: Is it fair that men, voters and
law-makers should legalize that which ruins body and soul and then ask the wives
and the mothers to hold their husbands and their sons back from destruction? It is
a heavy burden which these same law-makers are laying upon the hearts of the
women of America in that they ask us, by personal influence, education and
persuasion, to save a nation […] while they do their utmost to counteract our
efforts. But the fact remains that whether fairly or not, a heavy responsibility does
rest upon us, and we may not throw it off. (Huntington, 1893, p. 2)
The WCTU recognized the existence of the double moral standard and how it affected
matters of both temperance and age of consent, but saw, unfortunately, the only way of
fighting it as also maintaining it (at least temporarily). Women thus had to be the ones to
morally educate men to be better. In order to receive their ultimate desired result, women
first had to reorder ideas of moral responsibility.
78
They did so, as mentioned above, through education. In addition, however, they
also did so by example. In response to the White Cross Society, a men’s social purity
organization dedicated to protecting women, the WCTU formed the White Shield
Society. Both groups had similar purity pledges and youth divisions. Both groups also
pointed to men as the main instigators of social evils, with members of the male White
Cross Society writing, “let it be frankly admitted, for it is true, that the precepts of purity
are most violated on the male side of the human family [….] It will not be denied that
men are the aggressors in lust and seduction” (Wetty, 1895, p. 3). While the formation of
a distaff counterpart to the White Cross Society might seem unnecessary, especially
considering the WCTU already existed and the White Cross Society was more than
willing to speak to men directly, the creation of the White Shield Society in fact served to
highlight the need for a single moral standard; while “it was never as popular as the
White Cross, [the WCTU’s White Shield Society] did give some ideological symmetry to
the movement” (Pivar, 1973). This also underlined the point that while women were
more than happy to have—indeed, it was their ultimate goal to have—men working as
their allies in moral reform, the WCTU did not need them as their sole protectors.
Instead, maternal protective power was emphasized. Mothers’ ultimate
responsibility was to educate both fathers and children, with fathers as allies rather than
antagonists, was underscored by the message of Dr. Mary Wood Allen’s
35
short morality
tale “Baby Sweethearts” (1894). In it, she related the conversation held between a

35
The Union Signal contains contributions from numerous women with a variety of
degrees and honors, including doctors (both M.D. and Ph.D.), clergy, and more. While
these contributors were by no means representative of the average women in the United
States in the late nineteenth-century, the majority of the WCTU members being educated
middle to upper middle class white women, it is still interesting to observe from the
perspective of someone from today who reads over the issues.
79
married man and woman; the woman chastises her husband, telling him “it is not right to
tease [our son] so about his sweethearts” because “it is teaching him the wrong things,”
something that she had learned earlier that day at her WCTU mothers’ meeting. She
explains that “it is the placing of the association of babies on the level of men and
women, and teaching them to do the very things for which we will want to punish them”
when they are older that “constitutes evil” (Allen, 1894, p. 6). Telling boys that they are
free to kiss girls all they please, she says, is wrong, especially when in a decade or so
they will try to tell him their son cannot do so.
Her husband protests, but the wife points out that it is not just their son who will
treat other girls this way, but other boys will also take liberties with their own daughter.
The husband flatly states that their daughter “won’t permit it” since “she will be too well
taught.” To this, too, however, the wife has a response:
How? By teaching her at three and ten that the boys are her lovers and may
caress her as they please, and then at fourteen teaching her that all young men
must be kept at a distance? Can you do it? And, [husband], if it is right for [our
son] to kiss any girl that will permit it, why will it not be right for [our daughter]
to permit any young man to kiss her? You see it is not altogether a question of our
son and some one [sic] else’s daughter, but also of our daughter and some one
else’s son. Don’t you see that it is just here that we lay the foundation of that
double standard of morals which works so much mischief? If we teach our own
boys that they may treat girls with familiarity if the girls permit it, we must accept
the consequences not only to our boys but to our girls as well. (Allen, 1894, p. 6)
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Through this concrete illustration of the moral double standard, the husband is swayed to
the wife’s perspective. It is only by making the issue one with which he can identify,
casting him in the role of a father rather than of a man, that she gets him to see the issues
with expecting one standard for boys’ sexuality and another for girls’. Importantly, the
wife depicts the scenario in terms of the relationships between agents, acts, and scene.
Her focus is again on the agent, contending that people must be taught how to behave.
She argues that regardless of temporal (scenic) changes, such as children’s age, there is
only one proper way to teach them to act. Likewise, what acts children take are
determined by how they are morally educated. Thus, agent and idealism are foremost,
governing the purpose of morality (as evidenced by the repeated discussion of whether
things are “right” or “evil”).
Even at this point, however, Allen’s morality tale is not yet fully told. When the
husband asks his wife if she would “have boys treat girls just as they do other boys?” she
cites what she learned when she asked the same at the meeting, informing her husband
“that a boy should be taught to be polite to both boys and girls, and also to manifest a
courteous chivalry toward women, because his mother is a woman” (Allen, 1894, p. 6).
Furthermore, she muses aloud that this:
Means courtesy to all women and girls, because of the womanhood of the mother,
and also because of the potential motherhood of the woman. The thought of
motherhood should sanctify every girl and woman in the mind of man [….]
Foolish jesting about love and marriage degrades it in thought, and one reason
why we have so much unhappiness in married life may be the fact that we began
to undermine the foundations of morality in our teaching of our babies to play
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with the thought of the God-ordained relations of the sexes as with some trivial
toy. (Allen, 1894, p. 6)
The WCTU’s purpose of achieving a higher moral standard, then, was extended beyond
the issue of age of consent. By this, I mean to say that the WCTU drew connections
between the age of consent, conceptions of male and female sexuality, marriage, the
moral double standard, and more, seeing all of these as linked. In order to change the age
of consent, then, they needed to alter the ideals actors held about the other concepts.
Through this modelled conversation, Allen showed the ways mothers could lead the rest
of society to a higher, equal moral standard, creating “new men” and “new women.”
Mock discourses, however, were not the only means by which the WCTU
advanced their notions of morality and the need for an increased age of consent. One
story in The Union Signal recounts “the case of Maria Barberi,” which “strikingly shows
the inadequacy of law in affording justice and protection to women” (“Since Our Last
Issue,” 1895b, p. 1). A young girl who was sentenced to death “for killing her betrayer”
(i.e. for defending herself from sexual violence, resulting in the death of the man
attacking her), Barberi’s case drew national attention and outrage. Acknowledging the
pleas to free her, the WCTU proclaimed, “we rejoice that manly men and womanly
women all over the country are demanding this justice” of Barberi being fully pardoned
(“Since Our Last Issue,” 1895b, p. 1). For the WCTU, this was a sign that “the ‘new
woman’ is here and by her side the ‘new man’ who sees the horrible injustice of this
prison and scaffold being the only places in the making and administration of law where
woman can represent herself” (“Since Our Last Issue,” 1895b, p. 1). . The “new man”
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and “new woman” were thus those people who held themselves and others to a single
moral standard.
Another morality tale, “Reaping the Whirlwind: A Tale of Social Inquisition, In
Two Chapters,” actually demonstrates the transformation of an “old man” into a “new
man.” The first chapter of the story relates how a teenaged girl is impregnated by her
lover
36
who abandons her, explaining that while he loves her, he cannot provide for her:
“We are most unfortunate and we must bear the penalty of our fault. I am going away,
but I shall never forget you” (Saunders, 1895a, p. 2). The girl, rather predictably,
becomes a social pariah in her village, along with her infant son. It is only when her
erstwhile beau returns several years later and marries her that she can return to
respectability once more.
37
When he returns, however, it is not because he is forced to.
Instead, he begs the narrator of the story:
Can you believe me […] that I never meant to wrong her in the beginning, never
truly meant it at all. We were both so young and so fond of each other—but how

36
While in other circumstances this particular story might be framed in terms of a
violation of the age of consent, in this case due to the fact that (a) both people are the
same age, (b) they are older teenagers, and (c) the teenage boy repents at the end, having
been portrayed as someone who was ill-advised rather than someone who intentionally
betrayed the teenage girl, the age of consent aspect was not considered.
37
While this lesson in and of itself may seem a bit deterministic for the idealistic focus of
the WCTU, it is worth noting both that there was some degree of variation in whether
“fallen” women could be saved and, if so, to what extent. More importantly, this
particular story took great pains to establish that the girl is in no way lesser because she
had a child out of wedlock, noting that “People often remark that [she] has made [him] a
good, faithful wife, as if there was something remarkable in the fact. When her old
friends [who had abandoned her when she became pregnant] began to come around her
[she] opened her blue eyes in bewilderment, and she cannot even yet understand why she
is any better than she would have been if [her now-husband] had not come back to do her
tardy justice” (Saunders, 1895b, p. 3). In other words, while the writer by no means
condoned pre-marital sex (such an act would be too progressive for the WCTU), she did
note that, in this case, there were two parties at fault
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can I explain? Only, [we’re] going to keep our boys and girls from being thrown
too much at the mercy of their own passions. We mean to try to guard them more
jealously than ever we were guarded, and not the less if they are deeply in love
and engaged to be married. (Saunders, 1895b, p. 3)
The two young protagonists of this story exemplify the “new man” and “new woman.”
Although the engaged in pre-marital sex (something that the account does gloss over
slightly in this regard, admittedly), they are nonetheless understanding of the importance
of social purity and moral education for everyone, regardless of gender. Beyond that,
such a “new man” is shown as himself participating in the moral education of his
children. The WCTU, then, leaves open the possibility for fathers’ moral responsibility in
the future rather than positioning the current status of moral education as falling under the
mother’s purview as permanent.
As Abbie Morgon Diaz (1889) said in The Union Signal, “we should not accept as
fixed and final the modes of procedure which embody past conceptions of what is wisest
and best” (p. 7). The “new man” and “new woman” do not do this, instead continually
pushing for what is wiser and better. For the WCTU, that meant women educating
everyone on the dangers of the double moral standard and the importance and power of
the single moral standard.

Girls’ Ineligibility as Agents
At the same time that the WCTU championed the “new woman,” however, telling
their members that that is who they should strive to be, the organization also told those
who were not yet old enough to be women that they still had to be “old-fashioned girls.”
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In what at first appears to be a review of Louisa May Alcott’s novel An Old-Fashioned
Girl (1869), which was described as “an attractive picture of a rich, sweet nature
unspoiled by flattery, kept innocent by careful home protection, and growing towards the
full development of womanhood without loss of that modesty and womanhood without
loss of that modesty and delicate feeling which are maidenhood’s greatest charms,”
Spencer (1889) departed from lengthy discussion of the book itself and instead turned to
advising young girls on the proper way to behave (p. 7). An old-fashioned girl, she said,
is one who has “a fashion of courtesy, of gentleness, of mannerly deference, of dainty
taste, of considerate feeling, which will never become obsolete” (A. G. Spencer, 1889, p.
7). Such a fashion:
Is never set—save in a protected, well-bred youth, held true to some fine standard
of life inherited from the past. We want, in this sense, the old-fashioned girl
always; out of which to make the best and strongest of new-fashioned women. (A.
G. Spencer, 1889, p. 7)
Girls were still very much expected to conform to traditional gender roles, being docile
and demure. Their education, in other words, was still that which, “to a great extent
limited their involvement with the world at large and served to reinforce the notion that
their place was in the home” (Plante, 1997, p. 106).
38
Girls were not encouraged to be
agents in the same way women were by the WCTU.
In Robertson’s (2002) study of age of consent cases put forth by the New York
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC) in the late nineteenth-
century, he noted that:

38
Previously quoted above.
85
Render[ing an adolescent victim of sexual violence as] passive […] was part of
an effort to fit her to jurors’ understandings of childhood, and, by doing so, to
have them extend to her the protection from sexual violence that they were only
prepared to offer to children. (Robertson, 2002, p. 783)
In other words, in order for age of consent laws to be truly effective (both during the
campaign to have them increased and once those increases were put into effect), social
purity advocates such as the WCTU and NYSPCC had to not only separate girls under
the age of consent from women over it, but also distinguish between young non-sexual
children and older sexual teenagers. Or, more accurately, to recognize that society (read:
[white] male legislators/jurors) would conceptualize this difference and act on it; as
discussed previously, both a girl’s age and perceived sexual maturity were taken into
consideration when deciding if she consented to sexual activity or not. This meant that
those who wanted to group older, teenage girls with younger, pre-adolescent girls as far
as being capable of consenting to sexual activity was concerned had to illustrate the
former group in terms of the latter. Teenage girls, even those who knowingly engaged in
sexual activity with people their own age, were portrayed as passive. While their physical
maturity could not be denied, all possible attempts were made to portray them as
mentally and psychologically immature and essentially incapable. This meant that girls,
regardless of their age, could not function as agents while boys, on the other hand, were
considered to be much less passive, even at the exact same ages.
Here, we can see why the distinction between age of consent and the age of
protection is important. Framing the campaign as being about protection deemphasized
girls’ agency. While this made it easier for men to support the campaign, it also made it
86
more difficult for women later to advocate for themselves—they were, after all, the ones
in need of protection. As has been shown, laws enacted against sexual violence often
featured a corroboration requirement (Babcock, 1889). Such laws demonstrated the
continuance of social views that did not see women as full agents; their word alone was
not considered evidence in matters of sexual violence. While such a state of affairs was
not caused by the WCTU, focusing on girls as passive creatures that needed to be
protected by superiors rather than individual, active beings who deserved equal rights and
protections with others did reinforce such views.
Nearly all age of consent bills only addressed the age of consent as it applied to
girls. There were some exceptions, of course—an update on potential changes to the
national age of consent law remarked that “there was a decided expression in the House
Committee on Public Morals in favor for a like protection for boys. It is good to even
hear of such advanced sentiment” (Page, 1897, p. 5), for example, and Kansas did at least
move for the “impartial consideration” of whether or not “our law for the protection of
girls […] endangers the boys” (Weatherby, 1889, p. 11). As the nineteenth-century
neared its close, “such advanced sentiment[s]” became more common but they were still
neither the norm nor particularly progressive. Rather than focusing on preventing crimes
against boys, the emphasis was instead on preventing boys from committing crimes, or at
least from being tempted into committing them (J. S. Ehrlich, 2014; Webb, 1898). Once
again, women were held responsible for the morality of men and boys.
Whether or not boys under the age of consent should or could be held accountable
for engaging in sexual activities was a matter of heated debate. Some held that doing so
“does not protect a boy’s virtue” but rather “protects a bad boy in vice,” making it
87
permissible for him to solicit prostitutes, for example (Webb, 1898, p. 5) while others,
such as the WCTU in Kansas, were willing to at least consider that adolescent boys and
girls should be held to the same standards (Weatherby, 1889). In the former case, boys
were seen as active agents, capable of independent thoughts and actions. Thus, agent was
the controlling pentadic term, with the acts of sexual violence and the scenes of brothels
being subordinate to them; boys choose to act and visit such places. Through the agency
of their masculinity, boy-agents could act. However, with the agent-agency ratio’s focus
on girls as actors, acts are limited as femininity offers no possibility of agency. In the
latter case, however, agency is not a matter of femininity or masculinity but rather of age.
Neither boys nor girls were full agents and both needed to be protected. When they
advanced this single moral standard, then, the WCTU left open the possibility for women
to be agents who could take action on a variety of issues.
Overall, however, there was not a single moral standard when it came to
adolescents. Colorado State Representative Carrie Clyde Holly, one of the state’s first
three women legislators and sponsor of the bill to increase Colorado’s age of consent
(Beaton, 2012), argued against the age of protection’s application to boys, explicitly
saying that it was not needed because boys and girls were different:
Protect them from whom and from what? If boys can be assaulted in the same
way, bring a bill to protect them against us, and let each [bill] stand on its own
merit. But really, is it necessary to protect the wolf against the allurement of the
lamb? (cited from Ehrlich, 2014, p. 58)
Minor boys did not deserve protection because they were active and thus were considered
unlikely to be assaulted. Instead, boys were believed to much more likely to be the ones
88
seeking out sexual activity, if not themselves assaulting others (i.e. passive girls). Boys
were predators, while girls were prey. While this particular quote does not touch on
whether or not boys have to be this way, only that they were at the time,
39
it does
demonstrate that the dual moral standard still held, at least insofar as adolescent boys
were anticipated to not behave as morally as adolescent girls.
In fact, the only time when adolescent boys were seen as minors in need of
protection was when they are engaging in non-sexual crimes. While girls needed to be
protected while passive, only “consenting to their own ruin,” boys needed to be protected
when active, having chosen to, for example, murder someone. An article in the WCTU
argued that since a fifteen-year-old boy who was tried and killed for murder “had none of
the rights of citizenship, he could not vote nor will away his property, nor would any
contract made by him have legal recognition” his execution was illegal; “since a minor
has no rights of citizenship under the state, neither should he have its penalties; his
privileges and government inhere in the parent” (“Since Our Last Issue,” 1892, p. 1).
Comparing this to the age of consent, where “[the state] provides for the moral and
physical wreck of its girl children and the reckless debasement of its males,” the author
concluded that in all cases “the state is prodigally negligent of its child-life” (“Since Our
Last Issue,” 1892, p. 1). For both criminal boys and seduced girls, considering them
adults without rendering them any of the associated rights was seen as criminal. The
difference, however, was that boys need to be protected from the consequences of being
instigators of crime, while girls had to be protected from the consequences of being
victims of crime.

39
Or, more accurately, that they were thought of in this way.
89
According to Ehrlich (2014), “by denying the possibility of authentic female
sexual agency, the reformers sought to encode a narrow vision of respectability into law”
(p. 60). This contrasts with Robertson’s (2002) analysis that the reason for downplaying
adolescent female sexuality was actually to allow for the prosecution of statutory rape
cases. Ultimately, however, both reasons are equally valid; denying that adolescent girls
could operate as sexual agents both served to allow for the implementation and use of
higher age of consent statutes and to work to ensure feminine modesty. In so framing
adolescent girls who were “growing towards the full development of womanhood” the
WCTU actually reinforced the double moral standard (A. G. Spencer, 1889, p. 7).

Conclusion
In summary, then, the WCTU used moral education to push for the development
of “new men” and “new women” who would be held to the same moral standard.
However, these “new” men and women were supposed to develop out of boys and girls
who were still being held to a double moral standard, where girls were not seen as
independent, thinking agents. Unfortunately, if girls were not capable of being agents to
the same extent boys were, it was reasonable to assume that neither were women when
compared to men. The WCTU thus effectively hobbled its own argument, saying that
men alone were capable of acting as agents at the same time they argued that women
must be the agents of moral change.
It made sense, given the context of the time, for the WCTU to adopt an idealist,
agent-centered approach. As has been discussed, in the nineteenth-century (white,
middle-to-upper class, relatively educated) women’s place was still considered to be the
90
home (Hewitt, 2002). In other words, women were strongly associated with the private
scene of domesticity, to the point where Barbara Welter (1966) in her work on the cult of
true womanhood referred to them as “the hostage in the home” (p. 151). Over time,
however, women were able to expand their assigned “great task of bringing men back to
God” beyond the confines of the home (Welter, 1966, p. 163). To do so, however,
women had to establish themselves as agents.
To clarify, women at the time were not seen as capable of making decisions,
particularly not outside the home. However, by emphasizing their moral character and
religious responsibilities, qualities they were imbued with by the cult of true womanhood,
the WCTU could argue that women did have a place in public affairs. Thus, as they were
aiming to establish themselves as agents in public, emphasizing the agentic qualities of
motives in sexual violence prevention coincided with both their goals of gaining a
political voice and of increasing the age of consent. They were, in effect, killing two
patriarchal birds with one stone.
In addition, by focusing on morals, they could blame not just individual men but
rather society as a whole. In other words, the individuals who the WCTU needed to help
them adopt change, given that such individuals were the ones who had the ability to vote
and were themselves in positions of power in the government, were not being accused of
being evil or depraved themselves. Campbell (1989) framed this as a weakness in her
examination of Frances Willard’s speeches, saying that:
She [Willard] appealed to men in terms of their traditional role as protectors of
women. The reforms she proposed were all part of an effort to protect women
from evil forces. In responding to Willard’s pleas, men did not need to alter their
91
conceptions of their role or sphere; they merely acted as true men to create
conditions in which true women might play their roles more fully and safely [….]
As Willard presented her case, no social costs would accrue to men if the reforms
she proposed were enacted. (p. 128)
However, men did accrue social costs by supporting age of consent legislation. Not only
was their sexual access to young girls legally (and rightfully) restricted, any men who
publically supported such reforms were openly mocked. To overcome this problem, it
makes sense that the WCTU would call on contemporaneous standards of men as
protectors for women and girls to persuade them support a cause that was contrary to
their perceived self-interest.
In the end, however, this meant that women’s anti-SV movements wouldn’t push
for further substantial changes for several more decades. In addition, the changes they did
make were quickly attenuated: provisions were passed that required the girl to have
previously had a chaste reputation, allowed a defense of claiming the girl was thought to
be over the age of consent, or dispensed more lenient punishments if the defendant was
himself underage
40
(Cocca, 2006; J. S. Ehrlich, 2014; Larson, 1997). This is not to say
that an agent-centered, idealistic approach was wrong, but rather to say that in and of
itself it wasn’t enough to complete the WCTU’s goals. By positioning girls as incapable

40
Similar exceptions to this last attenuation have continued in today’s “Romeo & Juliet”
laws, which make exceptions for consensual activity between a minor and someone
whose age is within a few years of their but may or may not be a minor (e.g. a 17-year-
old and a 19-year-old). The existence and specific of these laws vary from state to state.
For the WCTU, however, such exceptions were important because they tended not to
make any distinction between forced and non-forced sexual activity (i.e. they did not
recognize that a 17-year-old could rape another 17-year-old).
92
of making their own decisions and men as their protectors, the WCTU limited their own
outreach. For example, one correspondent to the WCTU wrote:
Let me quote a few words from a personal letter from Helen Gardener. She says:
‘There is one point I wish you would always make clear to your women, and that
is that the age would better be seven than twelve or fourteen. At seven the child
has no internal forces to fight. At twelve and fourteen nature is her antagonist. She
does not understand herself, is morbid, nervous, and sensitive, and these are the
ages that almost all the states have placed as the age of consent. If they had baited
a trap and set it they could not have done worse for little girls of the lower and
middle class, those who have had no home training and whose mothers do not
understand what this means. I have yet to find the man who does not recognize
this when it is pointed out to him, and who is not willing and anxious to remedy
it. (Allen, 1895, p. 12)
Even girls who have reached the new age of consent are portrayed as “morbid, nervous,
and sensitive” and “nature is her antagonist.” If this is the case, how can girls then be
expected to be competent enough to engage in public politics? By framing the issue as
one of men protecting girls from all sorts of moral dangers, including themselves,
41
the
WCTU limited their ability to make an impact. Since an idealistic frame was front and
center, questioning girl’s reasoning abilities could only backfire.
Of course, the WCTU’s actions were not the final word on issues of sexual
violence, of which the WCTU themselves were well aware. According to Abbie Morton
Diaz (1889):

41
Themselves, in this case, can refer both to men and girls
93
We should not accept as fixed and final the modes of procedure which embody
past conceptions of what is wisest and best.” Thought is a living force; an active,
working, enthuse force. It means progress. Thus it is the duty of each generation,
while struggling with its inheritance, to think higher and wiser thoughts for the
next one. (p. 7)
Idealistic progress takes time. Though it may be viewed as “only a lot of women talking”
it is “their talk [that] embodies thought vital to humanity” (Diaz, 1889, p. 7). In other
words, through their age of consent campaigns, the WCTU was “laying hold of the power
that moves the world” (Diaz, 1889, p. 7) . However, such an action was part of a process,
and further progress needed to be accomplished by future generations. This is, of course,
exactly what happened. Building on the idealistic foundation the WCTU and others had
established, anti-SV movements in the 1970s continued to agitate for social change.
94
CHAPTER THREE

Introduction
Although the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union eventually achieved its goal
of raising the age of consent across the United States, the battle against sexual violence
was far from over. Women in the late 1960s and 1970s, joining together as organized
women’s rights movements, quickly realized that sexual violence could not be ignored.
Any gains that they made in social, economic, or other areas were curtailed by the threat
of sexual violence, leading to the awareness that “we women have aspirations and the
promise of freedom for a new generation, but we have the fears of our mothers and
grandmothers” (Medea & Thompson, 1974, p. 3). In response, women’s groups across
the country organized around the shared goal of combatting the threat of sexual violence.
In this chapter, I will explore works produced by two of the more prominent of
such groups, the New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) and Chicago Women Against
Rape (CWAR). Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women (New York Radical Feminists,
1974) and Against Rape (Medea & Thompson, 1974) (written by the NYRF and CWAR
and the titles abbreviated RSW and AR respectively) were two of the earliest mass-
produced texts on sexual violence. Each included not only practical suggestions for what
to do in case a woman were in a dangerous situation, but also guidelines for how to
galvanize anti-rape awareness and advocacy efforts in the community. These books took
a pragmatic, agency-centered approach to the issue of sexual violence; by focusing on
how sexual violence operates, they hoped to end it.
95
In the following pages, I will outline the general context in which NYRF and
CWAR were operating, including then-current legislation on and attitudes towards sexual
violence. From there, I will provide an overview of the antirape movements’ actions as
well as the background of the specific sources I will be analyzing. Next, I will explain
Burke’s work on agency as a pentadic element and its connections to the philosophy of
pragmatism. Finally, I will discuss AR (Medea & Thompson, 1974) and RSW (New York
Radical Feminists, 1974) as agency-focused texts that demonstrate the 1970s antirape
movements adopted a pragmatic approach towards fighting against sexual violence.

Context for the 1970s Antirape Movement
Even though we are obviously closer in time to the 1970s than we are to the late
nineteenth-century, we still must view the anti-SV movements of that time contextually.
Due in no small part to the efforts of 1970s women’s movements, the landscape of sexual
violence is in many ways quite different today. Understanding both legal and academic
perspectives on sexual violence from the 1970s can thus establish a starting point for our
discussions of CWAR and NYRF’s work.

Legal Views of Sexual Violence
While the age of consent had been raised as a result of the WCTU’s relentless
efforts, many other laws focused on sexual violence were not much improved from the
previous century. Rape, for example, was historically considered more of a crime against
property than a crime against a person. According to Susan Brownmiller (1990), who
96
wrote the first
42
successful popular press book on sexual assault, “the historic price of
woman’s protection by man against man was the imposition of chastity and monogamy.
A crime committed against her became a crime committed against the male estate” (p. 7).
Rather than the woman being the one who was the wronged party, the man who “owned”
her chastity (i.e. her husband or father) was the one who had been harmed. For example,
many states saw rape as a crime against society; in the state of California, rape was
classified “along with gambling, indecent exposure, horse racing, and abortion as crimes
against the person and against public decency and good morals”(Cobb & Schauer, 1977;
LeGrand, 1977, p. 69). Laws that provided spousal exceptions to rape and required
previous chastity also reinforced the idea of women as property. Society saw the only
damage as coming from when a woman was raped from a man who was not her husband.
Similarly, once a woman had had sex, she no longer had the value of her virginity.
Of course, such sentiments were not officially encoded in state laws about sexual
violence. However, the spousal exception and the previous chastity requirement were in
many state laws. While there is no single set of rape laws in the United States, the Model
Penal Code, originally written in 1962 by the American Law Institute, provides a
baseline. The Model Penal Code not only inspired numerous state statutes, but also
influenced how laws across the country were interpreted in courts (Robinson & Dubber,
2010). Spousal rape exceptions, requirements for previous chastity, and other limitations
on the criminal definition of rape and sexual assault were all written into the Model Penal
Code (The American Law Institute, 1962).

42
Her book, Against Our Will, was originally published in 1975 and has been
periodically reprinted since.
97
To add insult to injury, in order for this sort of action to even be considered
criminal, specific requirements had to be met. Successful prosecution for the crime of
rape entailed penetration, corroboration, and identification (Brownmiller, 1990; New
York Radical Feminists, 1974); ultimately, this meant that court cases had a greater focus
on interrogating the victim rather than the defendant. The Model Penal Code (The
American Law Institute, 1962) stated that:
No person shall be convicted of any felony under this Article upon the
uncorroborated testimony of the alleged victim. Corroboration may be
circumstantial. In any prosecution before a jury for an offense under this Article,
the jury shall be instructed to evaluate the testimony of a victim or complaining
witness with special care in view of the emotional involvement of the witness and
the difficulty of determining the truth with respect to alleged sexual activities
carried out in private. (p. 138)
The emotional involvement of the victim as a witness, but not the defendant if they chose
to take the stand, was something of which to be wary; certainly being on trial for a sexual
crime entails a degree of emotional involvement. The model code was enacted in multiple
states, including California, where juries were instructed:
A charge such as that made against the defendant in this case is one which is
easily made and once made, difficult to defend against, even if the person is
iinnocent. Therefore, the law requires that you examine the testimony of the
female person named in the information with caution. (as cited in Geis, 1977, p.
35)
98
Laws, however, did (and do) vary significantly from state to state.
43
The majority of
states did not have an official legal corroboration requirement, for example, and many of
those that did only required corroboration under specific circumstances (“The Rape
Corroboration Requirement: Repeal Not Reform,” 1972; Younger, 1971).
44
But even in
areas where these stipulations were not encoded in the legal code, they were often de
facto requirement, something that for the NYRF (1974) “suggest[ed] that it is the nature
of the victim and not the nature of the crime that necessitates corroboration” (p. 126).
While no one deserves to be falsely convicted, crimes of sexual violence were the only
ones treated in such a manner, the Model Penal Code makes no other mentions of jury
instructions towards witnesses with uncorroborated evidence. Such a fact lends strength
to the NYRF’s analysis.
Even beyond the complications imposed by these specific conditions, rape was
considered incredibly difficult to prosecute. First, only certain forms of rape were legally
considered crimes; spousal rape, for example, was seen as an oxymoron, “the wife having
given her permanent sexual consent to her husband” (New York Radical Feminists, 1974,
p. 89). As mentioned previously, the Model Penal Code (The American Law Institute,
1962) specifically exempted spouses from being prosecuted for sexual offenses. Second,
the past sexual behavior of women as victims—but not of men as the accused—was

43
New York, for example, passed a new rape law in 1972 that altered the corroboration
requirement, improving the legal situation (“The Rape Corroboration Requirement:
Repeal Not Reform,” 1972). Despite this, however, corroboration of victim accounts
often continues to be essentially a de facto requirement even today (meaning that while it
is not encoded into the law, judges and juries are hesitant to convict without independent
corroboration). Such stipulations call back to our discussion in Chapter 2 of women’s
untrustworthiness and the difficulties in viewing them as full agents.
44
This is also not an issue that has gone away today. At the beginning of 2017, the New
Hampshire legislature was considering a new bill (HB 106) that would establish a
`corroboration requirement for all sexual assault cases.
99
allowed into court (The American Law Institute, 1962); the idea that women’s behavior
or dress in some way caused the assault was often used as a defense. Even the fact that a
woman voluntarily accompanyied or associatied with a man was considered a valid
defense to rape (The American Law Institute, 1962). Third, courts were systems run
largely by men, who comprised the majority of judges, lawyers, and often jurors. At least
until 1975, a Massachusetts law decreed that “a judge may bar all women from juries
hearing cases of child rape, statutory rape, obscenity and various sex-related crimes
because women might be ‘embarrassed’ by the testimony” (Brownmiller, 1990, footnote
on p. 225). In other words, women were systematically excluded from serving on juries
about the very crimes by which they were disproportionately likely to be affected. This
meant that even if a rape charge were able to proceed to trial, those involved in deciding
the outcome of the case would often identify more with the accused rather than the
victim. Each step of the legal process, then, was configured to create as many barriers to
the successful prosecution of rape as possible.

Contemporaneous Research on Sexual Violence
Just as women were not only relegated to the sidelines of legal proceedings
concerning sexual violence, so too were they and their viewpoints ignored in the relevant
academic research of the time. This was a matter of particular concern in the fields of
psychology and mental health, where, along with legal journals, a majority of the work
on sexual violence was being done. According to Albin (1977), “in few other contexts
have women been as maligned, as degraded, and yet as ignored as in discussions of rape
by mental health professionals” (p. 423). Working based on Freudian theory, the majority
100
of academic work prior to the early-to-mid-1970s focused on figuring out what the victim
did to cause rape and what could be done to help the offender (Albin, 1977; Brownmiller,
1990; Chappell, Geis, & Fogarty, 1974). Women were often portrayed as the cause of
sexual violence; men were the victims. While this statement could perhaps be taken as an
enlightened view of sexual violence that recognizes such acts can occur in situations
besides the traditionally recognized man-as-rapist/woman-as-victim scenario, it is quite
the opposite. Instead, sexual violence research at the time largely concluded that, yes,
men were the ones committing acts of sexual violence towards women, but that women
caused men to do so, making men women’s victims. Rapists, therefore, deserved more
sympathy than rape victims. Abrahamsen (1960), for example, contended that:
There is frequently also a certain relationship between a criminal and the victim
he chooses and we find this is the case when a man commits sexual assault. The
offender often creates the circumstances (of which he too becomes a victim), but
the victim herself unconsciously also may tempt the offender [….] Often a
women [sic] unconsciously wishes to be taken by force. (p. 161).
Sexual violence thus was posited as occurring because women wanted it to, making men
unwilling participants. Even though Abrahamsen acknowledges that “the offender often
creates the circumstances,” Abrahamsen dismisses the offender’s responsibility by
positioning him as a victim of those same circumstances.
Not all research that originated in that era, however, took such an extreme stance.
Amir (1968, 1971), for example, produced some of the most well-known research on
sexual violence, popularizing the concept of “victim precipitation” (1968). Essentially,
victim precipitation means that men misinterpret women’s behavior as somehow
101
improper in a way that signifies that the woman is sexually available and that any sexual
advances the man makes, even to the point of rape, are justified.
45
Victim precipitation:
describes those rape situations in which the victim actually, or so it was deemed,
agreed to sexual relations but retracted before the actual act or did not react
strongly enough when the suggestion was made by the offender(s). (Amir, 1968,
p. 495)
Attitudes towards victim precipitation expressed in the literature are confusingly
contradictory. Amir wrote that “the victim is not solely responsible for what” happens,
“at least she is often a complementary partner” (1968, p. 493); at the same time, he chides
law enforcement officers who might think that “the victim’s behavior and the situation
[are] the ‘motive for the offense’” (1968, p. 494). So while what a woman does not
literally cause herself to be raped, in Amir’s view, she is still responsible for avoiding
miscommunications that might cause a man to think she is interested in sex when she is
not (thus leading to her rape). Likewise, it can be difficult to distinguish when sentiments
about victim precipitation are being explained and when they are being endorsed,
although such problems were (and are still today) by no means unique to research on
victim precipitation. Ultimately, however, research on victim precipitation put forth the
view that the blame for sexual violence was placed on women who did not act
appropriately. While the basic idea that women caused sexual violence was not novel,
cloaking it in the respectability of published academic research further legitimized and
reinforced it.

45
Or, to be more accurate, are not actually justified but are seen as such by men who so
misinterpret women’s behavior.
102
Others besides Amir took the conclusion that women were to blame for men’s
sexually violent acts to an even greater extreme. Abrahamsen (1960) studied the wives
of eight convicted rapists, ultimately determining that it was the wives’ fault that their
husbands had “turned to” rape. In other words, if their wives had been more sexually
accommodating or kinder to their husbands, the men would not have “had to’”go out and
rape other women. Women who were not even involved in the situation were thus
deemed to be responsible for rape while the men who committed the actions were the
real victims. Abrahamsen based his work on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, using
Rorschach inkblot tests to analyze the offender’s wives. He held that the results of these
tests showed the wives feared men. Abrahamsen
46
(Palm & Abrahamsen, 1954)
continued his analysis, claiming:
Our Rorschachs revealed that the psychodynamics were far more complex and
that the overt masochism and submissiveness of these women was a reaction to
their strong underlying feelings of hostility against men. Their fear and guilt
resulted from aggressive intents toward men [….] It was apparent that these
women, under the surface of their masochistic submissiveness showed a
masculine and aggressive orientation. They tended to compete with men and to
negate their femininity. There can be no doubt that they had latent homosexual
incliniations. In this connection, it is interesting that the husbands, who were
given psychiatric treatement in Sing Sing Prison, expressed various complaints
about the lack of sexual spontaneity of their wives. They complained of having to

46
When referring to this study, people usually cite Abrahamsen’s book The Psychology
of Crime, of which he was the sole author. The work discussed in that book concerning
the wives of convicted rapists, however, was originally published in a co-authored report.
103
‘bribe’ her, about their wife’s habit of sleeping in her underwear, and generally
about their frigidity. In some cases a prolonged period of sexual frustration
proceeded the offense.
In drawing up a completed picture of the psychodynamics of our subjects
the following emerges: We deal with the type of woman who, in her sexual
attitude, stimulates aggression only to encounter it with rejection. (168-169)
Abrahamsen earlier revealed that interviews with the wives indicated that they were
abused, returning to their husbands out of “fear of being killed, fear of being beaten, fear
of reprisals to the people who sheltered them” (p. 169). Still, he (and his co-author, Rose
Palm) found that wives were in fact aggressors, not victims.
Women were, in fact, rarely viewed as people who had been wronged, regardless
of the circumstances. Even advice from that time on how to medically examine women
who had been raped often focused more on blaming women for their own predicament
than it did on either treating them or collecting evidence. Enos, Beyer, and Mann (1972)
suggested a series of questions that emergency room doctors should ask women who
came into hospitals after claiming
47
to have been raped. These questions included “did
you know the man?,” “did you voluntarily accompany him in his car?,” (p. 50) and
“when was the last time you had intercourse prior to this event?” (p. 53). While some of
these questions had either relevant medical or investigative reasons for being asked (e.g.,
finding out if someone has had sexual intercourse within a certain period of time prior to
being raped could help examiners more accurately interpret the results of forensic tests),

47
I use the phrase “claiming to have been raped” here not to cast doubt on any such
assertions but instead to most accurately represent the perspective of the authors.
104
others functioned almost entirely to discredit a woman’s story. For example, the authors
claimed that:
if the victim was acquainted with the attacker or voluntarily accepted
transportation from him
48
, the probability that a sadomasochistic rape
49
has
happened is lessened. The current hitchhiking fad among teenagers falls into this
category. During the past six months we have examined seven such cases. The
complaints were usually registered after the young woman had been subjected to
rough treatment or abnormal acts by one or more of the males who offered her the
ride. (p. 53)
In other words, only incidents where the woman’s behavior remained within certain
limited criteria were considered legitimate, regardless of whether she “had been subjected
to rough treatment or abnormal acts.” Accepting a ride was seen as consenting to any and
all sexual activity, with the woman having no right to complain. The authors insinuated
that the sex itself was consensual but because it involved “rough treatment or abnormal
acts” the woman decided to report it as rape, perhaps because they were ashamed or
vengeful. Women, then, could not be trusted. Here, we can see the intersection of legal
views of rape on medical perspectives; doctors would not declare that rape had occurred

48
This is similar to the statute in the Model Penal Code, which stated that rape is a first
degree felony as long as “the victim was not a voluntary social companion of the actor
upon the occasion of the crime and had not previously permitted him sexual liberties”; if
either of those conditions were met, it was a lesser charge.
(The American Law Institute, 1962, p. 132)
49
The use of the term sadomasochistic rape here is used to mean “real” rape in the sense
that it should be treated as such by the hospital and law enforcement. This is shown by
how the authors advised that “if there is some doubt in the examiner’s mind, after all the
data have been reviewed, that the case represents an actual sadomasochistic rape, the
impression is usually expressed as ‘rape or intercourse’ within a given time period” (Enos
et al., 1972, p. 55). In other words, if something is not a sadomasochistic rape, then it is
not really rape and must be consensual intercourse.
105
without both physical evidence (corroboration) and past sexual behavior that fit their
image of a “proper” rape victim.
Unfortunately, even if a woman who had been raped met the doctors’
expectations on both these counts, it would still be possible for them to dismiss her claim
as spurious. The researchers also critiqued women’s physical and emotional appearance;
these factors, too, were used to discredit women. The first thing Enos, Beyer, and Mann
(1972) noted when talking about how to assess the “emotional state of victim” was how
“a lack of emotional response […] might indicate that the victim is fabricating the
complaint” (p. 51)
50
. The rest of that section was essentially a diatribe
51
on how the
authors perceived women to frequently file false reports of rape and why they do. Not
only did this ignore any mental health concerns that should be addressed if someone is
raped, it also worked to invalidate women who had been raped. One of the reasons the
authors included for why a woman might file a false rape report was “rough treatment by
a lover” (p. 51); even domestic violence, whether sexual or not, was apparently no cause
for concern so long as those involved were in a relationship. Like with women who
hitchhiked, entering into any sort of consensual relationship with a man was seen as
evidence of sexual consent.
Similarly, doctors were instructed to observe whether the “vaginal orifice” was
“virginal” or “marital” (Enos et al., 1972, p. 51). Once more, the criteria for whether or

50
While law enforcement officers do sometimes gauge emotional responses for
appropriateness in other situtations, rarely do they do so in order to determine whether a
crime has occurred. It is more likely to happen when they wish if someone is involved in
a crime or not (e.g. a parent of a killed child who does not cry might fall under
suspicion). In either case, responses to trauma are varied and there is not one correct
emotional response; using emotional responses to dismiss a criminal complaint is
inappropriate.
51
The use of the word diatribe here is, at most, only a slight exaggeration.
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not medical professionals decided if a woman was raped or not relied more on false
dichotomies and adherence to traditional gender norms than anything else. Whether
women exhibited (and if they even should exhibit) physical signs of previous intercourse
was connected to their marital status. Women were not to be trusted in determining what
happened to them; the roles of victim and offender were reversed, with men becoming
the unimpeachable casualties of women’s vengeance and regretted lust.
Other researchers, however, did focus on the sexual offender and his
52
problems
as an offender. Groth and Burgess (1977b) performed a study on whether rapists had
“erectile inadequacy,” “premature ejaculation,” or “ejaculatory incompetence” in order to
argue that the absence of semen during a medical rape exam did not conclusively mean
there was no intercourse (1977b, pp. 764–765). The same authors (1977a) also proposed
that rape should be recognized not just as a crime but as a diagnosis in the American
Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the
DSM). While their aim was to allow people convicted of rape to receive treatment that
would hopefully stop them from committing further sexual violence, the researchers’
view nonetheless aligned with similar perspectives that cast rapists as abnormal or
deviant, rather than seeing sexual violence as part and parcel of cultural attitudes toward
gender and sex. Although researchers at the time generally ignored such a cultural
connection, numerous studies did conclude that rapists were the “healthiest” of the
various categories of sex offenders since, with the notable exception of consent, their
partners and actions were the same as the “normal” male (Albin, 1977, p. 426). Thus

52
Keeping in mind the focus at the time on men raping women to the exclusion of any
other possibilities.
107
since male rapists sought out sexual activity with women,
53
rather than with other men,
children, or through solo masturbation, they were considered normal. It was considered
better, in other words, for a man to rape a woman than for a man to have consensual sex
with another man (Albin, 1977). Other researchers argued similar things, with one
describing the “continuum” of sexual offenders “from rapists to homosexual
paedophiles” (Ellis, Doorbar, & Johnston, 1954; Hammer & Glueck, 1957, p. 330).
Occasionally, some researchers did expand their definition of rape beyond vaginal
penetration by a penis. Kardener’s (1975) work on rape fantasies, for example, defined
rape as “all instances, genital or extra-genital, of a forced, dominant-submissive, dyadic
relationship in which the submissive partner is cast in a denigrated, demeaned position”
(p. 51). This definition was ultimately overbroad, however, given that he also included
“the mother who forces her child to eat” as a form of rape (p. 51). More to the point,
however, Kardner argued that rape fantasies are “needed, if often disguised
gratification[s],” helping us to cope with the sublimated sexuality we fear (p. 50). His
theories of rape fantasies ultimately ended up reinforcing the idea that women are passive
and resist sexual advances not because they do not desire sex but instead because
resisting is the “proper” thing to do. Kardner held that women “pick a fight and set up a

53
Again, remembering that at this time the term rapist was almost exclusively used to
refer to men who raped women, most often with the implication that neither party was a
child. It is worth noting, however, that AR (Medea & Thompson, 1974) defines rape as
“any sexual intimacy forced on one person by another,” which they acknowledge means
“it would be possible […] for a woman to rape a man” (p. 12). Such incidences are not
discussed however, because the authors “feel that it is so rare in comparison to the
reverse situation that to deal with it at all would be to overemphasize its important” (p.
12). While women raping men is not as rare as Medea and Thompson believed, it is
certainly reported much less often, even today. In any event, even when the possibility of
women raping and/or men being raped was recognized it was not really seriously
considered in the 1970s.
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situation that places the man aggressively on the offensive, after which love-making can
ensue” (p. 56, verb tenses altered to fit sentence).
Finally, some research saw rape as only incidental to the truly important matters
at hand. A law review journal article from 1972 analyzed a case where a girl invited a
boy to enter her room through an open window to have sex, thinking he was her
boyfriend; she realized she did not know him mid-coitus (Odgers, 1972). The boy was
convicted of trespassing, though this conviction was later overturned. Rather than
discussing whether the crime should have been charged as rape or some other form of
sexual assault to begin with, the focus of the legal analysis was instead entirely on
whether or not the boy trespassed. While I do not deny that this is a valid legal discussion
and undoubtedly an interesting question to practitioners of this type of law, it is not a
particularly germane discussion to an article titled “On Rape Intent” (Odgers, 1972). On
the flip side, many papers and books with a focus on sexual assault were given names
that did not indicate their subject, such as a French article with a title that translates as
“young girl-chasers with motor-cycles” (Chappell, Geis, & Fogarty, 1974, p. 252). This
combination of misnamed articles meant that relevant research on sexual violence was
incredibly difficult to find, as demonstrated by the roadblocks feminists ran into when
they attempted to investigate sexual violence (Matthews, 1974).
Ultimately, the research about sexual violence leading up to the 1970s anti-SV
movements demonstrated a lack of consideration of women’s perspectives on the matter.
Even research that was generally sympathetic to the issue of sexual violence perpetuated
dual gender standards of behavior and expected women to constrain their actions lest they
provoke a rape. Rape was less a women’s issue than it was women’s problem, and “the
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view of rape as neither perversion, taboo, nor serious crime against women was thus
substantiated by research whose underlying assumption was precisely that view” (Albin,
1977, p. 427). By basing research designs and questions on premises that led to foregone
conclusions, sexual violence research leading up to the 1970s did little more than
undergird inequalities and provide a rationalization to explain away for men’s sexual
violence.

Response of Women’s Movements
In essence, the women’s antirape movements of the 1970s needed to address a
society with a remarkably blasé attitude towards sexual violence. They had to battle
against not only sexual violence, but also against psychological experts, the legal
establishment, academia, and society at large. The general idea of the time that they were
fighting against an be summed up as:
force and consent are the significant issues in rape trials. Many times a female
will submit after a lot of talk, liquor, and lunges, and later for a wide range
of reasons, decide that she was really raped. Some girls rape awful easy.
So many chicks say no no when there’s yes yes in her eyes, and their
thighs seem to spread at a mere flick of the finger. The rape law is often
used by a woman to ‘get’ a former boyfriend or a hoped for boyfriend who
never materialized. (as cited in Wood, 1974, p. 143)
As demonstrated by the above quote, the legal situation, and the research being done at
the time, sexual violence was not taken particularly seriously. Many women felt that they
were essentially alone, not realizing that their friends, mothers, and sisters had similar
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stories. Over time, however, more and more women began speaking to each other about
their experiences with sexual violence, realizing that it was a common event for them all.
As their own awareness of the issue grew, women organized to combat rape. Through
consciousness-raising (CR) groups, speakouts and rape conferences, and women’s
centers and crisis hotlines, antirape groups of the 1970s all contributed to antirape
activism, which was “an attempt to mobilize women to combat their oppression in a
sexist society” (New York Radical Feminists, 1974, p. 174). While these actions were
directed specifically towards sexual violence, they were also connected to larger concerns
about women’s equality generally.
According to the New York Radical Feminists (1974), all of these actions were
tied together, with CR as “the initial step in the process” (p. 4). Although each of these
actions is discussed separately below, I would emphasize, like the New York Radical
Feminists, that “in reality these are not separate steps at all, but a complex experience of
growing awareness and involvement” since people “are radicalized not only intellectually
and politically, but emotionally as well” (p. 4).
In many ways, CR groups served as a “first step” to more public forms of
speaking out against rape (New York Radical Feminists, 1974). Karlyn Kohrs Campbell
(1973), who saw women’s liberation rhetoric as its own genre, argued that this
connection between the personal and political was integral to the women’s movement.
For Campbell:
in its paradigmatic form, ‘consciousness raising’ involves meetings of small,
leaderless groups in which each person is encouraged to express her personal
feelings and experiences. There is no leader, rhetor, or expert. All participate and
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lead; all are considered expert. The goal is to make the personal political: to create
awareness (through shared experiences) that what were thought to
be personal deficiencies and individual problems are common and shared, a result
of their position as women. The participants seek to understand and interpret their
lives as women, but there is no ‘message,’ no ‘party line.’ Individuals are
encouraged to dissent, to find their own truths. (Campbell, 1973, p. 79)
CR was much less a matter of group therapy
54
and more about moving towards a new
awareness of the interactions between social and individual issues and the push for
change.
Once women had voiced their experiences with sexual violence among
themselves, they began to speak publicly on the issue. Rape speakouts and conferences
were organized in the early 1970s, starting with the New York Radical Feminists Rape
Speakout in 1971. These events brought issues of sexual violence to public attention and
provided an avenue for the sharing of women’s stories and other important information.
Besides rape, other issues of sexual violence such as sexual harassment were
covered as well. Unlike much of the anti-SV movement of the time that either ignored
differences in experiences of sexual violence due to race and/or class or even perpetuated
racist conceptions of sexual violence (e.g. only alluding to the race of an offender if they
were a man of color
55
), sexual harassment was one area that had strong, integral

54
Although some part of it did involve processing trauma (Luckhurst, 2008)
55
A particularly egregious example of this comes from AR (Medea & Thompson, 1974).
After discussing both Eldridge Cleaver, a black man who raped black women as
“practice” for white women and also Pakistani soldiers raping Bengali women, they then
related the account of the gang rape of a developmentally disabled woman by a fraternity
in the Midwestern United States. Race is never mentioned but, as they explained, “we
have told this story in order to show what normal, red-blooded American boys are
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involvement of women of color and blue collar women workers (Baker, 2004). While
much work and many workers on the issue did explicitly acknowledge issues of race and
class, such awareness was often missing in practice.
Beyond this issue (which was by no means exclusive to speakouts and
conferences, especially not those on sexual violence specifically), such events were in
many ways successful. They were able to gain attention and spread awareness, often
garnering news coverage. In addition, such projects often spun off into further feminist
anti-sexual-violence projects, such as women’s centers and crisis hotlines.
Women who had experienced sexual assault knew that there was little to no
reliable information on what to do if you were assaulted, who to turn to, and what would
happen if you were to report to the police. To address this obvious need, they created a
variety of materials. In addition to these informational resources, they also provided
emotional support. The first rape crisis center was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1972;
many others that followed used their structure as a model. Ultimately, rape crisis centers
and hotlines served several functions, including “provid[ing] information and services for
women who have just been raped as well as support for women who have been raped in
the past and either are having trouble adjusting emotionally or just would like to talk to
someone about their experience,” self-defense lessons, and advocacy for women who
interacted with legal and medical establishments (New York Radical Feminists, 1974, p.

capable of doing, not in isolation, not in dark and lonely alleys, not in the jungles of
Vietnam, but in their own fraternity house with the approval and participation of their
peers” (p. 35). The racial coding of this statement (“normal, red-blooded American
boys”) not only implies that the perpetrators are white without directly saying so, it also
establishes whiteness as normative and wholesome. While AR does then make efforts to
say that white men, too, can rape, it does so by not mentioning their race directly and by
positioning their acts of rape as unusual as compared to men of colors’.
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153). Crisis hotlines were often operated through women’s centers and consisted of a
phone number that would connect anyone who called to a volunteer; this volunteer could
offer much of the same information that the rape crisis center did or direct the caller to
the appropriate information or service. Unfortunately, however, such services generally
operated on shoestring budgets and were staffed by volunteers; they were locked in a
perpetual struggle for resources.
In addition to the services offered by women’s centers and crisis hotlines, antirape
groups began to build their own research base, going off their experiences, interviews,
culture, and even “[finding] the very absence of research significant” (New York Radical
Feminists, 1974, p. 59). Some of the research articles they wrote were developed from
and in response to conferences, some were guidelines on how to establish and develop
your own rape crisis centers and hotlines, more were explorations of how rape occurred,
and still others were some combination of these. The writers of such pieces were not
simply sharing their experiences, however, but instead engaging in something that “goes
beyond the formulation of a feminist point of view—our attitudes and ideas are tested and
verified, not merely expressed [….] it attempts to describe not only our oppression, but to
analyze why and how women are oppressed” (New York Radical Feminists, 1974, p. 60).
While many of these works were not, strictly speaking, held to the rigors of a peer-
reviewed academic process, they nonetheless engaged in critical evaluation and
exploration of sexual violence. It is important to note that these were not any sort of
“self-help” guides but instead were more analytic in nature, offering frank discussions of
sexual violence.
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Individual women also produced some texts of their own. One of the earliest and
most influential of these works was Susan Griffin’s “Rape: The All-American Crime”
(1971), a piece cited in many of the writings on sexual violence that followed. In her
article, Griffin points out that “rape is a form of mass terrorism, for the victims of rape
are chosen indiscriminately, but the propagandists for male supremacy broadcast that it is
women who cause rape by being unchaste or in the wrong place at the wrong time—in
essence, by behaving as though they were free” (p. 35). The recognition of the gendered
nature of sexual violence and its connection to gender inequality that Griffin’s article
helped generate inspired other works, including Susan Brownmiller’s (1990) widely-read
Against Our Will, as well as other publications analyzed in this chapter.

Sources
As mentioned previously, I will be focusing my analysis on two sources, Against
Rape (1974) and Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women (1974) (again, abbreviated AR
and RSW respectively). Taken together, these two books offered insight into how sexual
violence was discussed by 1970s women’s antirape movements and also provided an
explicit description of how antirape activist groups form and operate.

Against Rape
AR (1974) was written by Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson. Medea
organized the first rape conference in the Midwestern United States in 1972; the
organization Chicago Women Against Rape, with which both Medea and Thompson
were associated, was founded soon after. While new copies of AR are no longer available,
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it remained in print for several decades. The book is divided into ten chapters in addition
to an introduction and appendix. The chapters cover the topics “What is Rape?,” “Why
Do Men Rape Women?,” “Who Is the Rapist?,” “Rape and Social Patterns,” “The Little
Rapes,” “Precautions and Preventions,” “Self-Defense,” “Psychological Reactions,” “I
Thought the Rape Was Bad…,” and “The Movement Against Rape.” Much of the
information in the book is based on responses to a survey about experiences of rape the
authors distributed at rape conferences and through women’s newspapers. The survey and
its results are described in an appendix.

Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women
RSW (1974) was written by the New York Radical Feminists and edited by
Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson. According to text inside the book’s front cover,
“rape can happen to any woman: And here is the first book that explores the reasons for
rape, tells women what they must do to protect themselves, and how they can work
together towards a solution.” This stated purpose is further elaborated throughout the
book’s contents. Beginning with the New York Radical Feminists Manifesto and ending
with ten appendices, the book has five additional sections: “Consciousness-Raising: Rape
Is Sexism Carried to its Logical Conclusion,” “Speaking-Out: An Open Act of
Rebellion,” “Feminist Analysis: The ‘Alleged’ Victim and the Psycho-Sexual System,”
“Legal Aspects: Rape by State,” and “Feminist Action: Women Must Begin Taking
Responsibility at All Times for the Survival and Well-Being of Other Women.” RSW
originated from the 1971 Rape Speak Out in New York and a subsequent conference on
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rape; many of the materials in the book are adapted from talks given at that first
conference.

Agency and Pragmatism
Before preceding to my analysis of RSW and AR, it is first important to establish a
firmer sense of what I mean by the terms agency and pragmatism. As a part of the pentad,
agency can be thought of as the answer to the question “how?”; it is the means by which
an act is accomplished (as opposed to the ends for which it is done, which are represented
by purpose) (Brock, 1990; Burke, 1969a). The agency-centered pragmatist is focused on
how well something works: “According to [William] James, the pragmatist evaluates a
doctrine by its ‘consequences,’ by what it is ‘good for,’ by ‘the difference it will make to
you and me,’ or by its ‘function,’ or by asking whether it ‘works satisfactorily’” (Burke,
1969a). Agency and purpose are therefore inextricably linked, as pragmatism,
represented by discourses that center around agency, looks at how effectively something
can achieve its purpose. Burke defines pragmatism by citing the Baldwin dictionary,
saying that “this term is applied by Kant to the species of hypothetical
imperative…which prescribes the means necessary to the attainment of happiness”
(Burke, 1969a). Similarly, quoting William James, Burke (Burke, 1969a) explains that
“Pragmatism is ‘a method only’” where “‘theories thus become instruments’” (p. 275).
To put it more simply, pragmatism looks at the tools by which a result is
achieved. When studying sexual violence and anti-SV movements, then, an agency-
centered, pragmatic perspective would be one that would focus on how sexual violence
occurs and how it can be prevented. The other pentadic terms are thus placed interrelated
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to agency, with agency being the ranking term. The motives for both acts of sexual
violence and its prevention are dramatized with a focus on how sexual violence occurs;
while the act of sexual violence and the people who commit it are important, ultimately
how it occurs is seen as the most crucial factor in understanding the issue.
Burke’s (1969a) descriptions of agency, unfortunately, are not necessarily the
most appropriate choice for a feminist project, given how he connects agency to gendered
stereotypes, explaining the division between agency and purpose by distinguishing
between women as lovers and women as mothers, the latter of which relates to agency
through “the combination of planning and usefulness that characterizes maternal care” (p.
283). While this explanation for agency runs counter to my application of it, however, it
does not lessen its utility. In other words, while Burke’s particular illustration for how
agency differs from purpose is one that is at odds with my project, the overall theory is
not.

Analysis of Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women and Against Rape
In their advocacy and awareness work, women’s groups faced the uphill struggle
of trying to make not only men but society at large identify with their campaign. As RSW
(1974) points out, “often the police (and the court) may, due to a common socio-cultural
orientation, see the situation from the offender’s point of view rather than from the
victim’s. Hence they may infer consent when none was given or think in terms of victim
precipitation” (p. 151). Thus, the issues of addressing sexual violence are depicted in
terms of the mechanisms by which society tends to value men’s accounts of sexual
violence over women’s. While agents (e.g. the police and court) are certainly a part of
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this picture, they are secondary in an explanation of human motives. Instead, the
“common socio-cultural orientation” is how individual agents lack identification with
women who have been raped.
While the difference may seem subtle, it is nonetheless important. The latter
describes human motives in terms of individuals and who acted, while the former
describes it in terms of the ideas that instrumented such actions. To put this in clearer
terms, we can use Kenneth Burke’s example from A Grammar of Motives (1969a). In it,
he walkedthrough an example “for the imputing of motives” in a scenario where a hero
escapes from being tied up by a villain (p. xx). When casting such a sequence of events in
a pragmatic light, Burke explained that:
pragmatists would probably have referred the motivation back to a source in
agency. They would have noted that our hero escaped by using an instrument, the
file by which he severed his bonds; then in this same line of thought, they would
have observed that the hand holding the file was also an instrument; and by the
same token the brain that guided the hand would be an instrument, and so
likewise the educational system that taught the methods and shaped the values
involved in the incident. (p. xxi, emphasis original)
Burke admitted, however, that “if you reduce the terms to any one of them, you will find
them branching out again; for no one of them is enough” (p. xxi). As discussed in the
previous chapter, for example, idealists feature the pentadic term of agent, which centers
around the mind. We can thus begin to see the difference between an agency-focused
approach that views the brain as an instrument, and an agent-focused approach that views
the mind as part and parcel with the person. Attempting to view everything from solely a
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pragmatic perspective, then, gives only a limited view of human motives; even an
agency-centered approach contains other pentadic elements.
Women’s groups needed to change that common socio-cultural orientation that
devalues women’s views on instances of sexual violence; in other words, they needed to
reorder power hierarchies. Given their limited resources and the need to balance between
focusing on social and individual factors, and between long-term and short-term
solutions, women’s groups of the 1970s understandably adopted a pragmatic, agency-
centered rhetoric. Through examining how they discussed the ways sexual violence
occurred and how it could be solved, we can better understand how a pragmatic approach
led to advocating for immediate fixes, even if that might cause more problems further
down the line.

Scope and Goals are Broad but Resources and Time are Limited
Anti-SV movements of the 1970s quickly realized that there was only so much
they could do, something both groups discussed in their works. While they wanted to be
able to advocate for change, they found that their work was almost entirely devoted to
triage, providing support and services for women after they had been the victims of
sexual violence. Political campaign efforts fell by the wayside in favor of time spent
running the rape crisis hotline and engaging in victim advocacy efforts. This applied not
only to more tangible outputs but also to the movements’ rhetoric; it is hard to be (self-)
critical about more subtle language use when you need to argue baseline premises such as
“women aren’t ‘asking for it.”
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The NYRF (1974) provided a good analysis of many of these problems, though
they noted that “so far [the] struggle for survival has not been so overwhelming that it has
totally absorbed the energies of the women involved, and they have not lost sight of basic
changes in the system that have to be made” (p. 178). Women’s centers faced two central
struggles: management of people and funding their projects. First, only a small number of
women were doing the vast majority of the work. As a result, new members were not
only intimidated by the amount of work they saw each woman doing but also did not
have anyone with free time to train them. This problem was acknowledged by women’s
groups, who tried to “do things that are easy for people—like signing petitions” to offer
alternatives to more dedicated involvement (New York Radical Feminists, 1974, p. 183).
This pragmatic approach recognized that the group needed to adapt how they address
sexual violence so they could be the most effective. By offering ways for people to
become involved that required less commitment (e.g. both signing a petition and
soliciting signatures for a petition are less time and effort intensive than staffing a crisis
hotline is), 1970s antirape groups provided a more accessible means for fighting sexual
violence. This is especially important given the context in which they were working—
given public knowledge of sexual violence that often consisted of ignorance and
misinformation, as discussed previously, people might be more willing to sign a petition
against rape, something they could easily support, then they would be to get involved
with something that would require them to have more developed knowledge about the
intricacies of sexual violence, such as working for legislation against marital rape.
Here, then, we can see how agency functions as a controlling term. Unlike the
WCTU, who viewed petitions from an agent-centered perspective, seeing them as a way
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to educate people who were unaware of issues, the 1970s antirape movements instead
emphasized the lack of investment petitions took. Agents became subordinate to
instruments, with the focus changing to how signatures could be gained rather than the
idealistic view that saw people as principal.
Second, due to a lack of funding, organizations were volunteer-run. While women
found fulfillment in volunteering for something they strongly supported, CR also helped
them realize how this connected to the devaluing of women’s work (New York Radical
Feminists, 1974). In other words, their efforts on this matter were not considered worthy
of compensation; they were expected to work for free. Not only did members of anti-SV
movements have to dedicate their time and talents towards a cause that many others
derided, they had to do so without acquiring any tangible gains for themselves. In other
words, while they contributed a great deal, they earned little other than personal
satisfaction in return; their efforts were not recognized. Understanding this helps us see
the connection between the lack of resources for anti-SV movements and the tensions
between fighting for both social and individual change. As Medea and Thompson (1974)
pointed out:
sexual freedom does not exist in a vacuum. The woman who has been given
sexual freedom without real financial and social independence will find herself
still bartering. The woman who has attained sexual independence but has not yet
freed herself from the destructive elements involved in her emotional relations to
men will find herself still tied to old ways of relating sexually.
Women are not yet fully independent people. At times they are just
independent enough to get themselves into dangerous predicaments. (p. 44)
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The WCTU’s actions, then, had succeeded in women becoming (at least partial) agents.
However, from the perspective of the 1970s anti-SVIMs, the primary issue became not
one of whether or not they were agents but instead of what agency they had. Thanks to
the progress gained by earlier women’s movements, their goal shifted to agency. The
1970s anti-SV movements, then, faced a dilemma between using the few resources they
had to address the immediate problems they were facing and pushing for long-term
change.
What’s more, women’s lack of resources was directly tied to the problems they
were facing in that insufficient financial freedom often made women vulnerable to sexual
violence. For example, women whose labor as housewives was uncompensated might
stay with a man who sexually abused them because they lacked the resources to leave;
similarly, women trapped in low-paying jobs might be unable to afford cab fare to escape
from a date who was sexually pressuring them, thus forcing them to rely on him for
transportation home.
Women, then, did not have agency in this situation; their lack of money meant
they lacked the proper instruments to truly act. The 1970s antirape movements’ statement
of motives concerning sexual assault highlighted this, demonstrating how the lack of
tools meant women’s actions were effectively pre-determined. The scene, too, was
important in this case. Medea and Thompson (1974) detailed several scenarios in which
the setting is an indication (but not a cause of) acts of sexual violence. The scene,
however, was never the primary pentadic element; instead, the lack of agency to cope
with the scene (e.g. having to go to men’s dorms to have parties in college, where they
could not control the situation, because women could not have alcohol in their own).
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Such situations were not accounted for in earlier research on sexual violence.
Instead, as in previously discussed work (Enos et al., 1972), women who entered into
social relationships with men were seen as consenting to sexual activity regardless of
whether or not they actually agreed to whatever sexual activities took place.
56
However,
this was a problem that women themselves found difficult to fix; while their own lack of
organized resources to address sexual violence helped them realize the connection
between individual financial dependence and individual vulnerability to sexual violence,
so too did their own lack of financial freedom mean their organized efforts could not
fully address the totality of the issue.

Tension Between Short-Term and Long-Term Solutions
As discussed in the previous section, women’s anti-SV movements often were so
busy dealing with the small, immediate problems that they found it difficult to secure the
time to address the source of those tproblems. In response, the movements adopted an
agent-centered, pragmatic response that allowed them to talk about the bigger picture
theoretically while practically focusing on immediate solutions.
One issue that both the CWAR and NYRF dealt with was how to pursue legal
reform. A point of great contention was whether or not laws should be revised to
distinguish between different categories of rape, meaning, for example, that spousal rape
would be a different crime from stranger rape (New York Radical Feminists, 1974).
Some activists were against such a distinction, holding that it would reinforce the idea
that some types of sexual violence were more legitimate than others. On the other hand,

56
Recall the marital rape exemptions as well as the earlier discussions of Enos, Beyer,
and Mann (1972).
124
“from a more practical point of view it would be wise to adopt a distinction between ‘date
rape’ and ‘stranger rape’ since jurors are likely to adopts such a distinction on their own”
(Wood, 1974, p. 155); differentiating between the two allows for convictions to be made
in cases of date rape where consent is a common defense that is difficult to counter.
This “more practical point of view” is indicative of an agency-centered approach.
It recognizes that while the proposed categorization further reifies a ranking system of
sexual violence, such a hierarchy already exists. Institutionalizing it through legislation
would merely allow convictions for forms of sexual violence that would not fall under the
cultural conception of “real” rape. In other words, a separate crime that covered date
rape, even if the offense were not considered as serious as “real” stranger rape, would
allow for criminal convictions for instances of sexual violence that would otherwise be
dismissed by judges and juries who dismiss the crime and place the responsibility on the
victim.
Changing cultural attitudes take time, but changing the likelihood of a conviction
can happen much more quickly. In this case, the distinction between different acts is used
in order to advance a pragmatic approach. The antirape movement, then, wanted to adapt
to the legal system it faced; rather than expecting juries’ attitudes to change immediately
if the law does (e.g. for juries to convict someone without corroboration), they instead
wanted to offer options that would allow for people to convict without changing their
“common socio-cultural orientation” (New York Radical Feminists, 1974, p. 151). The
strategy focuses on feasible outcomes rather than broad cultural change.
Of course, the NYRF (1974) do point out that “we must not settle for the
symbolic justice of laws; rather, we must seek to change the subtle mechanisms by which
125
we are oppressed as human beings” (p. 132). Re-ordering the hierarchy, in other words, is
not abandoned; it is kept in mind as the ultimate goal. The focus, however, is on how that
can be achieved most effectively—on what agency can be used. The answer, according to
the CWAR and NYRF, is through short-term solutions such as rape crisis hotlines. This
same balance between the long-term and the short-term is also seen in the somewhat
ambiguous attitude towards self-defense. By this, I mean that while both the CWAR and
NYRF advocated for women to learn self-defense, they were both wary of the
implications of saying that sexual violence could be prevented by women defending
themselves. Such wariness is understandable, especially given earlier research on victim
precipitation; even implying that women’s actions caused or led to sexual violence could
be seen as reinforcing cultural systems that underlay sexual violence.
The CWAR solved this difficulty by distinguishing between the “absurdity” of
placing restrictions on women on the one hand, and “what women themselves can do to
reduce the possibility of being raped” on the other (Medea & Thompson, 1974, p. 59).
They explain that “since it is unlikely that there will be any restriction on men in the near
future, and since women should not have to adapt to the present intolerable situation,”
then learning what women “can do to reduce the possibility of being raped” is the
appropriate approach (p. 59). Restricting women is not the appropriate instrument by
which sexual violence can be prevented, especially since sexual violence takes place
despite (and perhaps even because of
57
) these restrictions. Instead, women themselves
should live relatively unrestricted but be prepared to protect themselves if necessary. The
focus on how women should not have to restrict themselves and that it is unlikely that

57
In the sense that restrictions on women’s behavior reinforce the idea that women who
do not follow those restrictions are “legitimate” targets for sexual violence.
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men would be restricted exemplifies a pragmatic approach to the issue. It functions to
alleviate the problem in the short-term (by teaching women to defend themselves against
attackers) while simultaneously pushing back against the idea that women must be “good
girls”
58
lest they risk being raped. Self-defense thus offered a competing statement of
motives to the popular narrative at the time, one which positioned men as agents
committing acts of violence, rather than women as agents committing acts of omission.
The following passage illustrates the ways that the women’s antirape movements
of the 1970s approached self-defense, seeing it as a balance of offering both short-term
results and the promise of long-term change:
There is another way [instead of seeing rape as inevitable and adjusting your way
of life in fear of it]. You could take a very good self-defense course and work at
becoming strong, healthy, and skilled at handling yourself. You would, of course,
still have to take precautions (and in what follows, we will outline these
precautions for you), but you wouldn’t be living in mortal fear of physical
violence. You could still find yourself in a situation where there is no possibility
of fighting, but at least you would have the option to fight whenever it is practical
or necessary. We hope that women will learn self-defense; at the same time, we
realize it is not appropriate for every woman. It takes time, energy, dedication,
and the will to fight, which you may not consider to be worth the amount of
freedom you hope to gain. Each woman must make the choice for herself.
As important as learning how to defend yourself is learning how to cope
with the idea of rape. Until it is reduced from an overwhelming, darkly evil

58
The use of the term girls here is intentional, since restrictions on women’s behavior
often serve to infantilize them.
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prospect, the individual woman will not be able to deal with it. One of the reasons
for the continuing increase in rapes, is that too many women are frightened by the
idea of rape to do anything about it. In addition, there are the women who are
convinced that they can’t fight, that they are helpless. To their way of thinking, a
man will naturally always overpower a woman. This defeatism undermines them
until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Medea & Thompson, 1974, pp. 44–
45)
The short-term advantages of learning self-defense were laid out first. Women “wouldn’t
be living in mortal fear of physical violence” and “would have the option to fight
whenever it is practical or necessary” (p. 44). Immediate, day-to-day lives would improve
and be less limited. At the same time, of course, the authors did acknowledge that there
were circumstances in which self-defense was not appropriate; it was no panacea and
certainly cannot eradicate rape completely. However, it did still hold out the hope for
longer-term changes, given that by helping women understand that they are not
“helpless,” it could void the “self-fulfilling prophecy” of “defeatism” (p. 45). The 1970s
anti-SV movements, then, placed an emphasis on empowering women to fight sexual
violence by offering them the tools to change their lives and the world around them. At
the same time, however, the focus on self-defense as a short-term solution did put the
burden of stopping sexual violence on women, potentially limiting options for long-term
solutions.
Devoting their limited resources to short-term solutions meant that long-term ones
fell by the wayside. This friction between the long-term and short-term was not, of
course, limited to the matter of self-defense, something many women realized after
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actively joining the fight against sexual violence: As one woman noted,“what I first
thought of [after several roommates were all attacked in the same area] was just somehow
getting a radio show that could publicize the different bad areas in the city to sort of warn
women. That’s sort of a bad thing because it’s keeping women from being free, but it
would help” (New York Radical Feminists, 1974, p. 183). For this activist, and for many
others, her first inclination was to stop rape is to warn women not to go to a certain area.
While she recognized the issues with such a strategy, she also maintained that “it would
help.” This tension is evidenced throughout much of the advice on how to avoid rape
given to women, though the actual helpfulness of such advice varies considerably. Many
of the “precautions” suggested in AR (Medea & Thompson, 1974) did rise to the level of
restrictions or adaptations. For example, the authors explain that the three options for
reducing instances of rape are: (1) living far away from civilization; (2) self-defense; or
(3) “try[ing] to understand what rape is,” which partially includes “some elementary self-
defense” and learning “how your manner of relating to men can lead you into the kind of
situation in which rape occurs” (Medea & Thompson, 1974, p. 60)
The last of these points in particular did indicate that women need to place some
restrictions on their behavior. While it might have been a matter of unclear wording, at
the surface telling women that they must understand “how your manner of relating to
men” can lead to rape is quite different from understanding the ways that men will use
women’s manner of relating to men as a way to justify rape; such advice veered
dangerously close to supporting the concept of victim precipitation. Despite the focus on
not blaming women for sexual violence, ultimately women were still the ones who
needed to change their behavior so that it did not provoke men. In other words, Medea
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and Thompson (1974) implied that women are responsible for managing men’s behavior,
up to and including sexual violence, even if at other points they explicitly decried this.
Similarly, they advised women to always keep the blinds in their apartment down (so that
people could neither tell if you are home or not nor see you when changing), and women
are also discouraged from hitchhiking with the chiding “it’s your decision, of course, but
hitchhiking is a very high-risk activity” (p. 65). Women were also advised not to enter
elevators if there is only a single man in them and to only use the laundromat during
certain hours. All of these changes were supposed to allow women to “do your best to
bring your life back to the way you want to live” (Medea & Thompson, 1974, p. 69,
emphasis original). In effect, restricting your life was supposed to free you. Women are
counseled to “dress sanely” (ibid, p. 68). While this advice may have been practical (e.g.
meaning that women should wear clothes in which their movement is not restricted), it
still may also have served to limit women from living the lives that they wanted.
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Not only were some of the precautions problematic, but learning self-defense in
the first place was a fraught endeavor. During the NYRF Rape Conference, the
participants decided to enroll in or establish women’s self-defense courses (New York
Radical Feminists, 1974). However, when they attempted to do so, neither existing
classes nor potential instructors for new courses could be found. Furthermore, “feminists
who enrolled in judo and karate courses often met hostility and derision from their
teachers and male classmates” (p. 175). Women were expected to forcibly resist sexual
assaults (lest people dismiss their experience as having been consensual) but were
simultaneously strenuously discouraged from ever being able to effectively do so.

59
Especially since such a commandment would disallow a large percentage of women’s
fashion, ultimately a separate but related issue.
130
Advocating self-defense as the agency by which sexual violence could be prevented,
then, not only could prevent individual assaults but also worked to undermine gender
norms that positioned men as aggressive and women as passive (Brownmiller, 1990;
Gavey, 2005; Medea & Thompson, 1974; New York Radical Feminists, 1974).
We can begin to see, then, why it would make sense for the 1970s anti-SV
movements to state that “women must begin taking responsibility at all times for the
survival and well-being of other women” (New York Radical Feminists, 1974, p. 181).
This was not a matter of saying that women were to blame for sexual violence, but rather
of saying that their actions could work towards both the short- and long-terms, addressing
the issue on both the social and individual level. At the same time that they were pushing
for these changes, however, it still fit within the framework of placing the responsibility
for stopping sexual assaults on women. While the ultimate end was for men to change
their behavior, the immediate means by which this would be accomplished was through
women’s actions.

Conclusion
Essentially, then, women’s anti-SV movements of the 1970s had to contend with
trying to change social systems while still working within those systems. The resources
they had to dedicate to preventing sexual violence were limited, meaning they were often
limited to stopgap initiatives. While they recognized the value of these efforts, they also
realized the need for broader, systemic reform:
temporary measures, such as crisis centers or legislative reforms, may be able to
alleviate current atrocities, but until the time when the rape victim is no longer
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looked upon with suspicion and distrust, most rapists are likely to commit the
crime with impunity. The bias against the rape victim in the United States today
can only be dispelled if people become aware of the quandary in which she has
been placed by a society which tends to adopt a male perspective. Exposing the
defects in the system is the first step to curing them. (New York Radical
Feminists, 1974, p. 156)
The ultimate goal may have been to cure the defects in the system, but until such a time
as that happened,
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women still needed to deal with all of the flaws. Ultimately social
change was needed; “temporary measures” could only do so much.
This aporia was resolved by the 1970s women’s anti-SV movements through an
agency-centered approach. Such a strategy was appropriate to the 1970s; now that
previous women’ s movements had established that women could act as agents, the next
step was to address sexual violence was to investigate the agencies and structures through
which sexual violence operated. Just as the broader women’s movements of the time
explored the mechanisms underlying the workings of the patriarchy, so too did the
antirape movements.
As noted in AR (Medea & Thompson, 1974), it is “only when we begin to
understand rape [that] we can fight it, and fight it we must” (p. 16). In AR and RSW (New
York Radical Feminists, 1974), the CWAR and NYRF respectively focused on how rape
happened and how women could work to stop it. Their analysis and solutions provided an
answer for how sexual violence could be stopped, how we could counteract the
“acceptance of [the ‘little rapes’ such as sexual harassment] as normal” (p. 40), which

60
Or, perhaps more accurately, until such a time as that happens.
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“prepare [women] to be victims of rape” (Medea & Thompson, 1974, p. 55)
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In doing
so, they were able to demonstrate the capacity for both immediate improvements that
worked with their current social structures and gender ideologies as well as the possibility
of future transformations. These two goals were interrelated, with the short-term goals
contributing to the ultimate aim, and the ultimate aim informing the most effective way to
achieve short-term goals. The members of the 1970s anti-SV movements put it best when
they wrote:
each action taken by itself—whether it is self-defense, changing emergency ward
procedures, or starting a rape crisis center—is an attempt to reform the system,
but when they are combined they are a series of demands for a radical change, for
ultimately we are not demanding better treatment of rape victims or more
protection, but an end to rape and other forms of sexual abuse and exploitation.
No one reform will succeed if women continue to be viewed as objects or
possessions, which is why we must continue to fight on every front. (New York
Radical Feminists, 1974, p. 176)

61
Full quotations: “In themselves these incidents [the ‘little rapes’ such as sexual
harassment] are disgusting, repellent—in fact, intolerable. Acceptance of them as normal
is dangerous. This is one of the man ways in which women are prepared to be victims.”
(Medea & Thompson, 1974, p. 40, emphasis original); “All the daily encroachments on
their existence as human beings, whether subtle or blatant, prepare them [women] to be
victims of rape.” (ibid, p. 55)
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CHAPTER FOUR

Introduction
Unfortunately, however, the dedicated actions of the 1970s anti-SVMs were not
able to stop sexual violence. In fact, the past forty years still have not demonstrated a
total shift in the way sexual violence is viewed. Anti-SVMs today still face many of the
same challenges as their predecessors. For example, one online commenter responded to
the claim that the responsibility to stop sexual assault is “on us” with the criticism that:
No it's not. It's on women to take accountability for themselves. To not whore
around, walk the streets at night alone and to defend themselves with a gun or
weapon. Time to stop treating women like children. The same women that spend
their lives belittling men and then begging them for help when their mistakes
come back to bite them. (The Law, 2016)
While this could be dismissed as a stray, atypical comment, similar statements can be
found in most discussions of sexual violence. While this remark is certainly not
representative of everyone’s attitude toward sexual violence today, such views are
nonetheless regrettably unremarkable and frequently accepted, often cropping up
whenever the topic of sexual violence arises, including online (Schmelzer, 2017; Zaleski,
Gundersen, Baes, Estupinian, & Vergara, 2016).
What has changed, however, is who is instigating those conversations. The above
comment was left on a YouTube video that was not posted by a women’s organization
such as the WCTU or CWAR, but rather It’s On Us (IOU), a coalition movement
spearheaded by then-Vice President Joe Biden. Today, rather than sexual violence being
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solely of interest to women’s groups who must push and prod (male) politicians for any
substantial action to be taken, the federal government itself is organizing official
awareness and activism campaigns against sexual violence.
In this chapter, I will analyze the recent work done by IOU, a campaign started in
2014 and led by both the White House and Generation Progress, the youth branch of
progressive think tank the Center for American Progress.
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While IOU’s work is most
prominent on social media, namely Twitter and YouTube, IOU was both based on many
of the materials produced by and considered a part of the efforts of the US Department of
Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, whose resources are often referenced on
the IOU webpage and in IOU’s press releases. As a result of this integral connection, I
will also discuss the materials provided on the Office on Violence Against Women’s
“Protecting Students from Sexual Assault” page, which were associated with the White
House’s (now defunct)
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Not Alone campaign (Office on Violence Against Women,
2017). These, however, are not the main focus of the analysis; instead, we will be looking
at the IOU campaign itself, including press coverage of the campaign, its Twitter account,
and YouTube PSAs.
To conduct my analysis, I will first provide a context for how sexual violence is
currently viewed. Given the breadth of research now available on this topic, especially
when compared to earlier eras, I will concentrate on how sexual violence is treated on
college campuses specifically, since that is similarly the focus of IOU. In this discussion,

62
The implications of IO being an officially-sponsored campaign will be discussed
below.
63
While the “Not Alone” initiative itself is no longer officially supported, apparently as a
part of the administration change, it has been continued as a part of a Department of
Justice grant. All of the previous materials associated with those efforts are still available
through the Center for Changing Our Campus Culture at changingourcampus.org.
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I will also provide a brief overview of rape myths, rape culture, and various efforts to
combat sexual violence, including bystander intervention, online tools, and student
activism. Next, I will introduce the IOU campaign before discussing Kenneth Burke’s
work on scene and materialism; I will then analyze the IOU campaign for how it puts a
scenic, materialist focus on its anti-sexual violence efforts (or, more accurately, how it
frames sexual violence as scenic) and how while this attempts to change the social norms,
it also implicitly defines the situation as one that cannot be changed.

Current Research on Sexual Violence
Of course, sexual violence is not an easy problem to fix. Sexual violence is
predicated on a number of intertwining factors; stopping sexual violence involves more
than just telling people to desist from raping. The complexity of the issue is evidenced by
studies that show how, despite work done over a century ago by the WCTU to end dual
standards, expectations for men and women are still quite different. Clevenger (2016)
looked at “how mothers of sexual assault survivors ‘do mother’” (i.e. how they enact
their roles as mothers in the context of having a child who was sexually assaulted)and
finds that they perform “mother” as a gendered role (p. 200). Husbands of women whose
children had been sexually assaulted (in cases where the husbands themselves were not
the perpetrators), on the other hand, did not and were not expected to take on these same
caretaking and protective roles that the women were. Instead, gender defined the
appropriate responses to the situation. Many women even engaged in “self-punishment as
a way to atone” for having failed in their jobs as mothers ( p. 243). The fact that their
children were sexually assaulted mean that they were incompetent mothers, leading them
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to deny themselves pleasurable activities. Even nearly a century and a half later, the dual
double standard still exists, in other words, the responsibility for dealing with the sexual
assault of their children still falls on mothers. In fact, this demonstrates how the
implications of theWCTU’s approach of emphasizing the mother’s responsibility in
moral training, especially when it comes to matters of sexual violence, still reverberate
today.
With that being said, it is of course important to look at all of the convoluted
factors that are involved in sexual violence today. There has been a great amount of
research done on cultural and gender norms and their relation to sexual violence, for
example. In addition, understanding the context of college campuses is important.
Finally, the current trend towards bystander intervention and online anti-sexual violence
campaigns will be explored.

Cultural and Gender Norms
According to Lee, et al. (2007), “sexual violence is seen as a continuum of
behaviors instead of an isolated, deviant act” (p. 15). While it may at first seem to make
sense to separate out rape as being somehow special or different, it is in fact part of a
larger system of sexual violence based on cultural norms and how we see gender
(Conaghan & Russell, 2014; Gavey, 2005). Cultural expectations of appropriate gendered
behavior justify such acts. For example, feminist scholars such as Helen Haste (1994),
Susan Brownmiller (1990), Simone de Beauvoir (2011), Nicola Gavey (2005), and others
have discussed the ways in which women are constructed as being sexually passive prey
while men are sexually aggressive hunters. If this were the case, then men raping women
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is only an extreme expression of their natural, engrained behavior. The construction,
however, serves as a justification for unacceptable acts.
In other words, cultural norms, including those that posit women as prey for
men’s sexual conquest, are factors in sexual violence. In “Sexual Violence and the
Spectrum of Prevention: Towards a Community Solution,” a document published by the
National Sexual Violence Resource Center (Davis, Parks, & Cohen, 2006), the authors
laid out five different patterns that contribute to sexual assault: views of women
(including their continued objectification), power (the maintenance of power hierarchies);
violence (including condoning violent acts and victim-blaming); masculinity (traditional
gender constructs of men as dominant); and privacy (leading to an unwillingness or
inability to speak on matters pertaining to sexual violence) (p. 4). As Davis, Parks, and
Cohen pointed out:
Our society glamorizes and sexualizes violence. Often [it] is ignored, excused,
condoned, and even encouraged. While most people do not commit sexual
violence, and therefore it is not normal behavior, these kinds of norms imply a
level of acceptance and a sense of complacency about sexual violence. They
promulgate a toxic environment in which sexual violence can take place and
inhibit appropriate action while condoning inappropriate inaction. Given this, it is
not surprising that some people commit sexual violence and many bystanders
don’t speak up or intervene. (p. 4, emphasis original)
While explicit behaviors that can be pointed to and easily labeled as sexually violent may
not be obvious, then, contributions to a culture of sexual violence (i.e. rape culture, which
is discussed below) are much more prevalent, if not always more apparent. In other
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words, sexual violence may not be “normal” in its extreme forms (at least according to
the authors), but sexual violence is accepted; its existence and peoples’ inability to do
anything about it is taken for granted. People may denounce rape but still resign
themselves to its existence as a fact of life. At the same time, “smaller” acts of sexual
violence such as sexual harassment are normalized and justified.
This idea of social norms as a contributing factor to sexual violence coincides
with the idea of sexual violence as a continuum. As Susan Brownmiller (1990) famously
wrote, “rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all
men keep all women in a state of fear” (p. 5, emphasis original). While in the intervening
years since her landmark work Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Brownmiller,
1990) was published
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her original analysis has been critiqued
65
and expanded on, this
quote nonetheless serves as a way to show the connections between the act of an
individual rape and the culture that is supportive of rape.
Rape culture is “a culture in which sexual violence is the norm and victims are
blamed for their own assaults” (Maxwell, 2014), it is “a complex set of beliefs that
encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women” (Buchwald,
Fletcher, & Roth, 2005, p. xi). Rape culture, then, is based on what we, as a society, tend
to think of sexual violence. When “rape and sexual violence are accepted as inevitable
and are not challenged,” then there is a rape culture (Field, 2004, p. 174). While the idea
of a rape culture originated in the 1970s and is often attributed to Susan Brownmiller’s

64
Against Our Will was originally published in 1975 and re-printed in subsequent years.
65
There have been a great many (deserved) criticisms of Brownmiller’s work, especially
regarding her handling of race.
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Against Our Will (1990), it has gained popularity in recent years as a way to explain how
sexual violence is a greater problem than just the act of rape itself.
Rape culture’s existence is based on rape myths, or “false or biased information
about rape, rape victims, and rapists” that “work to deny that instances of forced or
coerced sex are actually rape” (Field, 2004, p. 175); rape myths reject the very existence
of rape as a real problem (Field, 2004). Rape “myths are either untrue and unfounded
ideas misconstrued as facts (victims want to be raped) or partially true yet atypical
experiences that get applied uncritically to all sexual assault cases (strangers rape women
in dark alleys)” (Schmidt, 2004, p. 191, emphasis removed as it was used to indicate
other entries in volume). Beliefs such as the idea that rape is frequently falsely reported,
that the majority of rapes are perpetrated by strangers, that men physically can’t be raped,
and other similar ideas are all examples of rape myths; each serves to put forth a narrow
view of what is “real” rape and what is “normal” sex. For example, saying that men can’t
be raped (as well as the accompanying justifications for this idea) implies that: (a) men
are always stronger than women and someone who is physically stronger can’t be raped
by someone physically weaker, (b) men always want sex, (c) someone who shows
physical signs of stimulation during intercourse (e.g. having an erect penis) is obviously
enjoying and therefore consents to that activity. In this one idea that men can’t be raped,
then, we see contained a host of ramifications for our views of sex and sexual violence,
including what consent is and is not and what men and women’s proper gender roles are.
How, exactly, beliefs about rape should be categorized (e.g. whether or not they
should be classified as rape myths or not) has been a matter of some debate. The majority
of researchers, however, hold that rape myths are not necessarily a matter of empirical
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truth but rather of heuristics (Conaghan & Russell, 2014). There is a difference between a
certain type of rape occurring and that type of rape being seen as prototypical of all rapes.
While they are both technically the same situation of sexual assault, the former is not
mythical (it has happened) while the latter is (it is not true that all rapes happen that way).
In other words, just because the scenario described in a rape myth has and does happen
does not make it any less mythical. Yes, it is true that there are sometimes rapes where a
stranger leaps out of a dark alley; likewise, it is accurate to say that many people believe
that a woman coming to a man’s apartment after a date indicates consent to sex. Both of
these situations, however, are still rape myths. In each case, such beliefs serve to
constrain our understanding of how rape works, shutting down the possibility that rape
can occur in other ways (e.g. non-stranger rape) or that consent is not implied through
unrelated actions (e.g. that a woman might visit a man’s apartment because she wanted to
continue an interesting conversation they were having).
Often, such rape myths are based on a binary view of gender that portrays men as
sexually aggressive and women as sexually passive. In such a view, often “the rapist’s
actions are implied to be out of his control: He simply could not help himself. This
viewpoint positions rape as an expression of sexual desire, rather than the enactment of
power, control, and anger” (Field, 2004, p. 174). Rape is thus portrayed as something
that, while abhorrent, is also natural. Rape is a natural extension or consequence of men’s
physiology. Women and men each follow scripts of how relationships between the two
should play out; however, sometimes such actions are considered ‘normal’ sex and
sometimes they cross the line into rape (Gavey, 2005). For example, women are often
expected to offer at least a token resistance when a man pursues them sexually. Not only
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does such a script position the man as the hunter and the woman as the prey, it also says
that in normal sexual relationships women say “no” but “don’t really mean it” and are
just playing the game of courtship. Overcoming women’s resistance is embraced as the
way that sex should work. Drawing a line between “token resistance” and actual
resistance, then, becomes very difficult; if women are supposed to say “no” but
eventually say “yes” after being wheedling or physical force, at what point does that
become rape? In other words, how can we tell the difference between rape and “just
sex?” (Gavey, 2005).
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Acceptance of actions that are associated with rape in that they
are likewise acts of sexual violence, works to help make rape itself—especially the
‘borderline’ cases where people disagree over whether or not they fit the definition of
rape (Reitan, 2013)—culturally acceptable as well (Orton, 2005).
However, too much of a focus on the gender binary can also be problematic.
When people “think about rape, they inevitably see a raped woman,” an attitude that
views women as “always either already raped or already rapable [sic]” (Marcus, 1992, p.
386). There is an uneasy balancing act between discussing rape and its relationship with
gender and seeing rape in solely gendered terms. Multiple scholars have provided
detailed analyses of the ways our culture and its views on gender work to support rape
and sexual violence. Mardorossian (2002) observed that much of the discourse on issues
such as sexual violence ends up perpetuating patriarchal views. For example, Nettleton
(2011), examined a cross-section of popular men’s and women’s magazines over a 10-
year period to see how they covered the topic of domestic violence. She found that men’s

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The answer, all too often, is that “real” rapes are those occasions that match with many
of the rape myths discussed below (e.g. the depraved stranger rapist) while “just sex” are
those instances that more closely mirror what we expect sex to look like (i.e. in the
context of a relationship), although in both cases there are issues with consent.
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magazines covered the subject humorously (when they bothered to address the topic at
all) women’s magazines often treated domestic violence as a serious subject. However,
women’s magazines also blamed women for domestic violence, provided advice on how
women should behave less violently in relationships, and concluded that the way to stop
domestic violence was to leave an already abusive relationship. By placing the entire
onus for domestic abuse on women and treating the subject as a joke for men, these
magazines thus supported environments that led to domestic violence even when they
ostensibly sought to end it, as in the case of many of the women’s magazines.
The complicated nature of sexual assault discourses is something that many
scholars find when investigating media narratives of sexual assault. Culkanz and Moorti
(2006) studied the television show Law & Order: SVU and found that while many of the
plotlines portrayed progressive depictions of sexual violence and women, the show
nonetheless maintained a sort of “misogynistic feminism” for the sexist ways it handled
other aspects of gender, including how often episodes dealing with sexual violence
argued that “the real victims are men and patriarchal institutions” (p. 317). Similarly,
Franiuk and Scherr (2012) pointed to the ways in which sexual violence and male
dominance and aggression is normalized and eroticized in recent vampire fantasy media
such as Twilight and The Vampire Diaries. This research and more, including that done
by Dow (1996), Horeck (2004), and Projansky (2001), show the ways in which
depictions of sexual violence specifically and gender broadly are complicated and can
often work to reinforce views on sexual violence and gender.
Putting this all together, then, we can begin to see how today’s views of sexual
violence and gender still perpetuate centuries-old notions of male and female sexuality.
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While reams of research have interrogated the idea that, in Burkean terms, men sexually
act, making conscious human choices, and women sexually move, executing animal
behaviors without thought. Such notions remain pervasive in everyday life, including on
college campuses.

Sexual Violence on College Campuses
Much of the research done in the past few decades on sexual violence has used
college students for its research participants. Discussing sexual violence among college
students, then, means that much of the research on sexual violence chosen at random is at
least somewhat generalizable to campus sexual assault, if it doesn’t specifically address
that population and topic itself. There is, of course, a problem in that such studies tend to
over-rely on white women; as Sabina and Ho (2014) point out, “white women are not as
common on college campuses as the demographics of a large number of these studies [on
sexual violence] would indicate” (p. 221). Given that people of color often interpret
experiences of sexual violence from a standpoint that includes a racial analysis, this is a
critical weakness in the research (McGuffey, 2013). Just as the sexual violence research
leading up to the 1970s faltered because it did not take women’s perspectives into
account, so too does research today fail to take the perspective of women of color into
account. It thus offers a biased framework for addressing sexual violence. When we
speak of college students, then, it is important to remember that much of the research
only addresses a certain segment of that population.
College students as a whole are an easier population to discuss in terms of sexual
violence. Just as in the late nineteenth-century it was easier for people to accept that
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young girls should not be assaulted since they were children, so too has the “extended
adolescence” and infantilization of college students opened up this possibility today;
college girls (notably not often referred to as college women) are “legitimate” victims
who need to be protected. Hines, Armstrong, and Reed (2012), for example, discussed
one potential explanation for campus sexual assault as being the routine activities theory,
which lists “the absence of capable guardians who could protect against a crime” as one
of the three factors to help explain victimization; the authors specifically point to the fact
that college students do not have the “capable guardians” that they are used to (and, it is
implied, that they should) (p. 924).
Whether being away from capable guardians is a cause or not, studies have shown
that almost 20% of undergraduate women experience some type of completed sexual
assault
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between entering college and the end of the first semester of their senior year;
for men, this figure is significantly lower but no less alarming at around 6% (Krebs,
Lindquist, Warner, Fisher, & Martin, 2009). Others have found that the context of sexual
assaults (e.g. the time of day and location) among college students is similar regardless of
gender of people involved (Hines et al., 2012). Regardless, the vast majority of college-
focused research has placed the emphasis on men as perpetrators of sexual violence and
women as victims.
Zinzow and Thompson (2015), for example, conducted a study surveying college-
aged men and asking them questions about their sexual behavior, aiming to find out “the
prevalence, severity, and predictors of repeated sexual coercion and assault” (p. 213). No

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In this study, sexual assault “include[d] a wide range of victimizations, including rape
and other types of unwanted sexual contact (e.g., sexual battery)” (Krebs et al., 2009, pp.
viii–ix)
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one has ever undertaken a similar study that asks women those same questions, despite
multiple such surveys directed at men (c.f. Edwards, Bradshaw, & Hinsz, 2014; Koss,
Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987; Young, Desmarais, Baldwin, & Chandler, 2016). The
existence of a revised version of the most common survey of this type, the SES (Koss et
al., 2007), that is gender neutral does allow for such questions to be asked. To the best of
my knowledge, the only exception to this lack of study is one article that examined sexual
coercion among women prison inmates (Yeater, Montanaro, & Bryan, 2014). It can be
assumed that women’s rates of being coercive are considerably lower, based on their
lower (reported) rates of perpetration. However, this assumption is by no means absolute
and more research needs to be done, especially given the barriers to someone reporting
they were assaulted or coerced by a woman.
When it comes to college-aged men as perpetrators for which information is
available, however, 30% of those surveyed admitted to behaviors that fit the definitions
of sexual coercion and assault (Zinzow & Thompson, 2015). Of those, 68% re-offended
within the four-year period of the study. Of these, 23% re-offended at least five times.
Offenders had higher scores on “sexually aggressive beliefs/norms” than non-offenders,
and the same was true when comparing repeat to single offenders, though this was not the
only factor that differed between the two groups (p. 218). It is important to note, too, that
actual rates of (re)offending may have been higher than those found in the survey for
several reasons. First, since many of the same factors associated with reoffending were
also linked to attrition from the study, it is possible that data from many people who
reoffended simply was not collected due to them dropping out of the study (Zinzow &
Thompson, 2015). Second, Rueff and Gross (2016) demonstrated the importance of
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wording when asking about the perpetration of non-consensual sexual behaviors.
Changing the wording of a question from “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with a
woman when she didn’t want to by overwhelming her with continual arguments and
pressure?” to “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with a woman who at first resisted
your advances, but due to your continued arguing and/or pressuring her, she stopped
resisting?” caused more men to respond in the affirmative because they did not have to
try and decide what the woman had been thinking or feeling (Rueff & Gross, 2016, p.
328, Table 1). While the version of the question used by Zinzow and Thompson (2015)
was framed in terms of non-consent rather than terms of resisting or not wanting to have
sex, Rueff and Gross’s (2016) explanation that response rates indicating (re)offending
behaviors may have been higher due to men not having had to retroactively posit
women’s internal states would still hold true for the Zinzow and Thompson (2015) study.
Beyond issues of statistics of sexual violence on campus, schools often struggle
with how, exactly, they are supposed to approach the problem. There are two primary
federal statutes that direct colleges in how to address matters of gender-based violence.
The first is Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments, which mandates that “no
person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in,
be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program
or activity receiving federal financial assistance” (Title IX of the Education Amendments
of 1972). Among other things, Title IX ensures that schools deal promptly and effectively
with instances of sexual harassment and sexual assault. In 2011, the U.S. Department of
Education Office for Civil Rights, who oversees Title IX, published a “Dear Colleague
Letter” (Ali, 2011), advising schools on the proper procedures for addressing Title IX
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complaints, handling grievance procedures, and implementing sexual violence prevention
measures. The last of these received a substantial amount of attention, with OCR
suggesting that:
In addition to ensuring full compliance with Title IX, schools should take
proactive measures to prevent sexual harassment and violence. OCR recommends
that all schools implement preventive education programs and make victim
resources, including comprehensive victim services, available. Schools may want
to include these education programs in their (1) orientation programs for new
students, faculty, staff, and employees; (2) training for students who serve as
advisors in residence halls; (3) training for student athletes and coaches; and (4)
school assemblies and ‘back to school nights.’ (Ali, 2011, p. 14)
However, administrators and other officials on college campuses can understandably
experience confusion over the exact nature of these recommendations (Payne, 2008). The
line between suggestions and requirements when it comes to Title IX, especially given
documents such as the “Dear Colleague Letter” (Ali, 2011), is not always clear.
The second prominent federal statute dedicated to addressing issues of sexual
violence on college campuses is the Clery Act, first passed in 1990 and updated in 2013
with the Campus SaVE (Sexual Violence Elimination) Act. Named after Jeanne Clery, a
university student who was raped and murdered in her dorm room, the act was designed
to make colleges that receive federal funding report instances of on-campus crimes in
order to keep the campus community safer. With the addition of the SaVE Act, colleges
became required to train and educate staff, faculty, and students about instances of
gender-based violence such as sexual assault, rape, and stalking (Campus Clarity, 2017).
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However, despite these requirements of the Clery Act, students at post-secondary
institutions are often generally unaware of campus services for sexual violence, according
to a meta-analysis of available research on campus policies regarding sexual violence
(Sabina & Ho, 2014). The state of campus policies and procedures, including whether or
not they were available to students easily (or at all), also varied widely from school to
school, and most colleges did not have any dedicated services for sexual violence. In a
more recent study
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that reviewed campus websites for what they called both necessary
(i.e. legally required) and sufficient (i.e. enough to fully address the issue) information
about sexual violence, Lund and Thomas (2015) found that not only did most schools
lack sufficient information, quite a few lacked necessary information: Only 88.2% of
colleges made any information about sexual assault available to students online, and only
83.3% of these included that school’s sexual violence policy. Fewer than 1/3 of websites
defined consent; only 1/5 addressed rape myths. Worst of all, perhaps, 1/10 of the total
number of examined websites included information that actually reinforced rape myths,
such “statements regarding ‘irresponsible’ alcohol use by the victim or assertions that
‘unclear’ communication on the part of the victim leads to date rape or sexual assault
(Lund & Thomas, 2015, p. 534). In other words, despite legislation requiring it, colleges
today still need to do a much better job of providing their students with appropriate
information and resources about sexual violence.
Of course, this is only addressing a small part of the picture; we have not yet
discussed grievance procedures for sexual violence complaints. While in and of

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Although it was published only one year later than the Sabina and Ho paper, the Lund
and Thomas study can nonetheless be seen as more recent due to the meta-analytic nature
of Sabina and Ho’s work (i.e. using papers that were inevitably published at least a few
years prior to 2014).
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themselves they are not as critical to the study at hand, Streng and Kamimura (2017) did
find an association between the rejection of rape myths and the perception that grievance
policies on college campuses are incredibly important, noting that “students who are less
likely to perpetuate rape myths in their campus believe student survivors should be
allowed sufficient redress from the university and that their perpetrators should be held
accountable for sexual assault” (p. 139). Colleges themselves reinforce rape myths,
consequently undermining grievance procedures and delaying or even thwarting any
justice sought by the victim.
In response to some of these problems, activists have worked to change the
climate of college campuses when it comes to sexual assault. Several states (including
California, Connecticut, Illinois, and New York) have recently adopted affirmative
consent legislation. These laws, which hold that consent should be a matter of “yes means
yes” rather than “no means no” have been a matter of some controversy (Friedman, 2015;
Grinberg, 2014; Keenan, 2015; Kuylman, 2016; Richardson, 2016).
Additionally, men have become increasingly involved in anti-SVMs. Piccigallo,
Lilley, and Miller (2012) found that a majority of men were motivated to become
involved because of concerns for women in their lives, often because a friend or partner
had disclosed an experience of sexual assault to them; before such an event, many men
simply “had never given the issue of sexual violence much thought” (p. 511) Such a
connection to sexual violence for men is problematic, both because it means that men
will not know what to do the first time someone discloses sexual violence to them and
because it means that women are expected to divulge their (painful and personal)
experiences of sexual violence in order to enlighten men (Piccigallo et al., 2012). This
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first reason is especially important, given that students are more likely to informally
disclose experiences of sexual violence to friends than they would be to officially report
to institutions (Sabina & Ho, 2014). However, Piccigallo, Lilley, and Miller (2012) also
identified other strategies for including men in anti-sexual violence activism, including
not just framing men as perpetrators but also as victims to allow for a greater degree of
empathy (read: identification) and having men serve as peer educators.
In addition, other instances of campus activism have had affected students’ views
of sexual violence. Campus protests, including those discussed in the first chapter of this
dissertation, have also had an effect on sexual violence on college campuses. However,
even when improvements are made as a result of such activism, the changes themselves
can be double-edged swords, with changes often having unintended potential
consequences (Gilmore, 2011)

Preventing Sexual Violence: Bystander Intervention
Like dealing with sexual violence more broadly, there are multiple messages
about sexual violence prevention transmitted through various media, including movies,
television shows, and magazines. These messages may not always be productive; Olson
(2013), for example, uncovers the ways in which Disney’s The Beauty and the Beast
(1991) romanticizes and glorifies intimate partner violence and unhealthy gendered
relationship dynamics. Similarly, the exact nature of how sexual assault prevention is
talked about has varied over the years and according to the source of the messages. While
many feminist scholars advocate for the idea that “we will not see the end of a rape
culture until a critical mass of people believes that violence against women is neither
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natural nor legitimate” (Buchwald, 2005, p. 215), others have focused on more
individualized methods, with a range of strategies in between. For example, Projansky
(2001) provides an overview of how instructional films that deal with sexual assault
begin by talking about self-defense as a way of stopping a sexual assault but make a shift
to instead discussing self-therapy as a method of recovering from sexual assault. This
shift points to how there are differences in how “prevention” itself can be defined.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2004) delineates three separate
categories of prevention when it comes to sexual violence. Primary prevention is when
interventions “take place before sexual violence has occurred to prevent initial
perpetration or victimization” while secondary prevention focuses on “immediate
responses after sexual violence has occurred to deal with the short-term consequences,”
and tertiary prevention focuses on more long-term goals for both victims and perpetrators
of violence (p. 3). Primary prevention, then, is the only type of prevention that is truly
preventative in the strictest sense of the word; both secondary and tertiary prevention are
more reactive to sexual violence that has already occurred, although they could be seen to
work to prevent further (re)victimization. Lee, et al. (2007), further expand the category
of primary prevention, pointing out that it is “especially those [strategies] that make
community and society level changes” (p. 15). Unfortunately, the majority of sexual
violence prevention work has focused on secondary and tertiary prevention rather than on
primary prevention (Lee et al., 2007; Marcus, 1992).
One recent sexual violence prevention strategy that aims to shift the focus to a
primary prevention strategy is that of bystander intervention training. Bystander
intervention training is an umbrella term for a series of programs that train individuals on
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how to interrupt situations that might lead to sexual violence. For example, someone
trained in bystander intervention might notice if someone is being harassed at a bar and
step in by distracting the harasser, confronting them more directly, or otherwise providing
an escape for the person being harassed. At its best, bystander intervention training views
sexual violence as happening on a continuum and calls for people to intervene whenever
they see a situation that can contribute to sexual violence or an environment that supports
it. As Tabachnick (2009) pointed out in his work on bystanders for the National Sexual
Violence Resource Center:
If we limit our interventions to a culminating ‘event,’ we miss multiple
opportunities to do something or say something before someone is harmed.
Instead, think of the ‘event’ as being on a continuum of behaviors that demand
specific interventions at each step [….] Each situation is an opportunity to
intervene by reinforcing positive behaviors before a behavior moves further
towards sexual violence. (p. 10)
There is some evidence indicating that bystander intervention can be helpful in
encouraging people to intervene in situations and that it increases self-reports of efficacy
in situations involving being a bystander in situations involving sexual violence (Banyard
et al., 2004; Koelsch et al., 2012; Moynihan & Banyard, 2008; A. Powell, 2012).
However, many of those studies involve only a small number of participants (the
Moynihan & Banyard study, for example, only looked at 127 students). Other studies find
that although bystander intervention training has positive results, there are issues in its
actual implementation, including the fact that people do not ultimately take responsibility
for events that they witness as bystanders or do not recognize situations as appropriate for
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bystander intervention (Koelsch et al., 2012). In addition, only situations that are more
blatant, rather than situations involving things such as discursive constructions that
support a culture of sexual violence (e.g. rape jokes), are likely to be acted on (A. Powell,
2012). While it is also theoretically possible that positive portrayals of bystanders who
intervene in order to help victims could work to restructure, rather than “reinforce[e]
dominant power positions” as “tolerant, non intervening bystander” portrayals do now
(Olson, 2013, p. 459), there is so far no substantial evidence of the effect of positive
bystander intervention media. In other words, bystander intervention is often most useful
in stopping a sexual assault before it goes too far rather than for preventing the full
continuum of sexual violence. It is individual situations that are intervened in, not social
norms. While the broadest-based view of bystander intervention does call for intervening
in social norms and beliefs as well, this is not as commonly acted upon (Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, 2004).
Bystander intervention training in and of itself, at least as it is currently
formulated, then, is not in and of itself sufficient to stop sexual assault. To return to
Burke (1969a), bystander intervention techniques involve too narrow a circumference,
positioning sexual assault prevention as something that happens within the scope of
individual acts rather than at a broader social level.

Online Campaigns
One of the ways contemporary anti-SVMs have attempted to enact change on a
broader social level, then, has been to engage in online activism. According to Rentschler
(2014), “using the tools of mobile and social media, young feminists not only expose rape
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culture, its supporters and perpetrators, they also affectively represent their experiences in
online spaces that enable broad distribution and response-ability” (p. 79). For example,
after writer and political analyst Zerlina Maxwell started the Twitter hashtag
#rapecultureiswhen, people from all over the world contributed, highlighting the ways
societal norms support sexual violence, particularly against women (Kingkade, 2014;
Maxwell, 2014). Other campaigns and Twitter hashtags have sparked worldwide
discussions of sexual violence (Campoy, 2016; Domonoske, 2016; McNamara, 2016;
Stewart, 2014).
While a Twitter hashtag might not seem particularly important, Armstrong and
Mahone (2016) hypothesized that “the more exposure sexual assault receives on social
media that is ‘labeled’ as sexual assault, the more likely users will be to mobilize against
it” (p. 100). In other words, hashtags such as #rapecultureiswhen help educate the public
about issues of sexual violence and move them to act to fix them. While the authors’
hypothesis was ultimately not supported, they did find a connection between bystander
intervention and collective action; they therefore argued that programs like IOU have
some utility, with awareness leading to activism.
Along these same lines, scholars have also investigated the ways in which Black
feminists have used the Internet in order to bring attention and spur action in cases
involving the sexual assault of Black women (Rapp et al., 2010), while others have
investigated the ways in which social structures affect which stories of sexual assault
survivors are told, even in the supposedly open environment of the Internet (Salter,
2013). Personal blogs have also been used as a way to process experiences of sexual
assault (Fawcett & Shrestha, 2016). Other websites, such as Project Unbreakable, have
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provided people who have experienced sexual assault with an outlet to anonymously talk
about their thoughts and feelings about sexual violence; this process allows them to not
only receive recognition and work through trauma, but also increases awareness of issues
of sexual violence from the point of view of those who have experienced it (Storla,
2015). With all these many uses of the Internet for addressing the issue of sexual
violence, then, it only makes sense that a campaign such as IOU would elect to use social
media as its primary means of communication and advocacy.

It’s On Us
It’s On Us officially began on September 19, 2014 when it was announced at a
White House press conference held by then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice
President Joe Biden (Somanader, 2014). According to one of the IOU campaigns videos
posted near the end of Obama’s time in office:
It [IOU] started with a celebrity spot to gain attention, followed by content
defining consent, which led to a pledge, that became a viral badge, which became
a movement, and by creating tools and handing over the campaign,
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the
movement grew. Other organizations and celebrities have started creating their
own content, using the original It’s On Us vision and design. (It’s On Us, 2017b)
While this description of events is not, strictly speaking, entirely accurate (much of the
initial content they discuss became available more or less simultaneously, rather than

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The tools that IOU created were an important part of the campaign. IOU encouraged
others to create their own anti-SV materials using information and materials that IOU
provided. In this way, IOU was not just an officially-sponsored campaign but instead also
had an element of user/audience participation that makes it more akin to the earlier
movements in this study.
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developing organically as is implied), it does provide an overview of the direction of the
campaign. IOU consists mostly of an active, frequently updated Twitter account, a series
of celebrity PSAs, some print advertisements, and a website that asks visitors to sign a
pledge:
To recognize that non-consensual sex is sexual assault.
To identify situations in which sexual assault may occur.
To intervene in situations where consent has not or cannot be given.
To create an environment in which sexual assault is unacceptable and survivors
are supported. (It’s On Us, n.d.)
It’s easy to see, then, that IOU adopts a bystander intervention perspective on sexual
violence, asking those who pledged to “intervene in situations where consent has not or
cannot be given” (It’s On Us, n.d., emphasis added). This responsibility is seen as
communal, a responsibility that truly belongs to “us.” Rhodes (2014), analyzing the
campaign’s logo, held that "the ‘us’ forms the backbone of this message, so Mekanism
[the ad company who designed the campaign] built a dense logo out of that two-letter
word, and stacked the ‘it’s on’ on top of ‘us,’ to suggest the collective responsibility
we’re carrying." This point of “collective responsibility” was further emphasized by the
IOU website, which provided those who signed the pledge with a tool that allowed them
to personalize the IOU logo, making it out of their own social network site profile picture
(Figure 1). By encouraging people to use this individualized IOU graphic as their profile
picture on sites such as Twitter and Facebook, IOU made a subtle, persuasive visual
argument that the responsibility for stopping sexual assault was on a non-abstract,
inclusive everyone. Allowing the people who comprise the “us” to be visualized could
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allow for greater identification with the campaign. While admittedly it is not known how
successful this particular aspect of IOU was, it does become clear why Vinjamuri (2014)
would declare that IOU “is a new kind of public service campaign” that “relies on solid
interventional research and engages a variety of non-traditional tactics to achieve its
ends.”

Figure 1: Screenshot of itsonus.org, showing how the campaign provides digital tools to combine your social
network profile picture and the IOU logo
By September 19, 2016, however, it became clear that IOU had reached at least
some measure of success: in two years, they had succeeded in soliciting 360,000 people
to sign the IOU pledge, enlisted 95 official partners, created over 2 billion social media
impressions, and held over 1400 events (ItsOnUs, 2016b). By January 17, 2017, the
number of pledge signers had increased to 400,000 (ItsOnUs, 2017a). Admittedly, almost
a full tenth of these 400,000 pledges were received in the week after Lady Gaga
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performed her topical song on sexual assault, “Til It Happens To You,” at the Oscars
while accompanied by a number of other people who had experienced sexual violence
(Strecker, 2016). Still, the rest of the time the campaign received an average of about
4,000 pledges a week (Strecker, 2016). This was accomplished through the use of
celebrity PSAs that raised awareness about sexual violence and the importance of
consent, as well as through the IOU Twitter account. Over Twitter, IOU frequently
hosted Q&A type chats using hashtags such as #IOUchat and #EndAssaultChat to
educate followers about sexual violence. In addition, they often seized the opportunity
offered by trending hashtags and current media events, including using the premiere of a
new episode of the television show Scandal (ItsOnUs, 2015a). Since actress Kerry
Washington, who plays the lead character in Scandal, was one of the celebrities featured
in a PSA for IOU, the campaign tweeted a picture of her from the PSA, saying that her
character from Scandal was making the IOU pledge. Like many of the tweets on the IOU
Twitter account, this particular tweet encouraged followers to go to itsonus.org and sign
the pledge.
Itsonus.org, however, does contain more than just the pledge. In the resources
section of the site, there is a list of seventeen “tips” for addressing the issue of sexual
violence on college campuses:
1. Consent is voluntary and mutual, and can be withdrawn at any time.
2. Past consent does not mean current or future consent.
3. There is no consent when there is force, intimidation, or coercion.
4. One cannot always consent if under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.
5. Talk to your friends honestly and openly about sexual assault.
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6. Don’t just be a bystander – if you see something, intervene in any way you
can.
7. Trust your gut. If something looks like it might be a bad situation, it probably
is.
8. Be direct. Ask someone who looks like they may need help if they’re okay.
9. Get someone to help if you see something – enlist a friend, RA, bartender, or
host to help step in.
10. Keep an eye on someone who has had too much to drink.
11. If you see someone who is too intoxicated to consent, enlist their friends to
help them leave safely.
12. Recognize the potential danger of someone who talks about planning to target
another person at a party.
13. Be aware if someone is deliberately trying to intoxicate, isolate, or corner
someone else.
14. Get in the way by creating a distraction, drawing attention to the situation, or
separating them
15. Understand that if someone does not or cannot consent to sex, it’s rape.
16. Never blame the victim.
17. If you are a victim or survivor, or helping someone in that situation go to
notalone.gov to get the resources and information you need. You can also call
the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1.800.656.HOPE (It’s On Us, 2017a)
The initial information released on IOU only included tips five through sixteen, with the
information in tip seventeen included but not labelled as such. Tips one to four were
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added later. Importantly, many of these tips work to counter common rape myths. Like
the pledge itself, the majority of these tips were focused on the situation, encouraging
bystanders to intervene.
This overwhelming dedication to the bystander intervention approach is one of
the things that spurred criticism of IOU. Dana Bolger (2014), one of the founders of
Know Your IX, a group dedicated to empowering students to be able to address sexual
and gender-based violence at their schools, said that IOU is a “flashy new bystander
intervention campaign” that “makes sexual assault sound a lot like a bad thunderstorm —
unfortunate, inevitable, striking seemingly out of nowhere, and devoid of human agents.”
Bolger points out that such an approach does nothing to challenge power structures; in a
Burkean sense, it does not challenge the existing hierarchy. Mukhopadhyay (n.d.) was
more generous in her assessment, but nevertheless asserted that “at best, bystander
intervention is one important piece of a broader puzzle. But it does empower college
students to see themselves as part of the solution.”
Other critics focused on slightly different weaknesses in IOU. Some felt that IOU
was, if not necessarily ineffective, then at least unable to prove its effectiveness. As a
writer from one conservative news outlet noted:
Maybe I'm missing something, but if a campaign is supposed to combat campus
sexual assault shouldn't its success be measured by whether or not the number of
sexual assaults declined rather than by the number of people who sign their name
to something?
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(Schow, 2015)

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Although there are indications that there is a correlation between increased awareness
and higher rates of reporting sexual violence on college campuses (McDonald, 2015), the
correlation between actual prevention and awareness is not as firmly established.
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Similarly, Lyanne Alfaro (2015) found IOU to be too vague to really make any
substantial impact, and Jake New (2014) noted that some people worried that regardless
of the gains of IOU, focusing too many anti-sexual violence efforts in that direction
would leave scarce resources for other avenues for change such as new legislation or
policy reform. Regardless of the number of pledge-signers or how many people had seen
IOU’s tweets, then, the far-reaching impact of IOU was—and is still being—disputed.

Theory: Scene and Materialism
Despite IOU’s effectiveness, such concerns and criticisms of the campaign make
sense when its scenic focus is considered. This is not to say that IOU is a bad campaign,
nor is it to say that it lacks anything beneficial to offer. Instead, it is to say that the
particular criticisms focus on the weaknesses that accompany a stress on the scene. IOU’s
emphasis on bystander intervention concentrates its sexual violence prevention strategy
on intervention; to stop sexual violence, we need to interrupt the circumstances—the
scenes—that lead to it. For Burke, the scene is where an act occurs. In dramatistic terms,
it is literally the stage on which an act and actors are set. Given this physical focus, it is
quite apparent why Burke (1969a)would associate scene with materialism, at one point
even defining materialism as the “reduction to scene” (p. 153).
Burke (1969a) relates several different meanings for materialism, all of which
essentially amount to a philosophy that explains the world in terms of things, motion, and
the physical. One of these definitions Burke takes from Baldwin’s Dictionary of
Philosophy and Psychology once more, citing that materialism is “defined as ‘that
metaphysical theory which regards all the facts of the universe as sufficiently explained
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by the assumption of body or matter, conceived as extended, impenetrable, eternally
existent, and susceptible of movement or change of relative position’” (p. 131). The
inclusion of movement in this definition may seem immaterial beyond its connection to
the physical realm. However, given dramatism’s distinction between action and motion
(discussed in the first chapter), it is actual quite worthy of discussion. Burke notes that
“with materialism the circumference of the scene is so narrowed as to involve the
reduction of action to motion. That is, whether the materialist happens to believe in the
existence of a personal God or not, he [sic] will employ a materialist vocabulary of
motivation insofar as such a principle is omitted from the scope of the circumference” (p.
131). A materialist philosophy, in other words, is one that does not focus on action;
instead, there is movement.
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A materialist approach, then, one that focuses on scene, is
one that is devoid of moral choices ( p. 136). Motion does not require a choice or free
will; instead, it just happens. Dana Bolger’s criticism of IOU as a campaign that places
sexual violence in an analogous position to a thunderstorm—something that moves but
does not act—is thus quite apt.

Analysis of It’s On Us
It’s On Us is a “rallying cry […] to realize the solution begins with you through
bystander intervention, consent education, and survivor support” (It’s On Us, 2017b).
This rallying cry is in response to the problem of sexual violence, which is framed in
terms of scene. Sexual violence occurs because of the environment; changing the
environment means that sexual violence cannot occur. This scenic focus is sometimes

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The use of the passive voice here is entirely intentional and serves to further highlight
the action/motion distinction.
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taken quite literally, such as when the IOU Twitter account quoted President Barack
Obama as having said that “‘Countries that oppress their women are countries that do
badly. Countries that empower their women are countries that thrive.’ -@BarackObama”
(ItsOnUs, 2014). In this case, the physical location of the countries is the scene.
It is important to note, however, that despite the focus on scene, neither actors nor
acts are forgotten. In many ways, it is more appropriate to say that the IOU campaign
uses a scene: act ratio, where scenes are fit containers for acts; according to Burke, “it is a
principle of drama that the nature of acts and agents should be consistent with the nature
of the scene” (Burke, 1969a, p. 3). This is demonstrated by a Funny or Die (2016) video
created as a part of the IOU campaign. The premise of the video is that Vice President
Joe Biden and actor Adam Devine go undercover together at a college party to spread the
word about the importance of bystander intervention. Devine, however, had not been
paying attention when being told about their “top secret mission,” so when the two men
begin to speak to everyone at the party about sexual violence he notes that this topic is
“above his paygrade”:
Biden: Our message is serious. 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are sexually assaulted by
the time they leave college, and we can all work together to change that.
Devine: Wow, okay, that is, that is way above my paygrade so I am, I am not qualified
to talk about that.
Biden: Look, that's the point. You are qualified. Everyone in this room is qualified. It's
on all of us to change the culture and prevent sexual assault.
Devine: So, like, if you see, like, a buddy and he's talking to someone who's too drunk
to consent you tell that buddy 'yo buddy chill' and then you make sure that drunk
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person gets home safe, right?
Biden: Exactly! You’ve got this! (Funny Or Die, 2016)
The scene, in this case a college party, is what contains the act. Biden presents this
happening in two senses. First, college parties contain acts of sexual violence; parties are
places where sexual violence “naturally” occurs—like Dana Bolger (2014) said, it is
framed as “unfortunate, inevitable, striking seemingly out of nowhere, and devoid of
human agents.”
On the other hand, college parties are also places where acts of bystander
intervention can “naturally” take place. Since “everyone in the room is qualified,”
bystander intervention is framed not so much as a matter of individual agents (especially
not since “it’s on all of us” [emphasis added]) but rather an act that corresponds to the
scene. If you are in the room, it makes sense for you to perform the act. IOU attempts to
reframe what acts are considered appropriate to the scene. It is not considered appropriate
to accost someone just because they are drunk and alone. Instead, it is appropriate to
make sure they are safe; that is the corresponding act for the situation. Scene, then, is still
very much the prominent factor. Indeed, even discussions in documents associated with
the IOU campaign about “victim-centered services” frame rape crisis centers as “a safe,
healing environment” (Basile et al., 2016, p. 30, emphasis added). Scene, then, is
incredibly central to IOU and in my analysis of the campaign, I will discuss three themes
from IOU: The scene of college campuses, gender as scene, and an emphasis on
situational intervention rather than prevention.

The Scene of College Campuses
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Talking about the scene of the campaign as being college campuses is quite
obvious, given that IOU is focused on addressing sexual violence at the level of post-
secondary education. The ways that this is done, however, help illustrate the exact nature
of the scenic focus. College campuses are discussed in the IOU campaign in terms of
physical location, campus climate, and the need for different approaches based on
different situations.
First, college campuses are seen as physical locations where sexual violence takes
place and where anti-sexual violence measures must occur. At the end of 2016, for
example, the IOU Twitter account tweeted, “It's been a big year for us! We were featured
in @womenshealth, released a PSA with #ItsOnUs heroes, and engaged students on 500+
campuses!” (ItsOnUs, 2016d). This tweet was accompanied by a picture illustrating some
of these achievements (Figure 2).
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Figure 2: IOU 2016 highlights, posted on Twitter
Although not all of the “highlights” they identify in their tweet itself involve physical
location, it’s important that one of them is that they “engaged students on 500+
campuses!” The IOU campaign is thus positioned as one that takes place in a particular
scene, that of college campuses. The sort of activities that are appropriate for addressing
sexual violence on college campuses, then, are circumscribed by this scene, in keeping
with Burke’s discussion of the pentad and motives.
For example, another Tweet reminds people that “if something seems wrong
disturb it. #ItsOnUs to stand up and help in any way we can” (ItsOnUs, 2015b). A
graphic of a hand hanging a “do not disturb” door hanger with the same text accompanies
this tweet; through the partially open door, we can see the blurry outline of what seems to
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be three different people, including one who is lying down with two others standing over
them (Figure 3).

Figure 3: IOU campaign image encouraging bystander intervention
Together, the text from the tweet/door hanger and the picture itself set a scene and
prescribe appropriate actions that people should take in response. The tweet and image
reference situations related to sexual violence and opportunities for bystander
intervention, such as when one or more people lead another heavily intoxicated person
away from a party and towards a secluded room, shutting the door. Rather than leaving
them alone, IOU encourages bystanders in such scenarios to “disturb” the pair, ensuring
that if anything untoward (i.e. if one person is attempting to engage in sexual activity
with another who, due to their intoxicated status, is unable to consent) is happening it can
be prevented or stopped. Thus, we can see the scene: act ratio through how IOU depicts
physical locations.
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However, IOU also maintains that not all college campuses are identical; the
proper response to the previously described situation, for example, can vary depending on
the specifics of the scene (what college it is, if it’s at a frat party or a dorm, etc.). The
need to adapt policies and approaches to addressing sexual violence depending on the
particular campus and circumstance is heavily emphasized in multiple documents
produced by government offices whose goals aligned with those of IOU (United States
Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women, 2007, 2014; White House
Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, 2014b).
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A document descriptively
titled “Sample Language for Interim and Supportive Measures to Protect Students
Following an Allegation of Sexual Misconduct” (White House Task Force to Protect
Students from Sexual Assault, 2014b), for example, repeatedly warns that the guidelines
contained within are “neither exhaustive nor exclusive” and are “not meant to be copied
and pasted into a policy” (p. 2). In addition, the suggestions it offers for interim measures
after a report of sexual violence are very focused (understandably so) on location (e.g.
providing new housing, rearranging classes, no contact orders, etc.).
The scene, once more, is the primary factor. And, yet again, it is the scene that
determines the appropriate acts. Policies in DOJ documents are guidelines for each
college to develop their own procedures, rather than adhering to blanket rules. While in
many ways this is good, as it allows for individualization, there are also negative
potential consequences as well. Too much variance can easily allow for discriminatory
policies or ones that do not truly address the issue at hand, as schools work to protect
their own interests over those of their students.

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A full list of and links to such resources can be found at
https://www.justice.gov/ovw/protecting-students-sexual-assault
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To determine what, exactly, the different scenes of each college campus are and
how they should be are determined by investigating the campus climate (climate, of
course, being a synonym for scene). In the ancillary DOJ materials, campus climate is
defined as the “student perceptions on school connectedness; general perceptions of
campus police, faculty, and university leadership; perceptions of leadership around sexual
assault prevention and response; student norms related to sexual conduct; and attitudes
about sexual assault” (United States Department of Justice Office of Violence Against
Women, 2016, sec. 2, p. 6). In other words, campus climate is a general term to describe
how campuses treat sexual violence.
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To understand what a campus climate is like, the
DOJ advises the administration of a campus climate survey, which “generates school-
specific data on the nature and extent of sexual assault as it exists on a campus, as well as
data on the attitudes and perceptions about sexual assault among different campus
groups” (United States Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women, 2016,
sec. 2, p. 1). This information, then, can be used to determine what measures are most
appropriate for each individual scene: Colleges that find they have a large problem with
students not knowing about available services will need to address that, while colleges
that have more issues with students lacking awareness of consent can allocate more
resources towards education.
Each individual school, then, should be able to know what tools they most need.
“Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from
Sexual Assault” (White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault,
2014a) identifies campus climate surveys as the first step to preventing sexual violence

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The term campus climate is used in other contexts as well, such as when discussing the
campus climate when it comes to race and racism.
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on college campuses. The connection between campus climates, which are scenes based
on ideas, thus allows us to see connections between scene and agent, as ideas are linked
to agent rather than scene (Burke, 1969a). Studying the scene allows for a glimpse into
corresponding prevention tactics. For IOU, then, understanding the scene is the primary
move to address sexual violence.

Gender as Scene
IOU’s focus on scene does not stop at physical location, however. Gender itself is
made scenic in the IOU campaign in the sense that masculinity and femininity are
equated with male and female. Gender is made material; it becomes largely just another
factor that needs to be considered when looking at prevention. According to Burke
(1969a), a materialist point of view is one where “the physical body of the agent is itself
but ‘scenic,’ to be listed among the person’s ‘properties’ (p. 10). The body is material,
and so the material of the body (i.e. its sex) is what determines the appropriate strategy
for addressing sexual violence. How we talk to people about sexual assault becomes
based on gender stereotypes tied to genitals.
However, this means that current power structures are left unchallenged. IOU
must perform a tricky balancing act in that it is intended to be a campaign to address men
(White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, 2014a). At the same
time, however, it needs to not antagonize its audience. David Horowitz, one of the lead
creators of IOU, observed that in prior efforts addressing college sexual assault:
The visuals associated with sexual assault on college campuses show a predatory
male, they present you with a lot of information all at once, and they feel
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overwhelming and they feel not inviting. We had to find a way for this campaign
not to be about scare tactics or about pointing fingers. We didn’t want it to blend
in with every other public service announcement. (quoted in Rhodes, 2014)
To effectively address men, IOU does not want to rely on the idea that sexual assaults are
all—or even mostly all—committed by men and against women. IOU is dealing with a
context where men are seen as sexual predators and women are seen as sexual prey, as
discussed previously.
However, unlike the WCTU, who chose to use an agentic focus to help men
identify with their anti-sexual violence rhetoric, IOU utilizes a scenic one. The idea of
“men” is made into a scene, setting up an environment where men can be comfortable (in
this case, a scene: agent ratio, where agents are seen as corresponding to the scene they
inhabit). For example, when Vice President Joe Biden was asked by a reporter if he had
“noticed any notable trends in reactions or responses of men to this campaign? Have they
offered any insight into the way they might view the campus sexual assault epidemic
differently than other genders?” Biden responded:
We’ve seen real, promising responses from men on and off campus. Olympic
athletes came together to record a public service announcement for the It’s On Us
campaign. We’ve partnered with Major League Baseball and NCAA, which
hosted a video contest with student athletes during March Madness. Fraternities
across the country have joined the campaign through the new It’s On Us Greek
Leadership Council. (quoted in Zellinger, 2017)
Biden’s answer neatly sidesteps the actual question. He does not indicate any “notable
trends” or “insights” about men’s reactions to IOU, but instead simply connects men’s
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role in the IOU campaign to sports. Men’s reactions and insights are reduced to the
campaign partnering with sports leagues and having athletes record a PSA. In this way,
the stereotypical male interest in sports becomes the scene with which men are supposed
to identify. This association between men and sports continues on the IOU Twitter
account, where numerous tweets reference sports. For example, one tweet noted that
“President @BarackObama talked about the importance of #ItsOnUs while he made his
#MarchMadness picks,” linking viewers to a video of the President doing so (ItsOnUs,
2015c).
These attempts to “mobiliz[e] men and boys as allies” and “promot[e] social
norms that protect against violence” by creating an environment welcoming to
stereotypically male interests such as athletics are intended to “foster[] healthy, positive
norms about masculinity, gender, and violence among individuals with potential for these
social norms to spread through their social networks” (Basile et al., 2016, p. 15). Even in
this case, men and boys are not quite positioned as full agents, but instead are part of the
scene of a social network that allows for social norms to spread. While men are by no
means explicitly identified as predators, they are still associated with stereotypical
masculine characteristics and interests. In choosing to appeal primarily to men this way ,
rather than through or in addition to other methods, IOU perpetuates a gender binary.
While it may seem like a stretch to connect this idea to rape culture and rape myths, one
rape myth is that men are stronger than women, and thus cannot be raped. By
concentrating on sports, men’s strength is confirmed. This is not to say that it is
irresponsible or wrong to appeal to men by discussing sports, but rather that drawing too
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heavily on such stereotypes falls back onto a narrow, scenic circumference that reduces
people to their bodies’ motions.
Such social norms also become material when it comes to IOU’s discussions of
consent. In one of the “One Thing” PSA videos, actress Zoe Saldana informs viewers
that:
There's one thing I give to everyone I have sex with. It's not something they get to
keep forever. They don't get to give it to anyone else. And I can take it back
whenever I want. But it's the most important thing I can ever imagine giving
someone. What it is? It's consent. Because sex without it isn't sex. It's rape. (It’s
On Us, 2015)
Consent becomes a “thing” that is “given” and is thus made material. While things,
obviously, can be abstract and non-material as well, the gendered nature of this particular
series of PSAs quickly makes it clear why in this instance consent is to at least some
extent material.
In the “One Thing” PSAs, a series of men and women discuss the “one thing” (i.e.
consent) that has to be there in order to have sex; by definition, there can be no sex
without consent, as non-consensual sex is rape. While all the “One Thing” videos end
with the line “consent: if you don’t get it [consent], you don’t get it [sex],” of the eight
videos featuring individual actors discussing consent, four of them feature women who
only really discuss giving consent. In contrast, the three videos with men either discuss
both giving and getting consent (one video) or just getting consent (two videos); there is
also one video with a woman who talks about getting consent and is almost identical in
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content to one of the men’s videos. In other words, women are depicted as giving
consent, while men are depicted as getting consent.
In particular, such a dichotomy between the discussion of consent recalls the
language used to highlight the importance of women’s sexual purity, where there is an
“inexorable link between virginity and the female body” (J. S. Ehrlich, 2014, p. 141).
Although these “One Thing” PSAs obviously advocate for consensual sex rather than
abstinence, the idea that consent is “the most important thing I can ever imagine giving
someone” (It’s On Us, 2015) is uncomfortably reminiscent of the idea that a girl’s
virginity is “her greatest treasure” (J. S. Ehrlich, 2014, p. 147; Welter, 1966, p. 154).
Such an emphasis on purity has been found to be connected to rape myths (Klement &
Sagarin, 2017) and “normalizes sexual violence” (Fahs, 2010, p. 137). And just as a
woman’s sexual purity is often referred to as a gift (Hickey, 2013), so too does Zoe
Saldana “One Thing” PSA imply that consent is a gift that a woman gives a man.
Women’s bodies as scenes, then, become used to teach lessons about consent and
preventing sexual violence but, in doing so, reinforce the idea of women’s sexual
passivity.
In other words, through its gendered language, the IOU campaign may be able to
appeal to men, but it also fortifies gender stereotypes that contribute to sexual violence.
Of course, it is again important to point out that the act of saying that “men like sports” is
a cause of sexual violence is a vast overstatement. However, when combined with the
portrayal of women’s consent, it is nonetheless a sign that gender is equated to sex and
seen as material in the IOU campaign. Such a use of language, however, does function to
help audience members identify with the core message. In other words, addressing men
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by appealing to stereotypical images of masculinity (e.g. sports) will help many men
listen to sexual violence prevention messages that they might otherwise dismiss. IOU’s
use of gender as scene is thus effect in spreading anti-sexual violence information but it
simultaneously reinforces beliefs that underlie a culture of sexual violence. It is thus
another example of the struggle anti-SV movements face in attempting to resolve the
aporia of pushing for change while remaining relevant to their current era.

Situational Intervention Rather than Prevention
Finally, IOU ends up focusing on material, situational interventions rather than
actual prevention by strongly advocating for bystander intervention above, if not to the
exclusion of, other methods of addressing sexual violence. According to one student
heavily involved in IOU, “too many women and men are getting hurt on our campuses,
and too much of our culture still accepts this reality as inevitable” (Franks, 2016).
However, the issue is that IOU also depicts sexual violence as inevitable, further
perpetuating the problem. Bystander intervention is a huge part of IOU; often, it is the
primary focus of news articles that discuss the campaign (e.g. Webster, 2016). Although
bystander intervention is technically defined as a primary prevention strategy, it is
important to remember that, as mentioned previously, “if we limit our interventions to a
culminating ‘event,’ we miss multiple opportunities to do something or say something
before someone is harmed” (Tabachnick, 2009, p. 10).
Bystander intervention, then, is not a primary prevention strategy but rather a
secondary intervention strategy (c.f. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2004).
If we get to the point where we are intervening in a physically sexually violent situation
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that has already started, this becomes secondary intervention, where we are responding in
the immediate aftermath of sexual violence; while a rape might not have occurred, sexual
violence has happened in the sense that there was an attempt to start such a violation.
Bystander intervention posits sexual violence as inevitable and reduces action to motion;
sexual violence is not a conscious human action that we can prevent; instead, it is simply
uncontrollable animal motion to which we can response.
According to the DOJ’s ancillary materials, bystander approaches “empower
young people to intervene in their peer groups by speaking up against sexist language or
behaviors that promote violence, reinforcing positive social norms, and offering help or
support in situations where violence may occur or has occurred” (Basile et al., 2016, p.
16). While the first two of these do not seem at first to be particularly scenic
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, social
norms can very much be embodied, making them material. Changing social norms also
causes a scenic shift; transforming what is considered socially acceptable alters the
circumstances. As “STOP SV: A Technical Package to Prevent Sexual Violence”(Basile
et al., 2016) pointed out, “characteristics of the social and physical environment can have
a significant influence on individual behavior creating a context that can promote positive
behavior or facilitate harmful behavior” (p. 26). Most importantly, however, these
mentions of “social norms” differ from much of the focus on bystander intervention as
discussed in IOU’s public-facing materials.
For example, just as “STOP SV” (Basile et al., 2016) held that “preventing
behavioral patterns of aggression and violence, particularly from taking place in the first
place” is important but does not bother to provide any examples of what that prevention

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As we have seen from looking at the way IOU discussed gender.
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looks like, instead only offering specific risk reduction and intervention strategies, so too
does the IOU Twitter account often conflate prevention with intervention (p. 13).
ItsOnUs claims that “supporting survivors is key to stopping sexual assault” and asks
followers to “join us tomorrow to discuss this and more during #IOUchat!”
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(ItsOnUs,
2016a). Here, “prevention” is discussed in terms of dealing with sexual violence that has
already been completed. Similarly, another tweet featured Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter
Jonsson, the two Stanford students who interrupted a sexual assault behind a dumpster in
2015 (Bever, 2016), labelling them “It’s On Us Heroes” (ItsOnUs, 2016c). Disrupting a
sexual assault that was already underway (and presumably preventing it from
progressing
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to rape is thus depicted as worthy of admiration and something that others
should emulate.
However, in her victim impact statement, “Emily Doe,” the woman who was
assaulted in this case, told her assailant:
You have dragged me through this hell with you, dipped me back into that night
again and again [….] My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with me. You
took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy,
my confidence, my own voice, until today. (quoted from Kadvany, 2016)
While it is certainly good that Arndt and Jonsson were there and admirable that they
intervened, then, they did not prevent Doe from becoming a victim of sexual violence,

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#IOUChat involved the use of that Twitter hashtag to provide a forum for social media
users to ask questions and learn about sexual violence prevention.
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For lack of a better term.
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nor did they (much less could they) prevent the secondary victimization that came from
the being involved in the trial
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.
To be perfectly clear, this is not to say that they, as individuals, should have been
expected to—they were not even at the same party that Doe and the man who assaulted
her were at—nor is it to say that what they did should be dismissed. Arndt and Jonsson’s
act is laudable; Doe herself thanked them in her victim impact statement, telling them
that she “sleep[s] with two bicycles
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that I drew taped above my bed to remind myself
there are heroes in this story. That we are looking out for one another” (quoted from
Kadvany, 2016). To dismiss Arndt and Jonsson’s actions would be to not only deny the
actions themselves but the impact they had on the person who was assaulted. Instead, by
saying that Arndt and Jonsson did not prevent Doe from becoming a victim of sexual
violence is to say that it certainly would have been better if Doe had never been assaulted
in the first place and that efforts that aim to prevent sexual violence would do better to
focus on genuine prevention rather than response.

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Many of the things she mentions in the above statement refer to at least some extent to
the painful, (re)traumatizing process of going through the trial (e.g. being cross-examined
in such a way as to paint her as an immoral, drunken party girl).
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Arndt and Jonsson were cycling past when they saw the assault in progress.
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Figure 4: Screenshot of tweet that honors Arndt and Jonsson
While the tweet that recognizes Arndt and Jonsson never directly mentions
bystander intervention, the site it links to does so explicitly (Figure 5). This website,
produced as part of MTV’s association with the IOU campaign, provides a way for
people to “see and share bystander stories” and offers “tips for stepping in” (MTV News,
2016). The materialist, scenic focus thus becomes clear. The scene of sexual violence
cannot be changed; sexual violence is always going to occur. Instead, bystanders can
intervene to redirect action, shifting actors to a new scene. There is no discussion of
shifting social norms to stop sexual violence from ever occurring here. Instead, bystander
intervention holds that certain scenes (e.g. college parties) are in effect conducive to
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sexual assault; to stop someone from being sexually assaulted, then, the scene must be
changed.

Figure 5: Screenshot of lookdifferent.org/itsonus, the website linked in the tweet from Figure 4
Needing to change the scene in order to avoid sexual violence, however, has led
to accusations that IOU has engaged in victim-blaming. In an editorial for their student
newspaper, a group of anti-sexual assault activists at the University of Alabama claimed
that “The ‘It’s On Us’ initiative on our campus has done nothing to eliminate rape culture
and has only perpetuated it” (Ridgeway et al., 2016). They wrote that:
When it has been proven that membership in a social fraternity significantly
contributes to the likelihood of perpetrating sexual assault, it is difficult not to be
wary of an initiative spearheaded by greek [sic] students. Initially, we gave it the
benefit of the doubt, thinking, ‘Who better to solve this problem than those who
are prominent within it?’ However, Jordan Forrest’s article about her project
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stated ‘We do not let our friends walk alone late at night or ignore their requests
for a designated driver. We hold our friends and ourselves accountable, and we
never blame the victim.’ While we admire the intentions of those who came
together to write these articles and lead this initiative, it must be noted that the
very sentence that warns us not to blame the victim is preceded by victim-blaming
through false notions of ‘accountability.’ The goal of this initiative was to create a
culture of accountability, but this accountability seems to be only for those more
likely to be targeted rather than those who may perpetrate it.
Similarly, while Emily Doe was not referring directly to the IOU initiative, she does say
in her victim impact statement, “sometimes I think, if I hadn't gone, then this never
would've happened. But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else”
(quoted from Kadvany, 2016). In both cases, a distinction is made between the actions
that an individual can take to avoid themselves or others being sexually violated and the
actions that will actually stop sexual violence.
IOU does not offer a solution to actually stop sexual violence, but an individual
can avoid being assaulted themselves by either removing themselves from the scene or,
with the help of others, moving to a different scene. The first, most prominent IOU PSA
told viewers:
It's on us to stop sexual assault. To get in the way before it happens. To get a
friend home safe. To not blame the victim. It's on us. To look out for each other.
To not look the other way. It's on us to stand up. To step in. To take
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responsibility. It's on us. All of us. To stop sexual assault. Learn how and take the
pledge at itsonus.org. (It’s On Us, 2014)
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The scene must be changed from one in which sexual assault is an appropriate act (in the
sense that sexual assault “fits” the scene) to one in which it is not. For example, by
getting a (presumably intoxicated) friend home safe, you are removing them from a scene
in which they are vulnerable to sexual assault (e.g. a bar, club, or party) to one in which
they are no longer vulnerable.
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However, it is important to note that nothing changes about whether or not the
scene of the bar fits a sexual assault. IOU, which focuses on altering the material
circumstances, does little to challenge the idea that it is okay to engage in sexual activity
with someone who cannot consent due to their state of incapacitation. Instead, it focuses
on removing the inebriated person from places where people would attempt to engage in
sexual activity with them. While at times the IOU campaign does move towards a scene:
act ratio in the sense of reframing which acts are appropriate for the scene, as previously
discussed, more often it is a matter of simply changing the scene.
Of course, it could be argued that this bystander intervention focus is only a part
of the IOU campaign and that they do, for example, discuss consent in the “One Thing”
PSA series. However, consent is never properly defined. As a result, the idea that

79
This PSA is made up of clips of a number of different celebrities. Each line is spoken
by a different one, with some dialogue overlapping. As this does not make a discernible
difference to our discussion of the video, I have not indicated these shifts here.
80
Such a distinction between vulnerable scenes and non-vulnerable scenes ignores the
realities of many cases of sexual violence, narrowing the focus on what is discussed in
terms of sexual violence on college campuses and ignoring sexual violence that occurs
outside of particular pre-defined scenes.
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someone who is inebriated, even to the point of unconsciousness, can “consent” to sexual
activity is never challenged either.

Conclusion
Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that “my father always said the worst
sin is the abuse of power, and the cardinal sin is for a man to abuse a woman or a child. I
hope my efforts have made a difference” (quoted from Whitaker, 2016). While I do not
wish by any means to belittle Biden’s accomplishments, as he has done a lot of good
work to combat sexual violence over the course of his career, it is important to parse out
this quote. By saying that “the worst sin is the abuse of power” but the “cardinal sin is for
a man to abuse a woman,” Biden’s father holds that men should not abuse the power they
hold over women while simultaneously accepting the fact that men do have power over
women. In other words, the actual power structure is allowed to remain unchallenged.
This, in effect, is what the IOU movement does, claiming that men’s sexual violence
towards women is terrible and that power should not be abused while simultaneously
claiming that that power imbalance (and violence, to a degree) is inevitable. No real
change can come from such a stance.
The IOU campaign maintains a materialist focus, whether through a scene: act
ratio or exclusively focusing on the scene. It does so by discussing framing the discussion
in terms of the physical location of college campuses, locating gender norms in male and
female bodies, and advocating for secondary scenic intervention rather than primary
prevention. Such a materialist focus makes sense in some ways, given that IOU is an
attempt to bring college-aged men into the fold of anti-sexual violence measures. By
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focusing on the material, such men can remain essentially blameless. However, at the
same time, then, this stance engages in victim-blaming and perpetuates gendered
stereotypes. Beyond that, a scenic focus fits with a campaign that was originally
organized by a presidential campaign and associated organizations; they could stage a
materialist intervention, whereas a statement of motives that focused on agency or agents
would not likewise correspond to the government’s capabilities. Finally, the scenic focus
allowed anti-SVM prevention discussions to err on the side of caution and avoid victim-
blaming, a concern from the tactics of the previous 1970s movements.
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In her analysis of sexual assault and agency, Koelsch (2014) contended that there
is a sort of dichotomy between someone who has experienced sexual assault who views
themselves as a victim (who has been wronged but was powerless) and one who views
themselves as a person with agency (who was at least partially responsible because they
retained control). For example, sometimes women may choose to preserve/emphasize
their sense of agency so as to not view themselves as powerless victims, saying that an
unwanted sexual encounter is not rape because they “chose” it by not verbally saying no,
despite not wanting it and not participating; some even expressed the sentiment that it
would be worse to say no and to have their desires disregarded (to be “really” raped) than
it would be to choose to not resist and have sex that they did not want but at least was not
strictly against their explicitly expressed desires (c.f. Gavey, 2005). Koelsch (2014)noted
that participants in her interviews could describe what not to do so as to steer clear of
being sexually violated, but they were not likewise able to say “what to do in order to
have consensual sexual interactions” (p. 24, emphasis original).

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This last rationale will be discussed in more depth in the final chapter.
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This demonstrates some of the issues that emerge when there is too great a focus
on scene. Even discourse about consent becomes far too simplistic; discussions of
consent and rape myths fall to the wayside. Instead, only material circumstances, such as
if someone has been drinking and where they are become matters of concern. While these
can be important, safety and adapting to predators who apparently are inevitable take
precedence over discussions of what consent looks like and teaching about prevention.
Of course, moving forward, both whether or not IOU can maintain the efforts it
has made and its eventual legacy are still up in the air. There were obviously some
concerns about what would happen to IOU in 2017 with the start of a new year and a new
presidential administration that, to say the least, did not value sexual violence prevention
as much as the previous administration. However, the structure of IOU was changed so
that it now operates independently of the White House (Kingkade, 2016). IOU’s
independence was demonstrated just a few days after the inauguration of President
Donald Trump when its Twitter account posted a link to the IOU pledge accompanied by
the tweet “#DearBetsy We need a leader who will commit to enforcing #TitleIX and
supporting survivors of sexual assault” (ItsOnUs, 2017b). By criticizing Betsy DeVos,
Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, IOU demonstrated its independence and ability
to operate outside the oversight of the Trump administration, something of critical
importance to a campaign such as IOU given not only Trump’s history with sexual
violence and harassment (D. A. Graham, 2017; E. G. Ryan, 2017; Tolentino, 2016) but
also the precedent of the Trump administration disabling government-associated Twitter
accounts who tweeted things unfavorable to Trump (Rein, 2017).
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The lack of IOU’s association with the government to such a great extent may
mean that IOU loses some of the clout that it previously had. Without the ability to, for
example, hold a press conference with the president at the White House, IOU will not
have the same amount of reach with the press that it once did. This is not to say that IOU
is a completed chapter in the history of anti-SVMs in the same way that the WCTU,
CWAR, and NYRF are, of course, but rather to say that we must keep moving forward. If
a scenic focus is not enough to allow for true change, instead focusing on intervention
after an act of sexual violence has already begun, what pentadic frame offers anti-SVMs
of the future greater possibilities?
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CHAPTER FIVE

Introduction
At this point, I have accomplished a great deal of what I set out to do: this study
has considered three separate anti-SV movements in the past century and a half and
analyzed them for how they adopted various pentadic approaches. What I have not done,
however, is fulfilled the fundamental objective of looking at these three movements in
relation to one another and exploring what new rhetorical understandings we can gain
from such an investigation. So far, we have just looked at these movements more or less
statically and have ignored (or, more accurately, temporarily set aside) the “intrinsically
kinetic nature of movement rhetoric” (Lucas, 2013, p. 128). By this, I mean not that each
era was discussed as a freeze frame that captured only a split second of each, but rather
that the movements have been left largely unconnected from one another.
In this final chapter, then, I will examine how each of the anti-SV-movement
periods we have discussed interacts with the others to form a continuous, overarching
anti-SV-movement narrative. I will use this analysis to argue for the concept of rhetorical
resonance, or the ways social movements produce discourse that identifies
simultaneously with the current era and the hypothetical future for which they are
advocating, showing how aporetic tensions among movements resolve if they are viewed
sequentially rather than simultaneously. Finally, I will offer suggestions for a possible
next step in the fight against sexual violence. Rather than a pentadic analysis, I argue that
an expansion to Burke’s hexad and the inclusion of attitude will be helpful tools for
future anti-SV-movements.
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Summary of Each Movement
The preceding three chapters offer detailed overviews of the Woman Christian
Temperance Union’s (WCTU) fight for higher age of consent laws in the late nineteenth-
century, the antirape work of the 1970s women’s rights movements, and the recent It’s
On Us (IOU) campaign to address sexual assault on college campuses, which was
organized by a coalition originally headed by the Obama administration. Of these, the
later efforts could not have happened without the work done by the former; the
campaigns are all inextricably linked. Of course, saying that the later campaigns could
not have happened without the work of the former does not imply that previous
campaigns shaped the present in any deterministic fashion. Rather, prior movements
inspired and influenced later ones. It may have been possible to achieve the same basic
outcomes in the 1970s had the WCTU’s age of consent campaign not occurred, but the
NYRF and CWAR would not have been likely, for example, to include a discussion of
how age of consent laws diminish girls’ sexual agency in their work. While these
connections among the movements do not consolidate them into a single effort where the
only difference among them is what time they occurred, the connections do link the
movements through time. Before exploring these connections and their meanings, I will
first briefly review each campaign and my analysis of them.

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
The WCTU was the largest women’s organization in the United States at the end
of the nineteenth-century. Dedicated to establishing temperance, its members also
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advocated for a variety of other causes, including increasing the age of consent. At the
time, the age of consent was as low as seven years of age. Using a variety of methods,
including petitions, meetings, and their weekly newsletter, The Union Signal, the WCTU
lobbied for improved age of consent legislation. They did so by offering up agent-
centered, idealistic arguments. For the WCTU, low age of consent laws were a sign of the
moral double standard that expected women to be more virtuous than men; a pre-teen
girl, then, was expected to guard her own “virtue,” while an adult man simply couldn’t
help himself from sexually assaulting that same girl. Age of consent supporters obviously
resisted such notions, holding that both men and women were capable of the same level
of morals.
Analysis of the WCTU’s age of consent campaign revealed three agentic themes:
the importance of education, mothers’ responsibility to create “new men” and “new
women,” and girls’ ineligibility as agents. Through the idealistic focus on morals, the
WCTU was able to place the responsibility for the problem with age of consent laws not
just on individual men but also on society as a whole. People lacked education rather than
inherent morality or character. At the same time, however, by placing the responsibility
for moral education on women and by stressing that girls needed to be protected, the
WCTU also limited the role that women could play in further change. While they were
successful in raising the age of consent across the United States, such legislation rarely
met the ages they wanted and often was only passed with heavy restrictions.

1970s Antirape Movements
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The 1970s witnessed the next major anti-SV-movement in the United States.
Groups such as the New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) and Chicago Women Against
Rape (CWAR) formed; they held speakouts and conferences on rape and offered women
who had experienced rape a variety of resources (e.g. advocates, rape crisis hotlines,
etc.). NYRF and CWAR both published some of the first widely distributed books on
sexual violence, Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women (New York Radical Feminists,
1974) and Against Rape (Medea & Thompson, 1974). These books served as guides on
forming your own antirape organization, offered self-defense tips, and provided research
on what rape was and how gender relations played a role in its occurrence.
This work adopted an agency-centered, pragmatic approach to anti-sexual
violence work; the 1970s antirape movements focused on how rape happens and how it
can be prevented. Two main themes emerged in this analysis: that the groups had scopes
and goals that were broad but time and resources that were limited, and that there was
tension between long-term and short-term solutions. While they ultimate wanted large-
scale social change, they did not have the ability to achieve this. By focusing on the
means, then, 1970s antirape movements worked to have a short-term impact that would
lead to the desired long-term social changes. Unfortunately, such a strategy did have the
effect of reinforcing many of the cultural beliefs that they wanted to change long-term.
Advocating for self-defense as a short-term strategy, for example, could be interpreted as
putting the focus for preventing sexual assault on not only individuals, but individual
victims of sexual assault.

It’s On Us
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IOU started as a largely social media-centered campaign to improve incidences of
sexual assault on college campuses. Launched in 2014, the campaign argued that
stopping sexual assault is a mutual responsibility that everyone shares; through its Twitter
account, celebrity PSAs, and other materials, IOU advocated for a bystander intervention
approach to preventing sexual violence. Such an approach was scenic and materialist.
Bystander intervention training instructs people to intervene in situations and change
them, making them unsuitable settings for sexual violence. In other words, bystander
intervention works to either remove people to a different scene or to alter the scene
people are currently in; these are material alterations.
Such a scenic approach to sexual assault prevention had three main foci. The first
was the setting of college campuses themselves; IOU emphasizes the need to adapt
sexual violence prevention efforts for each campus/scene. The second is framing gender
as material, and the third is promoting situational intervention rather than direct
prevention. This means that IOU and BIT, the agent is de-emphasized. Instead, the scenic
focus implies that things just happen, meaning that sexual violence is seen as something
that can be prevented from becoming too bad but is ultimately inevitable.

Connections Among Movements
As has been mentioned, anti-SV-movements have developed over time, building
on one another. As such, there are multiple links among them. By examining these
associations, we can see ways that anti-SV-movements have changed, each campaign’s
effects leading to new social ideologies with which successive movements must contend.
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First, we can see a change in how age of consent laws were viewed between the
WCTU and 1970s antirape movement. This is especially important since the age of
consent campaign was the focus of the WCTU’s anti-sexual violence work. While the
WCTU put their emphasis on the need for protection, the 1970s antirape movement
shifted to arguing for agency. In other words, the WCTU wasn’t looking at how (i.e. by
what means) underage girls were having sex but instead simply the fact that they were; it
made no difference to them whether girls wanted to have sex or not. Given the extensive
problem of seduction at the time (where girls or women consented to sex under the false
or later retracted promise of marriage), this makes a certain amount of sense. But unlike
the WCTU, who was largely concerned with the issue of under the age of consent versus
over the age of consent, the 1970s antirape movements were primarily interested in the
matter of consent itself as opposed to non-consent. According to the New York Radical
Feminists, “the charge of statutory rape, designed to protect virgins by setting an arbitrary
age of consent (varying from sixteen to twenty-one in various states), is a fundamental
denial of female sexual autonomy” (1974, p. 82). By the 1970s, sexual violence had
become a matter less of who engaged in sex but rather how sex was engaged in. To put it
another way, mutual consent (or the lack thereof), rather than a girl/woman’s age or
marital status, was the determining factor in what was considered a sexual crime or not.
This tells us several important things. First, the initial steps that the WCTU
wished to accomplish were, in fact, carried out. By the 1970s, it was possible to discuss
sexual violence as something to which not only children but also adult women should not
be subjected regardless of the circumstances. In the nineteenth century, the suggestion
that twelve-year-old girls could not consent to sexual activity with adult men was often
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met with incredulity, the idea that an unescorted, unmarried woman who met with a man
had not implicitly consented to sexual activity or that a wife could refuse her husband’s
advances were all but unthinkable. In later decades, it then became possible to discuss
rape as something from which women and girls—rather than just those who were “good”
or “chaste”—should be protected.
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Related to this, we can also see a shift in how agents
and agency were viewed. By this point, white women had had the legal right to vote in
the United States for half a century; it was no longer necessary for activists to make the
same arguments as the WCTU did in a time when women were not considered full
political citizens. Girls and women were now agents. Rather than focus on the who, then,
it made sense for the 1970s antirape movements to focus on the how. The change in
views on age of consent, then, was not arbitrary. Instead, it was part of the progression of
anti-SV-movements over time.
With the continuation of anti-SV-movements into the current era, we can also see
connections between the 1970s’ focus on self-defense and situational awareness and the
current emphasis on BIT. In this shift, there is an attempt to move away from the
potential for victim-blaming by focusing on scene rather than agency. In other words, by
telling people that sexual assaults should be stopped by non-involved individuals noticing
and interrupting a particular situation rather than by instructing women how to fight off
attackers, the responsibility for preventing sexual violence is more equitably distributed,

82
It is true, of course, that the WCTU did discuss violence against women in terms of
drunken men beating their wives, sometimes even hinting at what is now called marital
rape. However, this was framed in terms of the problem of alcohol rather than sexual
violence; the belief was that prohibition would end such abuses.
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rather than being a burden solely for (potential) victims.
83
So, the shift is an attempt to
move away from potential victim-blaming (e.g. “you were raped because you didn’t do
enough to fight the attacker off”) by focusing on the scene rather than agency (which in
this case must be employed by the victim-constructed-as-agent).
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The problem, however, is that while victim-blaming (which, it must be noted once
more, was never the intent of the 1970s antirape movements, and was something they
spoke out against) decreased, it likewise takes the focus off perpetrators. The 1970s and
today, then, are two sides of the same coin in this particular respect. In moving away
from the WCTU’s idealistic focus, anti-SV-movements neglected to discuss the people
committing sexual violence; by concentrating on agency and scene respectively,
perpetrators’ role as agents is deemphasized. This leads to the implication, for which IOU
has been criticized, that sexual violence is caused by circumstances rather than people. It
is something that “just happens” and people react to it. People are never absent, but their
role is seen as a diminished one. In dramatistic terms, sexual violence thus becomes
motion rather than action and therefore “is neither moral nor immoral” (Burke, 1969a).
While such an implication is not as strong in the 1970s movement, due to their agentic
focus, it does nonetheless exist. To put it more clearly: yes, by the 1970s antirape
movements did discuss how sexual violence occurred. However, due to the need to focus
on short-term solutions, self-defense as a way of preventing sexual violence outweighed

83
Sadly, there is no one who is not a potential victim of sexual violence. However,
particularly during the 1970s women alone were considered to be potential victims by
activists and non-activists alike.
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Meaning that the person who is at risk of being assaulted is framed as being
responsible for preventing that assault. The motive for sexual violence—what causes
rape—is positioned not as belonging to the rapist, the circumstances, or the culture but
instead on the victim’s (in)action.
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other methods that required an interrogation of the motives, both individual and social,
behind sexual violence. Both the 1970s antirape movements and the current IOU
campaign, then, unintentionally emphasize sexual violence as motion rather than action.
This is not to say, of course, that for an anti-SV-movement to use either an
agency- or scene-focused approach at all was a mistake. Importantly, today there is
relatively little need for anti-SV-movements to self-justify their existence. While the
WCTU had to argue that sexual violence (in their case, focusing on the age of consent)
was an issue that did not deserve to be overlooked, in recent years this has been a
relatively uncontested claim. Of course, the true significance of the problem is still very
much up for debate; IOU, for example, felt the need to cite statistics in explanation for
why college sexual assault was a large enough problem to be addressed (Funny Or Die,
2016). Through the actions of anti-sexual violence work, from that of the WCTU to
today’s campaigns, sexual violence has, if nothing else, become a recognized problem.
While this may seem like a minor accomplishment, it is in fact quite significant.
Moreover, these advancements have understandably affected the way the problem of
sexual violence is addressed.
At first, the materialist nature of IOU and the idealist character of the WCTU’s age of
consent work would seem to be entirely antithetical. Of course, it would be inaccurate to
claim that the WCTU was entirely idealistic, the 1970s antirape movements entirely
pragmatic, and the IOU campaign entirely materialistic. Even during the time of the
WCTU, for example, there is evidence of scenic elements, in the sense that articles in The
Union Signal make not infrequent mention of the situations influence (e.g. the lengths to
which economic circumstances might drive women—namely prostitution or other forms
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of “ruin”) (F. W. Graham, 1894; Kells, 1894). The two time periods, then, are not
diametrically opposed to one another. Instead, just as Burke’s pentad argues that the
scene and the agent are two parts of the overarching pentad, just as the pinky and thumb
are two fingers on the same hand. The scene and the agent are thus two parts of the
whole; just as a play needs actors, acts, and settings, so too does a complete statement of
motives need an investigation of the scene, agent, acts, etc. In other words, the shift from
a focus on agent to one on scene is not an indication that IOU contradicts its predecessor,
nor that either movement must necessarily be wrong. Instead, they are simply different
tools for different times.
Beyond this more basic, though important, comparison, it is also important to note
that despite both the earlier discussion of gender as scene and the fact that IOU is
addressed to college men IOU lacks many of the more blatant references to gender. This
stands in stark contrast to the nineteenth-century age of consent campaign. While both
time periods worked to appeal to men, they each approached the issue very differently.
The WCTU addresses gender quite blatantly, directly calling out the dual moral standard
between men and women. IOU, however, generally maintains a more gender-neutral
stance on the surface of its public-facing materials; references to gender are more coded.
However, the stance that each takes towards gender is compatible with its
contemporaneous gender norms. The use of more implicitly gendered anti-sexual
violence texts may be related to the emergence of post-feminism (Coppock, Haydon, &
Richter, 1995; Douglas, 2010). Since, according to a post-feminist view, sexism has been
extinguished, any problems with sexual violence are inherently not gendered ones. Even
if we do not accept the totality of this line of reasoning, it does make sense to say that, in
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a time when there certainly have been some advancements in women’s rights since the
late nineteenth-century, an anti-sexual violence campaign might deemphasize the
gendered factors of sexual assault in order to reach a male audience, whether
intentionally or not. In particular, such a strategy might be adopted in order to sidestep a
“backlash” response to an anti-SV-movement (Faludi, 2006; Matter, 2014). In other
words, while anti-SV -movements such as IOU do not have to argue for the existence of
sexual violence today in the same way similar movements have in the past, the
significance of the problem is still very much challenged on the basis of gender and
feminist progress in previous decades. Understating the role of gender, then, can mean
that the campaign does not have to “waste time” countering arguments that sexual
violence is not a bad enough problem because women now have the right to vote, there
are now laws against marital rape, men are raped as well, etc. While these are all true,
they are used as red herrings to detract from the work of anti-SV-movements.

Rhetorical Resonance
Looking at the work achieved by anti-SV-movements over the past century and a
half in the United States, it’s very easy to say that such work was ineffective and did not
accomplish much. While, yes, today we can now discuss sexual violence as a problem
without having to convincingly assert the existence of that problem, other changes have
been slow or non-existent. But at the same time the problem of sexual violence itself
continued. To discuss this seeming contradiction, we will return to the idea of rhetorical
resonance, which builds off of Burke’s distinction between arpeggios and chords. While
social movements may seem discordant when temporarily transposed atop one another
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(i.e. when they are all directly compared with one another), viewing them in
chronological sequence (i.e. as an arpeggio) allows us to see the resonances and parallels
between one note/movement and the next, as has been alluded to previously.
For example, the WCTU’s age of consent campaign, while initially successful,
quickly had many of its laws attenuated or reversed. Anti-sexual violence activists in the
1970s were, as has been discussed, quite critical of the WCTU’s work, seeing it as
counterproductive. But even with age of consent laws today, which often attempt to strike
a balance between girls’ sexual agency and power differentials caused by age,
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we still
see evidence of beliefs that blame young girls for being sexually assaulted, including an
instance where The New York Times intimated that an eleven-year-old girl had provoked
a group of men of to rape her (Durham, 2013). Here, we see the intersection of rape
myths and racism; the Times report disclosed neither that the girl was Latina nor that
most of the assailants were black, foreclosing the possibility of racial analysis while
simultaneously implicitly calling on racist and classist stereotypes of women of color as
promiscuous to place the blame on a Latina girl of low socioeconomic status in ways that
would have been less likely had she been white and/or of higher socioeconomic status
(Durham, 2013). Age of consent laws themselves, then, have by no means eradicated
popular adherence to rape myths concerning both underage nonconsensual sex and race,
let alone stopping all occurrences of statutory rape.
It seems, then, that the work on age of consent was doomed from the start; it is
contradictory to argue that girls need to be protected but boys don’t, that men and women

85
For example through the existence of what are called “Romeo and Juliet” laws, which
allow for the possibility of consensual sex between two individuals, one who is under the
age of consent and one who is above the age of consent, provided that the difference in
their ages is sufficiently small.
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should have a single moral standard, and that women are better moral educators than
men. Simultaneously arguing for and against gender binaries seems incompatible with a
persuasive movement. Of course, if someone in another generation or two were to write
their own analysis of current anti-SV-movements, they might say that the current
tendency to gloss over gendered components of sexual violence is contradictory to the
goal of preventing sexual violence. Even today we have already seen people critiquing
campaigns such as IOU on a variety of grounds (Bolger, 2014; Ridgeway et al., 2016;
Schow, 2015). So while it may be easy for us today to look back on previous anti-SV-
movements and find fault with their approaches, we can only imagine what others will
say of our own efforts in a few decades. And, what’s more, could we even have gotten to
the point we are today without previous movements? Could we get to a future point of
progress without being where we are today?
While the answer to that hypothetical question, broadly speaking, is likely, yes,
we could have, this is because rhetoric is an art and not a science. In other words, the
ways in which the anti-SV-movement as a whole in the US progressed is by no means the
only (or even necessarily the best) way it could have done so, but rather the way it
happened to have happened. There were reasons the history of anti-SV-movements
happened the way it did, as has been discussed, but those reasons were not deterministic.
Much like the metaphor explanation of aporia that describes swimming through a
constantly-shifting body of water, our own movements both alter the environment and are
changed by it, bringing us to where we are now. More narrowly, then, we could not have
reached each stage of the anti-SV-movement without the work that had been done
previously.
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While, yes, it is true that much of the WCTU’s work on age of consent itself was
not as impactful as they initially hoped for, we can see that by the 1970s anti-sexual
violence advocates were able to address not only the existence of dual gender standards
but how they operated. While The Union Signal did include some analysis of how women
treated differently from men, not just explanations that they were, at the time the agentic
approach was a better fit.
Furthermore, the 1970s antirape movements’ focus on self-defense, which today
seems antiquated and ill-advised at first glance, appears to place the responsibility for
preventing sexual violence on women. However, when viewed in conjunction with the
time in which the social movement rhetoric was produced and with the understanding
that it was a short-term solution intended to pave the way for longer-term answers, the
self-defense emphasis begins to make sense. Promoting self-defense as a way of
preventing sexual violence might reinforce some of the beliefs that undergird rape culture
and lead to sexual violence, but the hope was that the short-term changes it caused would
coalesce and lead to more permanent, social solutions. We can even see how this worked
through the transition to bystander intervention today. The 1970s antirape materials did
ask for women to look out for other women, the general public (read: men) did not figure
in as potential interveners in sexually violent situations. Instead, they were seen as threats
(Medea & Thompson, 1974; New York Radical Feminists, 1974).
In essence, components of an anti-SV-movement that seem contradictory during a
single time period are validated when the movement part of anti-sexual violence
movements is emphasized, positioning a series of anti-sexual violence actions in
chronological sequence. To return to Burke’s (1973) discussion of chords and arpeggios,
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if you try to play every “note” (or even a small number of those notes) in the history of
anti-SV-movements simultaneously, the sound will be discordant. However, playing each
note in sequence allows us to see how the ideas of each period of anti-sexual violence
action resonate with the next. To give an example, the 1970s’ critique of the WCTU’s
view of the age of consent originates from a different cultural era than that in which the
WCTU were operating; by the 1970s, activists had progressed to the next note in the
arpeggio of anti-SV-movements. While activists in the 1970s sometimes commented on
the problematic nature of the WCTU’s approach to the issue of consent, such an approach
needed to be considered contextually. Since the WCTU needed to have their message
resonate with a culture they were trying to change, such a strategy would of course
appear misguided to those who were operating in a time when that culture had already
moved forward.
It is through this concept of rhetorical resonance that we can understand the
growth and development of social movements. Social movements do not exist at a single
point in time, given that they push for progress. Instead, like arpeggios and unlike cords,
they move. By looking at this sequence of movements over time and how the rhetoric of
each particular “note” in the sequence ideologically corresponds with both
contemporaneous social beliefs (in order to identify with and therefore persuade its
audience) and the desired social change (in order to progress), we can see how social
movements laid the groundwork for future generations to do more.
Such a concept may seem insignificant. After all, what good is a social movement
if it doesn’t create tangible changes for the generation involved in it? While I by no
means dismiss more radical social movements, I argue that the changes brought about by
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rhetorical resonance are equally important, if less immediately noticeable. As pointed out
in The Union Signal:
Thought is a living force; an active, working, enthusing force. It means progress.
Thus it is the duty of each generation, while struggling with its inheritance, to
think higher and wiser thoughts for the next one. ‘Forget the steps already trod,
and onward urge our way.’ The new plans devised by the new thought will not at
once change present conditions, will not fit into them. But all the same must we
think the thoughts and plan the plans, and leave the embodiment of these to the
mighty thought forces which are ever marching on. (Diaz, 1889, p. 7)
There may certainly be times that a social movement can “leap” forward through radical
change. This, however, is a situation that has perils and pitfalls of its own. But it is also
through steady progress that accounts for both the present situation and the hypothetical,
desired future that social change occurs. These contradictions lead society to resolve the
aporia of how the current state of events can exist
Of course, attempts to coordinate a generation’s “inheritance” and “higher and
wiser thoughts” for the future can be a tough balancing act (Diaz, 1889, p. 7). However,
it is these very same contradictions and the work that goes into resolving these aporias
that moves society forward. By allowing for enough identification with their audience so
that they can be persuasive (e.g. accessing primary symbols, as Klumpp (1999) discusses)
while simultaneously remaining divided enough from the current social hierarchy that
they can push for change (Gregg, 2013), social movements are able to “resonate” with
both the present and the future. Social movements, through rhetorical resonance, thus
serve as object lessons in how social progress can be accomplished. It is not that social
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movements contradict themselves by calling on the present and the future; instead, they
resolve the contradiction of the aporetic tensions between current social hierarchies and
an imagined future order by showing a connecting path between the two. Through
rhetorical resonance, then, social movements can bridge either/or situations into ones that
are both/and, thus opening avenues for social change.
What I am arguing is that the success of social movements cannot be measured in
the short term or by policy changes. Taking the WCTU as an example, they were able to
push for multiple policy changes regarding the age of consent, thus appearing to be a
successful movement. However, many of the laws that were enacted were subsequently
walked back within a few years. It is only over time that their true impact becomes clear.
To be clear, “like all kinds of actions, the effects of social movements are often
indirect, unintended, and sometimes even in contradiction to their goals” (Giugni, 1998,
p. 386). There is no direct cause and effect here, to be certain; the WCTU were not the
only ones involved in the issue of the age of consent. It is difficult to measure the
outcomes of social movements, and most of that work has been done in sociology
(Amenta, Caren, Chiarello, & Su, 2010; Andrews, 2016; Giugni, 1998; Meyer &
Whittier, 1994). Rhetorical resonance, instead, helps explain the interactions between
movements who address the same issue over periods of time. Even within a relatively
short timeframe of a few decades, when people enter into a social movement can affect
what strategies they use (O’Neill, 2017). Social movements are thus tied into the events
and ideologies of their times. Social movements’ adaptation to the rhetoric of their time,
rather than pushing too quickly towards a rhetoric that mirrors the future ideologies they
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wish to adapt, is an important part of achieving and maintaining influence as a social
movement.

Where Do We Go from Here?
Now that we have established the concept of rhetorical resonance, the question of
what, precisely, we should do with such a theory emerges. Obviously, anti-SV-
movements are going to need to continue going forward for quite some time. While in an
ideal world we could immediately abolish all sexual violence, such a future unfortunately
is not realistic. Instead, one approach to figuring out where to go from here is figuring out
what part of the pentad will be most fruitful for the future of anti-SV-movements. As
mentioned earlier, the rhetoric of social movements is not a pre-determined path; there
are multiple tactics that future anti-SV-movements could choose. I propose that future
anti-sexual violence efforts should attempt to broaden their reach by utilizing an attitude-
oriented approach. In the following section, I will explain how Kenneth Burke adapted
the dramatistic pentad to include the term attitude, how his use of the term attitude has
been interpreted by other rhetorical theorists over time, how attitude has been used in
anti-sexual violence efforts to date, and finally what an attitude-centered anti-SV-
movement might look like.

Attitude
At first it may seem odd to say that we should adopt attitude as our suggested
approach, given that it is not one of the five pentadic elements. However, after initially
introducing the pentad, Burke later realized that scene, agency, purpose, act, and agent
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alone were insufficient to cover the complete range of human motives. As a result, he
suggested that the pentad be expanded to a hexad, adding the term attitude. According to
Burke (1970), “as regards the Dramatistic tautology in general, an act is done by an agent
in a scene. But such an act is usually preceded by a corresponding attitude, or ‘incipient
act’ (as when an act of friendliness grows out of a friendly attitude on the part of the
agent)” (p. 188). Attitude, then, fits in quite well with the pentad as a whole; it is
obviously connected to both agents and acts (agents having attitudes that inspire acts of a
similar nature).

Kenneth Burke’s Attitude (and Others’ Attitudes Towards It)
Attitude as a term is interwoven throughout much of Burke’s work, even featuring
as the key term in his early book Attitudes Towards History (Burke, 1984). For the
present purposes, however, Burke’s use of attitude in regards to the pentad begins in
Grammar of Motives (Burke, 1969a) when he identified it in relation to both the agent
and the act:
Where would attitude fall within our pattern? Often it is the preparation for an
act, which would make it a kind of symbolic act, or incipient act. But in its
character as a state of mind that may or may not lead to an act, it is quite clearly to
be classed under the head of agent. (p. 20, emphasis original)
Attitude is thus an incipient action. While Burke initially aligns attitude closely with
agent, he often referred to it in terms of acts:
As an attitude can be the substitute for an act, it can likewise be the first step
towards an act. Thus, if we arouse in someone an attitude of sympathy towards
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something, we may be starting him on the road towards overtly sympathetic
action with regard to it. (p. 236, emphasis original)
It is important to remember, however, as Burke previously stated, that attitude has “in its
character as a state of mind that may or may not lead to an act,” meaning that it is
identified with the idealistic and symbolic (p. 20, emphasis original). To clarify, this is to
say that even though attitude is spoken of in terms of acts, those acts are framed in
agentic terms.
The symbolic nature of attitude is thus incredibly important; Burke defines
symbolic acts as “the dancing of an attitude” (Burke, 1973, p. 9). Incipient acts, then, are
not just about what is done but also about how it is to be done. This is not in the sense of
the mechanics (i.e. by what means, as this would be agency), but instead with what sort
of character: “‘attitude’ would designate the manner (quo modo)” (Burke, 1969a, p. 443).
Attitude thus becomes an addition to the pentad, turning the five-fingered hand into a six-
fingered one.
However, Burke himself could not entirely decide whether or not attitude should
complement the pentad or if it should be added as a sixth term, expanding the pentad to a
hexad. As we can see even from the brief selection of quotes above, he refers to attitude
both as its own entity and as one that is comprised of others. Due to the differing uses of
attitude in Burke’s work, Burkean scholars have differed on several aspects of attitude
and its use, including whether or not there is actually a hexad or if attitude is simply a
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concept implied through the three pentadic elements of act, agent, and agency (F. D.
Anderson, 2010)
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.
In particular, one primary point of contention has been over whether or not
attitude is a function of the mind, body, or something in between (Petermann, 2015).
Hawhee (2006), for example, argues that many scholars look almost exclusively at
Burke’s A Grammar of Motives (1969a). While this particular work does have a focus of
the mind, in choosing to look largely at this work scholars miss out on Burke’s links
between the body and attitude, a position for which Hawhee advocates. Others such as
Muir (1999) saw attitude as existing somewhere between body and mind: “Burke […]
conceives of attitudinizing as a means of mediating between the realms of action and
motion-between symbol-use and biological organism” (p. 55). For still others, attitude is
symbolic, “an act of language carries attitudes that further elevate particular elements of
experience and disparage others” (Klumpp, 1999, p. 214). None of these views are
necessarily wrong. Just as Anderson (2010) understood both the pentad and the hexad as
possibilities, so too are the possibilities for attitude as symbolic and attitude as embodied;
each can apply in different situations and for different analyses. For the purposes of
applying attitude to anti-SV-movements, however, attitude is symbolic. Saying otherwise
works to remove responsibility from perpetrators, positioning behaviors as motion rather
than action. Placing too much emphasis on physical attitude strays to closely to the idea

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Anderson’s (2010) evaluation of whether Burke’s tool for dramatistic analysis should
be viewed as a pentad or hexad ultimately concludes that it is both a pentad and a hexad,
an interpretation supported both by ample textual support for both readings of attitude in
Burke’s work and by Burke’s propensity for “both/and” answers as opposed to
“either/or” ones.
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that sexual violence occurs because someone “can’t control themselves,” the act being
preceded by a bodily attitude over which they have no conscience command.
Regardless of the exact positions any individual theorist takes towards a Burkean
discussion of attitude, there is a variety of work that can and has been done using attitude
as a point of departure. Mahan-Hays and Aden (2003) proposed a type of attitudinal
analysis done by finding the intersection of representative anecdotes, how these work as
equipment for living, and the frame they represent. Similarly, Peterman (2015) saw
attitude as equipment for living, noting that it “displays an impressive range of uses. It
can be a strategy for dealing with a particular situation, a generalized strategy for dealing
with a category of situations and it can be a strategy for dealing with strategies” (n.p.).
The closest thing we find to Burke’s attitude being used to discuss sexual
violence, however, comes from Fisher’s “A Burkean Analysis of the Rhetorical
Dimensions of a Multiple Murder and Suicide” (1974). Fisher conducted a hexadic
analysis of a murder-suicide case where a man killed several of his female coworkers
before killing himself after law enforcement was called. Importantly, Fisher argued that
an attitudinal view of the event is important because such acts may never have occurred if
the man’s attitudes had been previously addressed. In other words, since attitude is
incipient action, understand people’s attitudes and, if necessary, working to correct them,
can help prevent undesirable acts. Sexual violence, then, can possibly prevented by
analyzing and confronting attitudes.

Use of Attitude in Previous Sexual Violence Research
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This Burkean approach to sexual violence prevention is one that corresponds with
much of the literature on and theories of sexual violence prevention, if not necessarily the
practices they inspire. It must be acknowledged that not only developing sexual violence
prevention programs but also figuring out which programs are effective is incredibly
difficult (Paul & Gray, 2011). Much of the body sexual assault prevention education
literature talks about role of attitude, adopting this as a possibly effective preventative
approach (Jozkowski, 2015).
In an attempt to develop tools for sexual assault prevention, researchers have
developed multiple scales that try to measure various attitudes towards aspects of sexual
assault. Feild’s Attitudes Toward Rape (ATR) measure (1978)is based on the idea that
“rape attitudes should be represented as a multi-dimensional construct rather than treated
as a unidimensional one” (p. 171). These multi-dimensional constructs include: “women's
responsibility in rape prevention,” “sex as motivation for rape,” “severe punishment for
rape,” “victim precipitation of rape,” “normality of rapists,” “power as motivation for
rape,” “favorable perception of a woman after rape,” and “resistance as woman's role
during rape” ( p. 170). By analyzing so many different aspects of attitudes towards rape,
the ATR worked to have a more complete picture of how people saw rape, its
perpetrators, and its victims. Other measures for attitudes towards sexual violence,
particularly attitudes towards rape, followed the ATR. The Attitudes Toward Rape
Victims Scale (ARVS) (Ward, 1988) was “designed to assess favorable and unfavorable
attitudes with particular emphasis on victim blame, credibility, deservingness,
denigration, and trivialization,” for example (p. 127).
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These scales have been used to gauge best practices in sexual violence prevention.
One study used the ATR and the simplified Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS-S) to
survey first year college men about attitudes towards rape and women (AWS-S) before
and after several treatment options (a control group, interactive small group with only
men and peer facilitators, men and women small group with discussion and professional
staff, large group with men and women with professionals and lectures) (Earle, 2009).
The study found that the treatment option with the largest overall attitudinal shift for the
measures of “traditional women’s role in the home and workplace and motives for rape”
but not for “perceived severity of the crime” was the condition with an interactive small
group of only men and peer facilitators (p. 427). Attitude change, then, is not the only
critical factor in sexual violence prevention. Or, more accurately, there are multiple
factors to consider when selecting a method to achieve attitude change.
Other research on attitude and sexual violence prevention suggests that attitude
plays a crucial role in preventing sexual violence. Strain, Hockett, and Saucier (2015)
investigated the association between “men’s propensity to commit rape” and their views
on whether they found certain behaviors towards women either personally or normatively
acceptable (p. 335). The researchers concluded that their “findings suggest that
pressuring behaviors may contribute to rape culture and a sexual hierarchy in which men
maintain sexual power over women" (p. 339). In other words, attitudes toward not just
sexual violence but towards gendered relations generally impact incidences of sexual
violence; changing these attitudes could be one avenue for sexual violence prevention.
In a meta-analysis of “the effectiveness of sexual assault education programs on
college campuses using both published and unpublished studies,” Anderson and Whiston
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(2005) found that the greatest effect was an increase in “factual knowledge about rape”
when comparing people who attended a sexual assault education program with those who
did not; only a “small but positive” effect on attitudes towards rape was found (p. 381).
Current sexual violence prevention programs, then, are not particularly effective at
changing attitudes. While it is certainly possible that an increase in knowledge could lead
to attitude change, this is by no means guaranteed. It is entirely possible to regurgitate the
“right” answers when asked in post-measures without that ability translating into either
attitudinal or behavioral changes. This is especially the case when the positive shift in
attitude was less than half that of the positive shift in knowledge. As Lee, Guy, Perry,
Sniffen, and Mixson (2007) pointed out, making an impact on “individual knowledge and
attitudes is more effective as part of a broader comprehensive approach which also
addresses how those attitudes interact with interpersonal influence, and the manner in
which norms, policies, and institutions shape the environment in which it all occurs" (p.
16). Sexual violence prevention, then, is not something achieved through one-off efforts,
but rather through continual, reinforced attitude change at both the individual and social
levels.
Importantly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines on
stopping sexual violence do call for not only secondary preventative efforts but also
primary ones (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2004). Unlike secondary
prevention efforts such as bystander intervention that are non-attitudinal in nature,
primary intervention does have some focus on attitudes. However, the relationship
between establishing attitudes (incipient actions, in Burke’s terms) and actions
themselves is complicated: “if attitude is action waiting to happen, trusting or acting on
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an ill-founded attitude can be perceived as a 'bad act.' The perceived failure to act wisely
and effectively--to trust 'appropriately,' thereby preventing a rape—leads to massive
guilt” (French & Brown, 2011, p. 9). Any work on sexual violence that looks at attitudes
towards sexual violence interventions, rather than preventions, then, displaces the
responsibility onto those who are not themselves committing sexual violence. This has
obvious implications for efforts to curb sexual violence, as it neither allows for direct
prevention nor does it encourage an environment where people can feel they acted
correctly. A different approach, one that does not view the failure to intervene in sexual
violence as a “bad act” but rather moves towards viewing sexual violence itself as a “bad
act,” is thus necessary.

Adopting an Attitude-Centered Approach in the Future
Attitude, then, is something that has been frequently discussed in previous
research on sexual violence, although this work has not always been best translated into
practice. Kenneth Burke defines attitude as incipient action. How, then, can a future anti-
SV-movement work to incorporate an attitudinal emphasis in its work? How can we use
attitude as a lens with which we can see how to prevent sexual violence?
Burke himself provides the answer when he remarked that “often we could with
more accuracy speak of persuasion ‘to attitude,’ rather than persuasion to out-and-out
action. Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man [sic] only insofar as he is
free” (Burke, 1969b, p. 50, emphasis original). Working to change attitudes towards
sexual violence is thus the best next step. Not only would persuading someone “to
attitude” truly prevent acts of sexual violence from ever occurring in the first place, it
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would make them truly unacceptable rather than just prohibited. In other words, the
hierarchy itself would be truly usurped by a new order rather than a guilt and redemption
cycle serving as a shield for the original order’s maintenance (Klumpp & Hollihan,
1979).
It could, of course, be argued that attitude is an inappropriate tool to use; after all,
there are many Burkean scholars who do not accept the pentad’s expansion to the hexad.
However, even if you consider attitude to be a combination of agent, agency, and act, this
simply illustrates its importance; attitude impacts so much of human motivations. While
it is certainly useful to look at the problem of sexual violence from the perspective of
agents, agencies, and scenes, as the movements I have analyzed here have done, these
pentadic elements alone, even combined in pentadic ratios, cannot get at the underlying
foundations of sexual violence in the same way that attitude can.
According to Burke (1969a), “two men [sic], performing the same motions side
by side, might be said to be performing different acts, in proportion as they differed in
their attitudes toward their work” (p. 276, emphasis original). An attitudinally-based
understanding of sexual violence will thus help us to understand issues of sexual violence
beyond the consensual/non-consensual binary. In other words, sexual intercourse is often
termed as “rape” (non-consensual sex) or “just sex” (consensual sex), with little room in-
between (Gavey, 2005). However, by viewing sexual intercourse from an attitude-based
perspective, we can understand how the motion of sexual intercourse may be associated
with different actions, depending on its associated attitudes.
In other words, by focusing sexual violence prevention on attitude, it would help
to address issues of “grey rape” and “bad” sex, including instances where a person does
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not actively resist or say no to sex but also does not want it and feels pressured into it. As
previously discussed, “attitudes and behaviors—and their normalization” “that mirror the
power dynamics of rape but are generally less overtly hostile and socially reprehensible
[….] function to reinforce a sexual hierarchy in which men are dominant (Strain et al.,
2015, p. 335). Without recognizing these as problematic, we are unable to fully prevent
the acts of sexual violence that are currently recognized as “real” rape. However, by
viewing sex and sexual violence through the lens of attitude, sexual violence could be
seen not just as a matter of rape/not rape but instead as a matter of in what manner a
sexual act was done. In fact, not only sexual acts in the sense of sexual intercourse but
other interactions could be considered this way as well (e.g. pressuring behaviors, jokes,
flirting, catcalls, etc., some of which may be appropriate depending on the attitude of
those involved but may fall along the lines of sexual violence in other cases).
Of course, I acknowledge that this view of attitude is potentially incredibly
problematic, given that it calls for an external judgment of attitude, an internal state. In
fact, this continues many problems with sexual violence in judicial systems that we have
today; the experience of sexual violence (whether each participant thinks an act “counts”
as sexual violence) is effectively intersubjectively determined. However, this simply
indicates the need for more investigations into the area, as well as for increasing calls for
non-judicial paths for addressing sexual violence (e.g. restorative justice). For example:
A restorative justice system holds the offender accountable by facilitating and
enforcing reparative agreements, including restitution. Restorative justice
recognizes that we must give offenders the opportunity to right their wrongs and
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redeem themselves, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the community. (Price,
2014)
Restorative justice labels an act as wrong rather than finding an agent guilty of being a
wrongdoer or not. While the offender was the one to commit an act of wrongdoing and
must acknowledge such, the focus is not on them as a bad person but rather on the harms
caused by their actions. Such an approach, and the dialogic nature of most restorative
justice interactions, have shown success when used in cases of both felony and
misdemeanor sexual crimes (Koss, 2014). Perhaps by advocating for one of these paths
as an option for those who are interested, anti-SV-movements could illustrate an
attitudinal approach to sexual violence.
In addition, this demonstrates the importance of using attitude not as a lens with
which to judge people but instead for teaching them to judge their own actions. Referring
back to Burke, this is a matter of persuading people to attitude rather than to action. By
asking people to consider the manner in which they are acting, rather than limiting their
behavior outright, we can work to change incipient action, thus preventing sexual
violence. By this, I mean that if sexual violence campaigns in the future work to highlight
the importance of not just blatant acts of sexual violence but the attitudes leading up to
them, they can help people to understand how sexual violence occurs. In doing so, both
acts of sexual violence that are commonly accepted as such and those that are seen as
“just sex” can be reframed as originating in unacceptable attitudes. According to
Polascheck and Gannon’s (2004) interviews with men convicted on charges of rape, such
a population often shares common cognitive distortions, viewing women as dangerous,
inferior, sex objects to which they are entitled to have access. These are “implicit
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theories” about how the world works (Polaschek & Gannon, 2004, p. 299). People who
commit rape, however, are not alone in possessing such worldviews, something that
complicates efforts to rehabilitate those who engage in acts of sexual violence towards
other adults: “Denial in rapists is more complex than with child sex offenders because a
rapist has the option of appealing to sociocultural explanations that he thinks others will
find plausible (e.g., ‘she said yes at the time but afterwards she changed her mind, you
know how women can be’)” (p. 311).
The attitudes held by those who have been convicted of sexual violence, then, are
often mirrored in those who have not been convicted of sexual violence, regardless of
whether or not they have committed acts of sexual violence. For example, one study
found that people are unable to reliably distinguish between disparaging quotes about
women from mainstream magazines and quotes about women from people convicted of
rape (Horvath, Hegarty, Tyler, & Mansfield, 2012). An anti-sexual violence campaign in
the future that attempts to address these attitudes will face a huge task, but an important
one. By dismantling the normalization of attitudes that accept sexual violence, they can
also diminish instances of sexually violent behaviors.
That being said, in this dissertation I do not offer a complete roadmap for what an
attitudinally-oriented anti-SV-movement might look like. Instead, I merely gesture
towards the possibilities. My goal here is not to provide a template for the future of anti-
SV-movements but instead to offer inspiration and a sound, rhetorically-based theoretical
understanding of how social movements progress. Various anti-sexual violence efforts
must adapt these strategies to their own circumstances and desired outcomes.

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Other Takeaways
Beyond the use of restorative justice as an attitudinal approach to addressing
issues of sexual violence, it is also important to remember what implications there are for
the idea of rhetorical resonance when it comes to social movements. It is often difficult
for social movements to show that they are an unqualified success, particularly when
there are so many intervening variables (Amenta et al., 2010; Andrews, 2016; Meyer &
Whittier, 1994). Given the current trend of big data, social movements may feel now
more than ever that they need to show quantitative gains in order to justify their existence
(the lack of which may lead to criticism (e.g. Schow, 2015)).
Social movements may therefore feel pressure to fix problems instantaneously.
Such an approach, however, may be (though is not necessarily) doomed to failure. Each
social movement needs to consider that pushing for too radical of a change means a
tradeoff with the ability to rhetorically resonate with the ideologies of their time. In
pushing for sudden reorganizations of the hierarchy, they can lose access to important
rhetorical resources for identifying with their audience. An approach that recognizes the
importance of identifying with the ideologies of the time can exert more influence.
The ultimate lesson imparted by this study of anti-SV-movements in the United
States, then, is that small changes accrete over time. A social movement need not be
viewed as a failure because it did not accomplish all of its stated goals or because it did
not entirely solve the problem it set out to address. By taking this into account, social
movements can strategically decide what note they should play in order to be concordant
with their time while still progressing to the next note in the arpeggio of social progress.

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Conclusion
According to some researchers, “focusing on changing male attitudes and
behaviors will have a far more direct effect on the incidence and prevalence of rape than
will interventions aimed at female attitudes and behavior” (Rozee & Koss, 2001, p. 301).
But it is not just male attitudes that we have to change. This is not to say that
“interventions aimed at female attitudes and behavior,” especially when used as the sole
intervention, are unproblematic, but rather to say that the problem of sexual violence is
not one caused by male attitudes alone. Instead, the issue operates on the basis of both
individual and social attitudes, regardless of the sex and gender of those who hold those
attitudes.
In this dissertation, I have examined three social movements in the history of the
United States and how they have approached anti-sexual violence work: The WCTU and
their age of consent campaign, the 1970s antirape efforts and the push for self-defense,
and the current work of It’s On Us that advocates for a bystander intervention approach.
While the change from one movement to the next might seem contradictory, it in fact was
these contradictions that allowed for social change. These movements used, respectively,
an agentic/idealistic, agency-centered/pragmatic, and scenic/materialistic approach to
their efforts.
However, sexual violence is not just a matter of acts (e.g. a rape) or of scenes (e.g.
a party) or agents (e.g. someone who is looking for someone to have sex with regardless
of the other’s interest or consent) but rather a matter of attitude. We need to stop, in other
words, the “little rapes” and not just the “big” or “really bad” ones (New York Radical
Feminists, 1974, p. 40). By changing attitudes, we can change behavior.
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At the beginning of this dissertation, I discussed several high-profile cases of
sexual violence that were prominent in the news. In just the short time since I originally
selected those cases, however, numerous others have cropped up: Hollywood mogul
Harvey Weinstein’s history of harassing and assaulting women has shifted from an open
industry secret to common knowledge, the head of Amazon Studios was fired based on
reports of similar if less pervasive behavior, and allegations against academics and
university executives ranging from fundraisers to Antarctic geologists were brought to
light (Farrow; Ng & James, 2017; Parvini, Ryan, & Pringle, 2017; H. Ryan, 2017;
Wadman, 2017). And those are only some of the high-profile cases that made national
news. The problem of sexual violence continues to be ever-present and pervasive, and
continued measures to counteract it are still needed.
At the end of the day, however, neither I nor this dissertation alone are going to
have any great impact on the problem of sexual violence insofar as immediately reducing
the number of sexually violent acts is concerned. I say this not to undermine my own
work but rather instead to point to the history of anti-SV-movements; these have all been
very much team efforts. When measured by other metrics, such as attitude shifts over
time, the impact of anti-SV work becomes more apparent. What I offer here is my
contribution, that others can take, build on, and adapt, to work towards the next stage in
the continuing anti-SV-movement. Most importantly, the work that activists will be doing
in the years to come is part of a larger, continuous effort to improve the problem of
sexual violence.
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Abrahamsen, D. (1960). The Psychology of Crime. New York, NY: Columbia University
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Creator Storla, Kari (author)

Core Title Navigating gendered relationships: change and inertia in U.S. activism against sexual assault

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 11/30/2019

Defense Date 08/18/2017

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Tag anti-sexual-violence movements,dramatism,feminism,feminist movements,OAI-PMH Harvest,second wave feminism,sexual assault,sexual violence,social movements, social change,Woman's Christian Temperance Union, It's On Us

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