"Under the Pretense": Caretaking Vulnerabilities and Sexual Assault in Revolutionary New England

The threat of rape and sexual violence structured women’s everyday experiences throughout the eighteenth century. Further, to be a woman in Revolutionary-era New England meant catering to the violent whims of fathers, husbands, and other townsmen. The fear of sexual violence pervaded hierarchical structures even before the onset of the American Revolution. Historians agree that the dislocations of war transformed social structures that allowed for mobility, regardless of race, gender, and class. In particular, women medical practitioners saw an increase in entrepreneurial opportunities that blurred hierarchies of power and helped negotiate coercive relationships. Women working as healers diagnosed, prescribed, and treated patients, all while gaining a semblance of bodily autonomy. Paid employment translated domestic healing knowledge into financial gain but, in turn, also continued to make women vulnerable to sexual assault. This was not due to the increase of troops in occupied cities but through the close domestic spaces of their labor. Men, both civilian and soldier, drew on eighteenth-century notions of societal and cultural norms of consent to prey on healing women seeking economic independence. Men garnered invitations into small domestic colonial homes—and women’s healing spaces—through their supposed need for healing. Would-be attackers, from both public and domestic settings, replicated husband and wife patriarchal relationships, where heads of households dictated access to women’s bodies. In other words, we see the persistence of brute force grounded in patriarchal notions of consent, even during the dislocations of war.