Understanding the Roots of Violence Against Women
Week 1 of Crisis Intervention Training at the Center for Community Solutions
I sat in the training room on the first night of my Crisis Intervention Training, watching the presenter click through a PowerPoint slide that traced reproductive rights history in the United States. The timeline marched forward: 1821, Connecticut criminalizes abortion. 1873, the Comstock Act makes it a federal offense to distribute birth control information. 1916, a judge rules that women don’t have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” 1957, the FDA approves the first oral contraceptive. 1973, Roe v. Wade.
And then: 2022, Roe v. Wade overturned.
That last entry hit differently. When I was in law school, I was a member of Law Students for Reproductive Justice. We volunteered with our local Planned Parenthood chapter, staffed information tables, and dressed up for the annual Roe v. Wade gala dinner. It was empowering to be surrounded by so many likeminded individuals, all of us certain that we were protecting rights that had been hard-won but were now secure. That gala celebrated decades of legal precedent. We toasted to reproductive freedom as if it were settled law.
The reality today is starkly different. Rights we fought for and celebrated just 10-15 years ago are under direct attack. The Dobbs decision didn’t just overturn Roe—it opened the floodgates. Since June 2022, fourteen states have banned abortion entirely, with limited or no exceptions. Several states have criminalized helping someone access abortion care across state lines. Politicians are openly discussing federal abortion bans, restrictions on contraception, and the dismantling of Title IX protections. The same arguments we thought we’d defeated decades ago—about women’s “proper roles,” about controlling our bodies, about our fundamental personhood—are being resurrected in state legislatures and on the national stage.
Sitting in that training room, watching that timeline end with Dobbs, something crystallized for me. This isn’t new. None of this is new.
I’m currently in the middle of Crisis Intervention Training with the Center for Community Solutions, working toward certification as a Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Counselor. This training is the foundation of my transition into victim advocacy work. And this presentation on the history of sexual assault and intimate partner violence was the very first substantive session we had. That’s not an accident. CCS teaches history first because you cannot do this work without understanding what you’re up against.
What it showed us—what I want to share with you—is that violence against women isn’t random, and it isn’t new. It’s embedded in legal, social, and cultural systems that have controlled women for millennia. From the Code of Hammurabi in 1772 BCE to the Dobbs decision in 2022, there’s an unbroken throughline: the use of law, religion, culture, and violence to control women’s bodies, sexuality, labor, and lives.
History, as they say, repeats itself. Or more accurately: history never really stopped. The patterns just evolve, adapt, find new language. Understanding these patterns isn’t academic exercise—it’s essential to advocacy work. When you’re sitting with a survivor, you’re not just confronting one person’s violence. You’re confronting structures built over thousands of years, systems designed to make that violence possible, even permissible. You’re up against victim-blaming that traces back to ancient legal codes. You’re navigating a culture that still, in 2026, questions what a woman was wearing, whether she said “no” loudly enough, whether she has the right to control her own reproduction.
The training itself has been wonderful—collaborative, full of discussion, energizing even when the content is heavy. But it’s also been clarifying. Each session builds on the last, and they started with history because everything else makes more sense once you see the patterns. Once you understand that the violence we’re responding to today is not aberrational. It’s systemic. It’s historical. And it requires a response that understands it as such.
In his final essay before his death, civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis wrote:
“You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you… When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war.”
This is why I’m documenting my CIT training. I want to share what I’m learning—not just the facts and timelines, but the framework for understanding why this work matters and what we’re really fighting against. This isn’t just for aspiring advocates. It’s for anyone who wants to understand why the attacks on women’s rights feel so relentless, why victim-blaming is so pervasive, why reproductive freedom is always under threat, why the backlash to every advance feels so vicious.
Because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. And once you understand it, you can fight it more effectively.
So let’s start at the beginning. Let’s trace the origins of rape culture, victim blaming, and patriarchy throughout history. Let’s see how laws and norms that controlled women thousands of years ago still shape our world today. And let’s understand what we’re up against—because that’s the first step toward dismantling it.
This post is the first in a series documenting my Crisis Intervention Training with the Center for Community Solutions in San Diego. CCS has been providing free, confidential services to survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence since 1969. Their mission is to end relationship and sexual violence—and that starts with understanding how we got here.
Four Persistent Themes: How Patriarchy Maintains Control
After walking us through the historical timeline, we were asked to step back and look at the patterns. What themes emerge across thousands of years and vastly different cultures? What connects the Code of Hammurabi to Victorian marriage laws to today’s political landscape?
Four themes kept surfacing, again and again, across every era and every society we examined:
- Women as objects and property
- Women as virgins
- Women as mothers
- Women in the workforce
These aren’t separate issues. They’re interconnected systems of control that work together to maintain patriarchy—a sociopolitical and cultural system that values men and masculinity over women and femininity. Understanding these themes is essential because they help explain why certain patterns of violence and oppression persist even as laws change and social norms evolve. The mechanisms adapt, but the underlying systems remain.
Let me break down each theme and show you how it operates both historically and today.
Theme One: Women as Objects and Property
The most fundamental theme is the treatment of women as property rather than persons. This isn’t metaphorical. For most of human history, women were literally owned—first by their fathers, then by their husbands.
In the Code of Hammurabi (1772 BCE), this was explicit. A woman was property in her father’s house until marriage, then property in her husband’s house. Rape wasn’t a crime against the woman—it was property damage against the man who owned her. If a virgin was raped, her father was compensated. If a married woman was raped, both she and her rapist were bound and thrown into the water, because the husband’s property had been damaged and the wife had “allowed” it to happen. The husband could choose to spare his wife, and if he did, the king would spare the rapist. Notice who has agency in this scenario: the father, the husband, the rapist, the king. Not the woman.
This legal framework—women as property—persisted through European history and into American law. When English legal scholar William Blackstone wrote his Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1765, he articulated what became the foundation of U.S. common law: “By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”
Read that again. A married woman had no legal existence separate from her husband. She couldn’t own property, sign contracts, or control her own earnings. This is coverture, and it remained the law in the United States well into the 20th century.
How this shows up today:
The objectification of women’s bodies is so pervasive we barely notice it anymore. Advertising uses women’s bodies to sell everything from cars to hamburgers. The male gaze shapes how women are portrayed in film, television, and media. Women are valued for their appearance, their desirability, their usefulness to men—not their full humanity.
But it goes deeper than media representation. Think about the pervasive practice of revenge porn, where women’s intimate images are shared without consent as punishment or entertainment. The legal system has been slow to respond because there’s a lingering cultural belief that once a woman has shared her body with someone, she’s relinquished control over it.
The objectification of women makes violence easier. When you don’t see someone as fully human, when you view them as existing for your use or pleasure, violating their autonomy doesn’t register as a moral wrong. This is why “locker room talk” matters. This is why the normalization of strip clubs at bachelor parties matters. This is why songs that describe women as objects (“bitches” and “hoes”) matter. They reinforce a worldview in which women are things to be used, not people with inherent dignity and rights.
Theme Two: Women as Virgins
Closely related to women-as-property is the obsession with women’s virginity and sexual purity. If women are property, then virginity is about maintaining the value of that property. A virgin is worth more—to her father in negotiating a marriage, to her husband in ensuring his paternity.
This is why in ancient legal codes, raping a virgin required compensating her father and marrying her. She was damaged goods now, so the rapist had to buy her. It’s why “virginity tests” have existed in various cultures—to verify that the property hasn’t been devalued. It’s why women’s sexuality has been so tightly controlled throughout history while men’s sexual behavior has been broadly tolerated or even celebrated.
The virgin/whore dichotomy is one of the most enduring features of patriarchy. Women are sorted into one of two categories: the pure, modest, sexually restrained “good girl” who deserves protection, or the sexually active, insufficiently modest “bad girl” who deserves whatever happens to her. This binary has been used to justify violence against women for millennia.
In European history, we see this in religious doctrine and cultural practice. The idealization of the Virgin Mary set an impossible standard—a woman who is both virgin and mother, sexually pure yet reproductive. Meanwhile, women who had sex outside of marriage, who dressed “immodestly,” or who simply existed in public spaces were subject to violence, harassment, and legal punishment.
How this shows up today:
Purity culture is alive and well in 2026. Abstinence-only sex education still dominates in many states, teaching girls that their virginity is their most valuable possession and that they’re responsible for managing boys’ sexuality. Purity rings and father-daughter “purity balls” explicitly treat young women’s sexuality as property to be guarded and eventually transferred to a husband.
But the impact goes far beyond overtly religious communities. Consider how victim-blaming works in sexual assault cases. What was she wearing? Had she been drinking? What was she doing at that party/bar/location? How many partners has she had? These questions are all rooted in the virgin/whore dichotomy. They’re asking: Is she the kind of woman who deserves our protection, or the kind who was “asking for it”?
Think about how differently we treat sexual assault allegations depending on the victim’s perceived sexual history. A woman with multiple partners, or who works in the sex industry, or who was drinking at the time faces enormous skepticism. The implicit assumption is that she’s already given up her right to say no. This is why defense attorneys introduce evidence about victims’ sexual history—they’re trying to move her from the “virgin” category to the “whore” category, knowing that juries are less likely to convict when they see her as the latter.
The double standard persists in everything from how we talk about teenagers who have sex (boys “score,” girls become “sluts”) to how we police women’s clothing in schools and workplaces. Women are simultaneously told that their value lies in their sexual desirability AND that if they’re too sexual, they forfeit the right to safety and respect. It’s an impossible standard, and that’s the point. When women can never get it quite right, they can always be blamed for the violence perpetrated against them.
Theme Three: Women as Mothers
If women are property and their sexuality must be controlled, then their reproductive capacity becomes a site of intense regulation and control. This is where all the other themes converge. Control reproduction, and you control women’s lives, choices, economic prospects, and futures.
Throughout history, women’s reproductive capacity has been viewed as belonging to someone other than the woman herself. In ancient societies, it belonged to her father and then her husband—children were the man’s property, and the woman was the vessel that produced them. Laws regulated when women could marry, required them to produce heirs, and punished them severely for adultery (which threatened the paternity line) while tolerating or ignoring men’s extramarital affairs.
The regulation of reproduction has taken two forms throughout history, often simultaneously: forced pregnancy and forced sterilization. Both are about controlling which women reproduce and under what circumstances. Enslaved women in the United States were forced to bear children who would become property of their enslavers. Poor women and women of color have been forcibly sterilized to prevent them from having children the state deemed undesirable. Wealthy white women have been denied access to contraception and abortion to ensure they fulfill their “duty” to produce children.
The reproductive history timeline is chilling in its clarity. Connecticut criminalized abortion in 1821—before women had the right to vote, own property, or have legal existence separate from their husbands. The Comstock Act of 1873 made it a federal crime to distribute information about contraception or abortion, defining such information as “obscene.” When Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in 1916, a judge ruled that women do not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” Even when the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive in 1957, the cultural panic was about women’s “sexual anarchy”—not about women’s health or autonomy, but about what happens when women can separate sex from reproduction.
How this shows up today:
The Dobbs decision didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s part of a long pattern of treating women’s reproductive capacity as public property subject to state control. Since June 2022, fourteen states have banned abortion entirely. Several states have criminalized helping someone access abortion care across state lines. Pregnant women have been denied medical care for life-threatening complications because doctors fear criminal prosecution. Women are being investigated and prosecuted for miscarriages.
But it’s not just abortion. Access to contraception is under threat. Several states have passed or proposed laws restricting access to emergency contraception and IUDs. The same Supreme Court that overturned Roe has signaled openness to revisiting the right to contraception established in Griswold v. Connecticut. Politicians are openly discussing fetal personhood laws that would classify embryos as legal persons from the moment of conception—which would logically criminalize many forms of birth control.
The maternal mortality crisis in the United States is also about reproductive control. The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation, and Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. When the state forces women to continue pregnancies but fails to ensure they have access to prenatal care, delivery care, and postpartum support, it’s making a statement about whose lives matter. Forced birth without maternal healthcare is not pro-life—it’s about control.
And watch what happens when women choose not to have children. The cultural backlash against childfree women is intense. They’re called selfish. They’re told they’ll regret it. They face discrimination in the workplace and social ostracism. Young women who request tubal ligation are routinely denied by doctors who insist they might change their minds or that they need their husband’s permission. Because women’s reproductive capacity is still viewed as belonging to society, not to the individual woman.
Project 2025, the policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that has significant influence in conservative politics, explicitly calls for tracking women’s pregnancies, restricting contraception, and eliminating abortion access nationwide. The document frames this as “protecting life” and “strengthening families,” but the effect is clear: comprehensive control over women’s reproductive lives.
Theme Four: Women in the Workforce
Economic dependence has always been a key mechanism of controlling women. If women can’t earn their own money, own property, or control their own assets, they can’t leave abusive situations. They can’t make independent choices. They remain dependent on men—first fathers, then husbands—for survival.
For most of history, women were explicitly barred from most forms of paid work, from owning businesses, from controlling their own earnings. Even when women did work, their wages legally belonged to their husbands under coverture laws. The first married women’s property acts in the United States weren’t passed until the mid-1800s, allowing women to own property and control their own earnings. But cultural norms continued to restrict women’s economic participation—the ideology of “separate spheres” held that women belonged in the home while men belonged in the public world of work and politics.
When women did enter the workforce in larger numbers—during industrialization, during both World Wars when men were absent—they were paid significantly less than men for the same work. This wasn’t an accident. It was policy. The wage gap served multiple purposes: it kept women economically dependent on men, it provided employers with cheap labor, and it reinforced the message that women’s work was worth less than men’s.
The Equal Pay Act wasn’t passed until 1963, and it still hasn’t achieved its goal. Women working full time year-round still earn 83 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men. For Black women it’s 66 cents. For Latina women it’s 58 cents. For Native American women it’s 58 cents. This isn’t just unfair—it’s dangerous. Economic dependence traps women in abusive relationships. Women cite economic concerns as one of the primary reasons they stay with or return to abusive partners.
How this shows up today:
The wage gap persists, but it’s not the only mechanism of economic control. Women are concentrated in lower-paying fields and are less likely to be promoted to leadership positions. The “motherhood penalty” means that women’s earnings decrease after having children, while men experience a “fatherhood bonus.” Women are expected to perform the unpaid labor of childcare, eldercare, and household management—the “second shift”—on top of their paid employment.
The refusal to treat care work as valuable economic labor is itself a form of control. When childcare is prohibitively expensive but there’s no public support for it, when paid family leave doesn’t exist, when teachers and childcare workers (predominantly women) are paid poverty wages, society is making a statement: women’s traditional labor has no value, and women who do this work should do it out of love, duty, or biological imperative—not for fair compensation.
Economic abuse is one of the most common and effective tactics of intimate partner violence. Abusers control their partners’ access to money, sabotage their employment, ruin their credit, hide assets, and create financial chaos that makes leaving seem impossible. The lack of affordable housing, the waitlists for shelter beds, the cost of childcare and transportation—all of these economic barriers keep women trapped in violent situations.
And consider how the erosion of reproductive rights compounds economic control. When women can’t control if and when they have children, they can’t control their economic trajectories. Forced pregnancy derails education, disrupts careers, and creates economic instability. This isn’t a side effect—it’s the point. Keep women economically dependent, and you keep them controllable.
How These Themes Work Together
Here’s what makes these themes so powerful: they reinforce each other. They create a system where if one mechanism of control fails, others remain in place.
If a woman tries to assert her sexual autonomy, purity culture kicks in to shame her and victim-blaming protects her abuser. If she tries to achieve economic independence, the wage gap and motherhood penalty work against her. If she tries to control her reproduction, the state steps in to force pregnancy. If she tries to leave an abusive situation, economic dependence and lack of social support trap her. And underlying all of it is the fundamental devaluation of women as less than fully human—as objects, property, vessels for reproduction, sources of cheap labor.
Understanding these themes isn’t about cataloging historical injustices. It’s about recognizing that the same systems that controlled women in 1772 BCE are still operating in 2026. They’ve evolved, adapted, found new language and new mechanisms. But the goal remains the same: to control women’s bodies, sexuality, reproduction, labor, and lives.
As victim advocates, we’re not just responding to individual acts of violence. We’re confronting these systems every time we help a survivor navigate a criminal justice system that still often treats her as less credible than her abuser. Every time we help her find financial resources because leaving means losing economic stability. Every time we explain that what happened to her wasn’t her fault, we’re pushing back against millennia of victim-blaming. Every time we affirm her right to make her own choices about her body and her life, we’re challenging the fundamental premise of patriarchy.
Now let’s look at how these themes have played out across history—and how they continue to shape the world we’re trying to change.
The Historical Timeline: Tracing Patterns of Control
Now that we’ve established the four themes that persist across time and culture, let’s trace them through history. What you’ll see is that these aren’t modern problems with ancient roots—they’re ancient systems that have never truly been dismantled.
Ancient Times: The Code of Hammurabi (1772 BCE)
When we think about the origins of written law, we often imagine the establishment of justice and order. But for women, the codification of law often meant the codification of their oppression.
The Code of Hammurabi, created in Babylonia around 1772 BCE, is one of the oldest written legal codes we have. Carved into a stone stele that still exists today, it contains over 300 rules covering nearly every aspect of life. And it provides a crystal-clear picture of how patriarchy becomes law.
Women as Property
Under Hammurabi’s code, women had no independent legal existence. A woman was considered property—either a virgin in her father’s house or a wife in her husband’s house. Her value was determined by her relationship to men and her usefulness to them.
The code is explicit about this. To “ravish” a virgin was considered property damage against her father. The punishment wasn’t for harming the woman herself, but for devaluing the father’s asset. The rape of a married woman resulted in both the woman and her rapist being considered guilty—they would be bound together and thrown into the water to drown. But here’s the crucial detail: “If the husband of the woman wishes to spare his wife, then the king shall spare his servant.”
Notice who has agency in this scenario. The father owns the virgin. The husband owns the wife. The husband can choose whether his wife lives or dies. The king makes the final determination about the rapist. At no point does the woman herself have any say in her own fate. She’s the property being adjudicated, not a person with rights.
Economic Control
The code also demonstrates economic control mechanisms. A husband could terminate a marriage at will, though he was required to provide the wife with money equivalent to her “marriage price”—essentially returning her value to her family. But if a wife was deemed to have “not been discreet, has gone out, ruined her house, or belittled her husband, she shall be drowned.”
Even more stark: “A man in debt can sell his wife and children, who for years shall work in the house of their purchaser. In the fourth year they shall be given their freedom.” Women and children as fungible assets, sold to settle debts, their labor owned by strangers.
The Foundation Is Laid
The Code of Hammurabi wasn’t an aberration. Similar legal structures existed across ancient civilizations—Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome. The specifics varied, but the fundamental premise remained: women were property, their sexuality and reproduction were controlled by men, their labor and lives belonged to their fathers and husbands.
This matters because these ancient legal systems became the foundation for later European law, which became the foundation for American law. When we talk about how patriarchy is “baked into” our legal system, this is what we mean. It’s literally written in stone.
European History: Codifying Violence (1100s-1700s)
European history provides a through-line from ancient legal codes to modern Western law. And what we see in medieval and early modern Europe is the systematic normalization of violence against women—not just in practice, but in law, religion, philosophy, and culture.
Instructions for Violence
In 1184, Andreas Capellanus wrote “The Art of Courtly Love,” a text that was widely read and influential across Europe. In it, he advises men on how to pursue women: “Be careful to puff her up with lots of praise and then, when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace her by force.”
This wasn’t considered rape advice. This was considered courtship advice. Flattery followed by force was the prescribed method for obtaining what you wanted from a woman.
By 1477, the advice had become even more explicit. In “The Rules of Marriage,” Friar Cherubino instructed husbands: “When you see your wife commit an offense, don’t rush at her with insults and violent blows. Scold her sharply, bully and terrify her. And if that still doesn’t work, pick up a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and correct the soul.”
Notice the framing. The husband isn’t committing violence—he’s administering correction. He’s saving her soul by punishing her body. Wife-beating isn’t abuse; it’s a husband’s duty, a form of spiritual care.
Marital Rape as Legal Impossibility
In 1713, Sir Matthew Hale wrote “The History of the Pleas of the Crown,” which became a foundational text in English common law. In it, he articulated what became known as the “marital rape exemption”: “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.”
Read that carefully. By marrying, a woman gives permanent, irrevocable consent to all sexual acts with her husband. She cannot retract it. She cannot say no. Marital rape is legally impossible because wives are not legally capable of withholding consent from their husbands.
This wasn’t just Hale’s opinion. This became the law. It remained the law in Britain and the United States for centuries. Nebraska became the first U.S. state to criminalize marital rape in 1976—more than 250 years after Hale wrote his treatise. The last U.S. state to remove the marital rape exemption entirely was Oklahoma—in 1993.
Legal Non-Existence
In 1765, William Blackstone published “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” which became the basis for American common law. His articulation of coverture—the legal doctrine that a married woman has no independent legal existence—was stark: “By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”
Under coverture, a married woman could not own property, sign contracts, or control her own earnings. Any wages she earned belonged to her husband. Any property she owned before marriage became her husband’s property. She could not sue or be sued. She could not write a will. She had no legal existence apart from her husband.
This was the law that English colonists brought to America. This was the legal framework that shaped the early United States. This is why married women’s property acts—allowing women to own property independently—weren’t passed in U.S. states until the mid-1800s. This is why women couldn’t have their own bank accounts or credit cards in their own names until the 1960s and 1970s.
Cultural Reinforcement
Law wasn’t the only mechanism of control. Art and culture reinforced these norms constantly. Consider the paintings of biblical and mythological scenes that decorated churches and aristocratic homes. “The Rape of the Sabine Women” was painted repeatedly by master artists—showing mass abduction and rape as the founding of Rome, a necessary violence. “Susanna and the Elders” showed a woman bathing, spied on by lecherous old men—but it was painted to be titillating, the male gaze turned on the viewer.
These weren’t depictions of tragedy. They were eroticization of violence, normalization of violation, instruction manuals for how to see women—as objects to be taken, bodies to be viewed, property to be claimed.
The Throughline to America
Everything we see in European law and culture from this period became the foundation for American law. The English colonists who settled in what became the United States brought these legal structures with them. Coverture, the marital rape exemption, the legal treatment of women as property—all of this was simply the inherited legal framework.
And it remained the law—largely unchanged—well into the 20th century.
Early U.S. History: Racialized Violence and Reform (1490s-1900)
American history adds another dimension to the patterns we’ve been tracing: the explicit intersection of sexual violence with racism and colonization. In the United States, rape and intimate partner violence were not just tools of gender oppression—they were also tools of racial oppression, used systematically to terrorize and control Black, Indigenous, and other women of color.
The Sex Slave Trade
The racialized sexual violence that would characterize American history began before the United States existed. In the 1490s, Spanish conquistadors established a sex slave trade in Hispaniola, systematically kidnapping and raping Indigenous women. This set a pattern that continued through centuries of European colonization—the rape of Indigenous women was treated as a right of conquest, a tool of genocide, a method of cultural destruction.
Rape as Legal for Some, Criminal for Others
In the 1600s, colonial laws began defining rape as “carnal knowledge of a woman 10 years or older, forcibly and against her will.” But this definition applied only to white women. The rape of enslaved Black women was not a crime. It was not even legally possible. Because enslaved people were property, not persons, they could not be victims of crimes against persons.
This legal distinction wasn’t an oversight. It was policy. Enslaved women were systematically raped by enslavers and overseers. Children born from these rapes became property of the enslaver, increasing his wealth. Thomas Jefferson, author of “all men are created equal,” enslaved Sally Hemings and fathered multiple children with her—a relationship that began when she was 14 years old and he was 44, when he owned her and she could not legally refuse him.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the trafficking and rape of Native, Black, and foreign women and children was common and legal. They were sold into prostitution, trafficked across borders, brutalized with impunity. The law offered them no protection because the law didn’t recognize them as fully human.
The Threat of the Black Male Rapist
The legal permissibility of raping Black women existed alongside white America’s obsession with the imaginary threat of Black men raping white women. After the Civil War, during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, the myth of the Black male rapist became a tool of terrorism. Black men were lynched—tortured and murdered—based on accusations (often false) of looking at, speaking to, or touching white women.
Ida B. Wells, a Black journalist and activist, documented this in her investigative reporting in the 1890s. She showed that lynching was not about protecting white women—it was about terrorizing Black communities and maintaining white supremacy. Black women were raped with impunity, but white men claimed to be protecting white women from Black men. The sexual violence and the racialized violence were two sides of the same system of control.
Breaking the Silence
In 1866, following the Memphis Riots, African-American women were among the first to break the public silence about rape. They testified before Congress about the sexual violence they had experienced during the riots. This was extraordinary—these women speaking publicly about rape, naming what had been done to them, demanding accountability.
But statutory reform during the Jim Crow era lagged for decades. Racial stereotypes about sexuality—about Black women as naturally promiscuous, about Black men as sexual predators—continued to shape who was believed and who was protected. From the 1880s through the 1950s, reform efforts moved slowly, hindered by the intersecting forces of racism and sexism.
Early Reform Efforts
There were some advances, though they were slow and limited:
In 1882, Maryland became the first state to make “wife-beating” a crime. This was significant, but enforcement was inconsistent and social norms still treated domestic violence as a private family matter.
By 1900, women’s rights activists had successfully lobbied for laws against “Seduction by Acquaintance”—making it a crime (though a lesser one than rape) to coerce sex through fraud or manipulation. This recognized a form of sexual violence that fell outside the narrow legal definition of forcible rape, but it still carried assumptions about which women deserved protection.
The Foundation of American Rape Culture
What we see in early U.S. history is the establishment of patterns that persist today:
- The differential treatment of sexual violence based on the victim’s race, creating a hierarchy of whose pain matters
- The use of false accusations against Black men as a weapon of racial terror, which makes it harder for all survivors to be believed
- The myth that “real rape” involves a stranger, force, and a “respectable” victim—anything else is suspect
- The treatment of domestic violence as a private matter that law enforcement shouldn’t interfere with
- The slow, grudging expansion of legal protections only after decades of advocacy by women’s rights activists
These patterns didn’t emerge randomly. They were built into our legal system from the beginning, inherited from European law and adapted to maintain both patriarchy and white supremacy.
By the early 1900s, some legal protections existed on paper. But the cultural norms, the enforcement gaps, and the systematic exclusion of women of color from those protections meant that the reality of violence and impunity continued largely unchanged.
And the fight for meaningful legal reform—for marital rape laws, for rape shield laws, for the Violence Against Women Act—was only beginning.
The Control of Reproduction: 1821 to Today
Of all the mechanisms of control we’ve examined, the regulation of women’s reproductive capacity may be the most fundamental. Control reproduction, and you control everything—women’s education, careers, economic prospects, relationships, futures, lives. This is where all four themes converge: women as property whose value depends on their reproductive capacity, women whose sexuality must be controlled to ensure paternity, women whose primary purpose is motherhood, women whose economic participation depends on when and whether they bear children.
The history of reproductive control in the United States shows a clear pattern: progress followed by backlash, rights extended and then rescinded, the same arguments resurfacing across centuries. And it brings us directly to the moment we’re living through right now.
The 19th Century: Criminalizing Abortion and Contraception
1821: Connecticut becomes the first state to criminalize abortion. This happens decades before women have the right to vote, own property independently, or exist as separate legal entities from their husbands. The criminalization of abortion isn’t about protecting women—it’s about controlling them.
1873: The Comstock Act passes. Named after Anthony Comstock, a postal inspector and anti-vice crusader, this federal law defines contraceptives and information about contraception as “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials. It becomes a federal offense to disseminate birth control information or devices through the U.S. mail or across state lines.
Think about what this means. Women could not legally access information about how to prevent pregnancy. The knowledge itself was criminalized. Teaching women how their bodies work, how reproduction happens, how to prevent it—this was legally equivalent to distributing pornography.
The Comstock Act remained law until 1938. For 65 years, it was a federal crime to mail contraceptive information. State-level Comstock laws remained on the books even longer, restricting access to birth control well into the 20th century.
The Early 20th Century: Resistance and Repression
1916: Margaret Sanger opens the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. She is promptly arrested. At her trial, the judge rules that women do not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”
Let that sink in. A judge ruled that women do not have the right to have sex without the risk of pregnancy. The fear of pregnancy—the potential for forced motherhood—is deemed an acceptable and necessary constraint on women’s sexual behavior. The punishment for avoiding that risk is criminal prosecution.
1940s: Planned Parenthood emerges, but in a troubling form. The organization is primarily run by religious men and focused on population control—determining which populations should be encouraged to reproduce and which should not. This is the era of eugenics, when forced sterilization of poor women, disabled women, immigrant women, and women of color is legal and common.
The control of reproduction has always had two faces: forced pregnancy for some women, forced sterilization for others. Both are about determining who gets to make reproductive decisions—and the answer has never been “the woman herself.”
Mid-20th Century: The Pill and the Panic
1957: The FDA approves the first oral contraceptive. For the first time in history, women have access to a reliable method of preventing pregnancy that they can control themselves, that doesn’t require a partner’s cooperation or knowledge.
The cultural reaction is panic. A 1966 article captures the anxiety: “Is the Pill regarded as a license for promiscuity? Can its availability lead to sexual anarchy?”
Notice what’s not being asked. Not: Will this improve women’s health? Will this allow women to plan their families, pursue education, control their economic futures? The question is whether allowing women to separate sex from reproduction will lead to “sexual anarchy.” The fear is that women who can have sex without consequences will stop being controllable.
1965: Griswold v. Connecticut. The Supreme Court rules that married couples have the right to birth control as a matter of privacy. This is significant, but notice the limitation: married couples. Access to contraception is framed as a marital right, not a woman’s individual right. It would take another seven years before unmarried people had the same access.
1972: A Gallup poll shows that a majority of Americans—64%—believe “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” This is important context for what comes next. Before Roe v. Wade, most Americans already supported abortion rights.
1973: Roe v. Wade
January 22, 1973: The Supreme Court rules in Roe v. Wade that the constitutional right to privacy extends to abortion. For the first time, women have a federally protected right to terminate a pregnancy.
The decision is not absolute—it establishes a trimester framework balancing the woman’s right to privacy against the state’s interest in potential life. But it’s revolutionary nonetheless. Women have a constitutional right to control their own reproduction.
The backlash begins immediately. The anti-abortion movement, which had been relatively small and fragmented, becomes organized and politically powerful. By the late 1970s, the “pro-family” agenda is targeting not just abortion, but contraception, sex education, gay rights, and women’s liberation generally. The Religious Right becomes a political force, and restricting abortion becomes a cornerstone of conservative politics.
The Late 20th Century: Progress and Backlash
1976: Nebraska becomes the first state to criminalize marital rape. Remember—until this moment, it is still legal in all 50 states for a husband to rape his wife. The last state to fully remove the marital rape exemption won’t do so until 1993—twenty years after Roe, two centuries after the founding of the nation.
1994: The Violence Against Women Act passes. This landmark legislation provides federal resources for investigating and prosecuting violence against women, establishes a national domestic violence hotline, and funds services for survivors. It represents a recognition that violence against women is not a private matter but a public crisis requiring federal intervention.
But even as VAWA passes, abortion access is being restricted. States begin passing waiting periods, parental consent laws, restrictions on public funding, targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP laws) designed to shut down clinics without explicitly banning abortion.
1997: Research exposes the role of “predatory” adult men in teenage childbearing and familial abuse. This challenges the narrative that teenage pregnancy is about irresponsible teenagers and reveals the reality: adult men impregnating teenage girls, often through coercion or abuse. But this research doesn’t lead to prosecution of these men—it leads to more restrictions on young women’s access to abortion and contraception.
1998: Mississippi becomes the last state to remove the “chastity provision” from its criminal sexual conduct code.cUntil 1998, Mississippi law treated unchaste women as less worthy of protection from sexual violence than “chaste” women. The virgin/whore dichotomy, codified in state law, until the 21st century.
The 21st Century: Progress Continues
2003: Lawrence v. Texas. The Supreme Court strikes down sodomy laws, ruling that consensual sexual activity between adults is protected by the right to privacy. This is particularly significant for LGBTQ+ individuals, but it’s also a broader affirmation of sexual autonomy.
2010: The Affordable Care Act passes, requiring insurance coverage for contraception with no co-pay. For the first time, birth control is treated as essential preventive healthcare. Access improves dramatically, particularly for low-income women.
2011: The FBI revises its definition of rape for the first time since 1927. The old definition—”the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will”—is replaced with a broader, less gendered definition that includes non-forcible rape and other forms of sexual penetration. This represents a recognition that rape is about violation of consent, not about force alone, and that men can also be victims.
2017: The #MeToo movement explodes into public consciousness. Millions of women share their experiences of sexual harassment and assault. High-profile men in entertainment, politics, business, and media are held accountable. There’s a sense that something fundamental is shifting, that the culture of silence and impunity is finally breaking.
2022: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
And then, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a 6-3 decision eliminates the federal constitutional right to abortion. The decision explicitly rejects the right to privacy established in Roe and its precedent, Griswold v. Connecticut. Justice Clarence Thomas writes in his concurrence that the Court should reconsider other rights based on the same privacy doctrine—including the right to contraception, the right to same-sex relationships, and the right to same-sex marriage.
The impact is immediate and devastating:
Fourteen states have total or near-total abortion bans, many with no exceptions for rape or incest, some with extremely limited exceptions for the life of the mother.
Women are being denied medical care for life-threatening pregnancy complications because doctors fear prosecution. Women with ectopic pregnancies—which are never viable and can be fatal if untreated—are being turned away from emergency rooms. Women experiencing miscarriages are being denied the medication that would complete the miscarriage and prevent infection, forced to wait until they’re septic before doctors will intervene.
Women are being investigated and prosecuted for miscarriages and stillbirths. The same surveillance and criminalization that we saw with the war on drugs is now being applied to pregnancy. Pregnant women are the new “suspects,” their bodies potential crime scenes.
Several states are attempting to criminalize helping someone access abortion care across state lines. If you drive your friend to a clinic in another state, you could be prosecuted. If you provide information about how to access abortion, you could be sued. The tools of the Comstock Act—making information itself criminal—are being resurrected.
Access to contraception is under threat. Some states are already restricting access to emergency contraception and IUDs, claiming these are abortifacients (they’re not, but the claim provides a justification for restriction). Conservative legal organizations are challenging the ACA’s contraception mandate. Politicians are openly discussing rolling back Griswold.
Maternal mortality is rising. The United States already has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations. Black women are already three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. Forcing women to continue pregnancies in states with inadequate maternal healthcare is lethal.
2025-2026: Where We Are Now
As I sit in this training in January 2026, three and a half years after Dobbs, the landscape continues to deteriorate.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint that has significant influence in conservative politics, explicitly calls for:
- Tracking women’s pregnancies to identify those who don’t carry to term
- Restricting access to mifepristone (medication abortion) nationwide
- Eliminating Title X family planning funding
- Defunding Planned Parenthood entirely
- Enforcing the Comstock Act to ban mailing abortion pills
- Establishing fetal personhood from conception
Several states are pushing “fetal personhood” laws that would classify embryos as legal persons from the moment of conception. The logical implications are staggering: IUDs and emergency contraception could be criminalized as they prevent implantation. Miscarriages could be investigated as potential homicides. Pregnant women could be legally subordinate to the “person” they’re carrying.
The arguments being made today—that women who have sex accept the risk of pregnancy, that motherhood is women’s natural purpose, that abortion is murder, that contraception enables promiscuity—are the same arguments made in 1916 when Margaret Sanger was arrested. The same arguments made when the Comstock Act passed in 1873. The same arguments embedded in the Code of Hammurabi in 1772 BCE.
The Pattern Is Clear
Look at the timeline I saw on that slide in the presentation:
- 1821: Abortion criminalized
- 1873: Information about contraception criminalized
- 1916: Judge rules women don’t have the right to sex without pregnancy risk
- 1957: The Pill approved (with moral panic about “sexual anarchy”)
- 1972: Majority of Americans support abortion rights
- 1973: Roe v. Wade establishes constitutional right
- 2022: Roe v. Wade overturned
We fought for these rights. We won them. And now they’re being stripped away.
This isn’t a failure of the movement. This is the pattern. Every advance for women’s rights has been met with organized backlash. Every expansion of women’s autonomy has triggered attempts to reassert control. The mechanisms adapt—from outright legal prohibition to TRAP laws to elimination of federal protection—but the goal remains constant: control women’s reproduction, and you control women’s lives.
Why This Matters for Advocacy
Understanding this history is essential for the work I’m training to do. When I sit with a survivor who’s pregnant from rape and can’t access abortion in her state, I’m not just witnessing one woman’s tragedy. I’m witnessing the culmination of thousands of years of laws and norms that treat women’s bodies as public property subject to state control.
When I help a survivor safety plan around an abusive partner who sabotages her birth control and threatens to get her pregnant to trap her, I’m confronting the same system of reproductive coercion that’s been used to control women since ancient Babylon.
When I see a survivor blamed for “letting” the abuse continue, questioned about why she didn’t leave, judged for having children with an abuser—I understand that the person asking those questions has inherited centuries of victim-blaming, internalized the belief that women are responsible for men’s violence.
The history shows us that this is not a series of isolated injustices. This is a system. And systems require systemic responses.
That’s what I’m learning in this training. That’s what drew me to advocacy work. That’s why I’m documenting this journey—because understanding the history is the first step toward changing the future.
And as John Lewis said: “When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war.”
We know the pattern now. We’ve traced it through 4,000 years of history. We see how it operates, how it adapts, how it reasserts itself.
And now we fight to break it.
Conclusion: Understanding the Past, Fighting for the Future
I walked out of that first training session with a strange mix of emotions. There was anger, certainly—at the sheer scope and persistence of these systems of control. There was grief for all the women throughout history who lived and died under these laws, who had no language for what was being done to them, no movement to support them, no legal recourse.
But there was also clarity. And strangely, hope.
Because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. And once you understand the system, you can fight it more effectively.
This is why the Center for Community Solutions starts the Crisis Intervention Training with history. Not with crisis intervention techniques or safety planning protocols or the mechanics of how to answer the hotline. With history. Because you cannot do this work without understanding what you’re up against.
When advocates talk about “dismantling systems of oppression,” this is what we mean. We’re not being dramatic or abstract. We’re talking about actual systems—legal structures, cultural norms, economic arrangements—that have controlled women for thousands of years. Systems that are written into our laws, embedded in our institutions, internalized in our assumptions about how the world works.
The Code of Hammurabi was carved into stone. William Blackstone’s commentaries became the foundation of American law. The marital rape exemption remained on the books until 1993. The Comstock Act is being invoked again in 2026. These aren’t metaphors. They’re the literal legal and cultural infrastructure we’re still living within.
What This Means for Advocacy
In the coming weeks of my training, I’ll learn crisis intervention techniques. I’ll practice safety planning and learn about trauma-informed care. I’ll study the neurobiology of trauma and the dynamics of intimate partner violence. I’ll learn how to answer the hotline, how to accompany survivors to forensic exams, how to navigate the legal system on behalf of clients.
But none of those skills would be complete without this historical understanding. Because when I sit with a survivor, I need to understand that she’s not just dealing with one person’s violence. She’s navigating systems designed to make that violence possible, to excuse it, to blame her for it.
When she tells me she’s afraid no one will believe her, I understand that fear is grounded in millennia of victim-blaming. When she tells me she can’t afford to leave, I understand that economic dependence has always been a tool of control. When she tells me she’s pregnant from rape and can’t access abortion, I understand that reproductive control has always been the linchpin of women’s oppression. When she’s a woman of color and tells me she’s afraid to involve the police, I understand the historical reasons for that fear.
This understanding doesn’t just inform how I do the work—it’s what sustains me in the work. Because this work is hard. Sitting with trauma is hard. Witnessing the impact of violence is hard. Confronting the inadequacy of our systems—the underfunded shelters, the unsympathetic law enforcement, the victim-blaming judges, the restrictive laws—is exhausting and infuriating.
But knowing the history reminds me that this fight is not new. Women have been resisting these systems of control for as long as the systems have existed. Every right we have now was fought for by women who came before us. The fact that we’re still fighting doesn’t mean we’re failing—it means we’re part of a long tradition of resistance.
The Pattern and the Backlash
Here’s what the history teaches us: progress is not linear, and it’s never secure.
Every advance for women’s rights has been met with backlash. When women gained the right to vote, there was backlash. When women entered the workforce in larger numbers, there was backlash. When birth control became available, there was backlash. When Roe v. Wade was decided, there was backlash. When #MeToo gave survivors a platform to speak, there was backlash.
The backlash we’re experiencing right now—the overturning of Roe, the attacks on contraception, the resurgence of “tradwife” ideology, the emboldened misogyny in politics and culture—is not evidence that the movement failed. It’s evidence that the movement succeeded enough to threaten the status quo. The backlash is proportional to the threat.
This doesn’t make it less dangerous. The women who are being denied abortion care, who are dying from pregnancy complications, who are being prosecuted for miscarriages—they’re paying the price for this backlash right now. The stakes are life and death.
But understanding the pattern helps us respond strategically. We know that the same arguments resurface across centuries. We know that they adapt to the language and norms of the time but the underlying logic remains the same. We know that legal victories can be reversed, that cultural shifts can be resisted, that we can never assume rights are permanently secured.
And we know that resistance works. Because we’re still here, still fighting, because women before us refused to accept these systems as inevitable.
Moving Forward
I’m writing this in the middle of my first week of CIT training. By the time I finish in late February, I’ll be a certified Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Counselor. I’ll begin my volunteer work with CCS’s Sexual Assault Response Team, responding to forensic exams, supporting survivors through the immediate aftermath of assault.
I’m documenting this journey through these blog posts because I want to share what I’m learning. Not just the facts and timelines, but the framework for understanding why this work matters and what we’re really fighting for.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve just traced 4,000 years of patriarchal control. You’ve seen how laws and norms that controlled women in ancient Babylon still shape our world today. You’ve seen the pattern of progress and backlash, the mechanisms of control adapting but never disappearing.
This is heavy knowledge to carry. But it’s also clarifying. Because once you understand the system, you can see it operating everywhere. You can recognize victim-blaming when you hear it. You can identify economic control mechanisms. You can spot the ways reproductive restriction is always about controlling women’s lives, not protecting life. You can see how racism and sexism intersect to make violence against women of color both more common and less likely to be addressed.
And you can resist more effectively.
What You Can Do
You don’t have to become an advocate to make a difference. Understanding these systems makes you better equipped to:
Recognize and challenge victim-blaming when you hear it—in media coverage, in conversations, in your own internal thoughts.
Support survivors in your life by believing them, respecting their choices, and understanding why leaving an abusive situation is complicated.
Advocate for policy changes that address the systemic nature of violence against women—funding for survivor services, stronger legal protections, economic support that reduces women’s dependence on abusive partners.
Question the ways you’ve internalized these norms—about women’s sexuality, about who deserves protection, about whose stories you automatically believe.
Support organizations doing this work—volunteer, donate, share their resources, show up when they need community backing.
Vote with an understanding of what’s at stake—reproductive rights, funding for violence prevention programs, judges who will enforce protective orders, legislators who understand that violence against women is a systemic issue requiring systemic solutions.
Teach this history—especially to young people who may not know that marital rape was legal in their parents’ lifetime, that their grandmothers couldn’t have their own credit cards, that the rights we have now were fought for and can be taken away.
A Final Thought
John Lewis wrote: “You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you.”
Sitting in that training room, I felt the weight of that history. But I also felt connected to every woman who resisted it. Every woman who testified about rape despite the stigma. Every woman who sought out contraception despite the laws. Every woman who left an abusive partner despite having nowhere to go. Every woman who said “this is not acceptable” when everyone around her said it was just the way things were.
We stand on their shoulders. And the women who come after us will stand on ours.
The pattern may be ancient, but it’s not inevitable. Systems built by humans can be dismantled by humans. Laws written on stone tablets can be shattered. Cultural norms can shift. Every generation moves the work forward, even when it feels like we’re fighting the same battles.
This is Week 1 of my training. This is the foundation. Everything I learn from here builds on this understanding: that violence against women is not random, that it’s systematically enabled and culturally normalized, and that changing it requires us to confront the full scope of what we’re up against.
I’m ready for that fight. I hope you are too.
This is the first post in my CIT Training series, documenting my journey through the Crisis Intervention Training program at the Center for Community Solutions. If you or someone you know needs support, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, and the National Sexual Assault Hotline is available at 1-800-656-4673. In San Diego, you can reach the Center for Community Solutions 24/7 hotline at 888-385-4657.