Rape and the Civil War Today’s idea: Were rape and the threat of sexual violence used as weapons in the Civil War? A historian explores evidence from the Union occupation of New Orleans. Scarlett with Rhett: She wasn’t the only belle who felt threatened. History | When the topic is sexual violence in wartime, the horrors of the Balkans and Rwanda typically come to mind — not the American Civil War. But in the academic journal Daedalus, Crystal N. Feimster begs to differ with historians who “have accepted without question the idea that Union soldiers rarely raped southern women, black or white, and have argued that sexual violence was rare during the Civil War.”
In fact, the University of North Carolina historian writes, “hundreds, perhaps thousands of women suffered rape” during the war, with many assaults likely unreported. But her focus is the threat of sexual predation by northern troops, the kind of threat suggested fictionally in Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind.” Feimster explores an 1862 order by the Union Gen. Benjamin Butler, decreeing that any New Orleans woman showing contempt for his occupying troops “shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation” — that is, the city’s outspokenly Confederate belles were to be treated as prostitutes. Feimster sifts evidence that the order was a green light for Union soldiers to threaten sexual violence if not commit rape itself.
After President Abraham Lincoln ignored calls to rescind the order and it was applied beyond the city, she concludes, its geographical reach “ensured that the threat of sexual violence and the fear of rape were common to southern women and central to how they experienced the Civil War.” [Daedalus]
URL to original article:findarticles.com/p/articl...1964235/?tag=content;col1
Original Article Name/Author: General Benjamin Butler & the threat of sexual violence during the American Civil War Daedalus, Spring 2009 by Feimster, Crystal N