UCLA Center for the Study of Women

The Little case serves as a window into how different groups conceptualized sexual violence; when and why varying social movements deemed rape particularly problematic and what they believed needed to be done about it. It is a particularly interesting case because feminists had been mobilizing since the early 1970s against rape and claimed the issue as their own. Thousands of women nationwide during the early 1970s created an active and effective anti-rape movement and sexual assault became a major feminist battleground. By the time of Little’s trial in 1975, the women’s liberation movement had firmly placed the issue of sexual assault into public consciousness. While feminists may have deemed rape a “woman’s issue” in the 1970s, civil rights activists also claimed sexual assault as a key issue in the black freedom struggle. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, civil rights activists rallied around cases of interracial rape, seeking justice for the historic and continuing suffering of black men who were wrongly accused and convicted of raping white women as well as championing the cause of black women who suffered from sexual violence by white men. To the dismay of many feminists, racism (and not sexism) became the prevailing issue in this case, both in terms of the approach of the legal defense team and the media reporting. This paper argues that understanding the politics of rape in the 1970s requires us to look at both the newly emerged feminist understanding as well as the decades of rich analysis from the civil rights perspective that preceded it.