Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller Read Free Book Online

asked for the restoration of daughters who had been carried off . . . . It might have been in accordance with some sort of law of war, had the victor justly won the women who had been unjustly refused him; it was contrary to every law of peace that he seized those who had been denied him and then waged unjust war with their indig nant parents.

    Because the Sabine women had been carried off and raped before the war, Augustine called the operation a "shady trick."

    There is no precise moment in history when bells clanged and rape in war universally came to be considered a criminal act, out side the province of a proper warrior. The historic development of the rights of women, like the development of nations, proceeded at an uneven pace. Totila, the Ostrogoth who captured Rome in 546 A.D., forbade his troops to rape the Roman women, but the source from which I rescued this obscure bit of history warned that "Totila stands out as a bright chivalrous knightly figure in an age of savagery." Nonetheless, Totila deserves a nod as a man ahead of his time.
    One of the earliest surviving Articles of War was proclaimed by Richard II of England in 1385. Among the twenty-four articles governing the conduct of his soldiers, King Richard decreed "That none be so hardy as to . . . force any woman, upon pain of being hanged." An equal penalty was applied to the hardy who pillaged a church. Yet as late as the seventeenth century, the Dutch jurist Grotius, who wrote at length on ·international military law, was forced to muse that some countries held that the dishonoring of
    women in war was allowable while other countries held to the contrary. Grotius asserted that the more civilized of nations dis allowed rape. The outlawing of rape in warfare, at least on the books, was an important advance for women, but despite the penalties, and whether or not they were rigorously applied, rape in warfare continued to flourish.
    A simple rule of thumb in war is that the winning side is the side that does the raping. There are two specific reasons for this, one pragmatic and one psychologic, and neither has much to do with the nobility of losers or with the moral superiority of an heroic defense. First, a victorious army marches through the defeated people's territory, and thus it is obvious that if there is any raping to be done, it will be done on the bodies of the defeated enemy's women. Second, rape is the act of a conqueror. This is more than a truism. It helps explain why men continue to rape in war.
    Long af ter the enemy's women had lost their utilitarian value as slave labor or battle-camp trophy, and long af ter rape was frowned upon by the more civilized kings and generals, rape re mained a hallmark of success in battle. In medieval times, oppor tunities to rape and loot were among the few advantages open to common foot soldiers, who were paid with great irregularity by their leaders. The Byzantine emperor Alexius is supposed to have extolled the beauty of Greek women in his appeals for recruits for the First Crusade. When the city of Constantinople was sacked in 1204, rape and plunder went hand in hand, as in the sack of almost every ancient city, Totila's Ostrogoths notwithstanding. "To the victor belong the spoils" has applied to women since Helen of Troy, but the sheer property worth of women was replaced in time by a far more subtle system of values. Down through the ages, triumph over women by rape became a way to measure victory, part of a soldier's proof of masculinity and success, a tangible reward for services rendered. Stemming from the days when women were property, access to a woman's body has been con sidered an actual reward of war.* "Booty and beauty" General

    * Because access to women af ter a battle has been a traditional reward of war, it is impossible to discuss rape in warfare without touching also on prostitu tion, since the two have been linked in history. Not that if prostitutes are not readily available men will turn