Rep.

Todd Akin's Ideas About Rape Hark

Back to the Colonial Era Op-Ed
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In early America, such notions had profound implications
for women seeking justice after rape resulted in pregnancy.
Today, they are used to affect abortion laws.
August 22, 2012 | By Thomas A. Foster


Rep. Todd Akin, the GOP's candidate for U.S. Senate in
Missouri, caused a huge stir the other day with his comments
about how women who are true rape victims rarely get
pregnant.

"If it's a legitimate rape," he said, "the female body has ways
to try to shut that whole thing down."

In a piece that was typical of the widespread outrage the
remarks stirred, the Atlantic magazine called them the
"contemporary equivalent of the early American belief that
only witches float."

The writer was onto something important. Akin's ideas truly
do date back to the colonial era.

In those days, prior to modern medical understanding of
conception, women were considered to be "more amorous" than men, and it was believed that
both partners needed to have orgasms in order for conception to occur.

Nicholas Culpeper's 17th century midwife manuals espoused that it was a woman's "womb,
skipping as it were for joy" that produced "in that pang of Pleasure" the "seed" needed for
conception to occur. If both husband and wife were not properly in love and enjoying sex,
conception would fail, he asserted, because "the woman, being averse, does not produce
sufficient quantities of the spirits with which her genitals should normally swell."

Although many women in early America undoubtedly knew that orgasm was not required for
pregnancy to occur, many women also embraced the two-seed theory of reproduction.

Jane Sharp's 17th century manual, for example, explicitly discussed the clitoris, and described it
as the location for women's physical sexual pleasures and the key to women's ability to conceive.

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Todd Akin (R-Mo.) speaks to reporters
after addressing the Missouri Farm
(Christian Gooden / St. Louis)

"By the stirring of the Clitoris," she wrote, "the imagination causeth the Vessels to cast out that
Seed that lyeth deep in the body."
Such notions of fertilization could have profound implications for women who sought justice
after rape resulted in pregnancy. As historian of rape in early America Sharon Block has shown,
colonial courts were notoriously suspicious of women who brought rape accusations. Women
were seldom taken at their word and the status of the accused and the accuser became central to
the outcome of the case. Moreover, a recurring theme in newspapers of the era was that that men
needed to protect themselves against women "the cunning sex" who were out to falsely
accuse them of rape.

Women who bore the added burden of pregnancy as a result of rape might come under special
criticism in an already skeptical legal and social setting. Given the understanding of conception
outlined above, if a woman became pregnant as the result of rape, consent would be assumed.
Newspapers in early America routinely mocked women who dared to speak about rape and
sexual assault by implying that they had wanted the sexual contact.

Indeed, the idea of women as bewitching seductresses was common in early America. In 1759, a
woman named Anna Donham was brought before the Plymouth General Session for having had
"a wicked and diabolical intent to corrupt and debauch" the local men, inciting them "to commit
fornication and adultery." She was fined and sentenced to public lashing, but the men who
enjoyed her company were not accused of any crime.

In the 1980s, politicians and activists again embraced the idea expressed by Akin, that women
who were raped generally could not conceive. They did so for the same reasons as Akin to
affect abortion legislation. But by the 1980s, such discussions were centuries behind the times. A
generation later, politicians embracing this rhetoric remain willfully ignorant and dangerously
powerful.

This campaign season, let's redefine the traditional "sex scandal" to include misinforming the
public about sex and sexuality.

Thomas A. Foster is an associate professor and chairman of the history department at DePaul
University. He is the editor of "Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of
Sexuality in America."