Debating the Semantics of ‘Rape’

Ginia Bellafante at The New York Times writes: “‘Makers: Women Who Make America,’ an expansive, multipart documentary beginning Tuesday on PBS that chronicles the modern feminist movement, illustrates, among other things, how much of the ethos of the 1950s still coursed through the system in the decades that followed. It was not simply a pervasive distrust of female ability that lingered — and would, of course, carry on — but a more insidious rank dismissal of basic cognition: the belief, for instance, that a woman could not be considered a reliable narrator of the sexual violence that she had endured.”