WOMEN'S ABDUCTION

"The Rape of the Sabine Women" by Pietro de Cortona

The abduction of women by men seeking wives, concubines, or slaves is a practice that goes back to ancient times. One such example, the Rape of the Sabine Women, concerns the legendary founding of Rome. Facing a severe shortage of women and unable to get nearby cities to agree to alliances through intermarriage, the early Romans abducted the Sabine women during a religious festival. Despite being abducted and raped, the Sabine women formed attachments with their abductors. Some months later, when the Sabine men sought revenge, they found their sisters and daughters did not want to be rescued. Instead, they pleaded with their fathers and brothers not to attack the men who had become their husbands and the fathers of their unborn children. This story, recounted by both Ovid and Livy, justifies abduction and rape as a means to obtain brides and establish a city. This view of the episode has been immortalized over the centuries in numerous works of art, literature, and theater (including the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which sets the story in the American West).

"The Abduction of the Sabine Women" by Nicolas Poussin

One of the most famous portrayals of the Sabine women's abduction is the seventeenth-century painting by Nicolas Poussin, Rape of the Sabine Women (1633–1634). In this painting, Poussin portrays the rape and abduction in heroic terms. In fact, themes of “heroic rape” were common in the seventeenth century, as they were throughout the early modern period, emphasizing both the power of husbands over their wives and nobles over their subjects. In legal terms, rape was considered mainly a crime of property theft: the Sabine women were stolen from their fathers. Far from being objects of contempt or pity, the Sabine women became revered as the mothers of Rome.

The abduction of heiresses was one way in which some men increased their wealth and property. Abducted, forced into marriage, and consummation of the marriage, some wealthy women and girls found themselves legally bound to men who wanted only their land and money. One purpose of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century child rape laws was to protect the daughters of wealthy men by making sexual intercourse with girls under a particular age illegal. Since the girls could not legally consent to sexual relations, they also could not marry. Eighteenth-century laws against clandestine marriages, while serving to regularize marriage regulations and procedures within England, also attempted to prevent bigamy and the abduction of brides.

However, bride capture was not just an ancient Western tradition. Some Native American tribes stole women from neighboring tribes when they faced shortages of women within their own group. Historical evidence suggests that the Navajo and Pueblo at times exchanged women peacefully and at other times forcefully abducted them. Similarly, some Native American and indigenous Mexican women were given as gifts to the Spanish, but at other times, Spanish soldiers and explorers seized them as spoils of conquest.

European women were also taken as captives by Native American men, as were men and children. Some women became “wives”; others were adopted by their captors, and still others probably held some indeterminate position, depending on how long they were held captive and by whom. Mary Rowlandson, in the first captivity narrative published in North America, declared that she was never raped, although she spent much time enumerating all the abuses of the Indians she considered to be savages.

Far from being repulsed, some European men, encountering Native American women, African women, and the indigenous women of various Pacific islands, viewed them as temptresses who were sexually voracious. Although some of these women were given to European men as wives or concubines in order to form trade or political alliances, others were simply abducted and raped. As the trade in African slaves grew and developed after the discovery of the New World by Europeans, millions of women and men were abducted, taken from their homelands, and forced across the Atlantic Ocean.

By Merril D. Smith in "The Greenwood Encyclopedia Of Love, Courtship, and Sexuality Through History", Greenwood Press, 2008.Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa