ABSTRACT
When we write about relations between men and women, it can be tempting to see heterosexual relations as the most fundamental site of oppression: here, it would seem, is the key to both patriarchial power and women’s attraction to it.1 Perhaps, in some not always explicitly theorized way, this may account for the turn feminist history has taken towards a particular interest in prostitution, rape and sex crimes. Analysing the historical forms of oppression in heterosexual relations promises to make gender a primary historical category. Instead of the history of prostitution or rape being historical byways, they are shown to be central routes to understanding past societies. So, for instance, Anna Clark’s book takes rape as a paradigmatic way of investigating the oppression of women by men in the eighteenth century;2 or Judith Walkowitz’s history of nineteenthcentury English prostitution uses that issue to get to the heart of relations between men and women and explore nineteenth-century feminism.3
