Women, especially women of color, whether it be Hispanic, Native American, Black, or Asian, have never had easy lives throughout the course of history. While women of color have been overly sexualized, white women seem to have been disqualified from both expressing sexual behavior and from being sexualized. Regardless, the female body has been sexualized over and over to the benefit of men in power. Sexualization can go one of two ways as proven in the differences between Native American and colonial white women. In the early course of American history, when English colonizers were coming to the New World and discovering Native American tribes, the native women were mentioned as erotic, sexual objects that were forbidden for English men
Colonial men desired the native women for this reason. In contrast, the English women were held to a wifely standard, one where women were not to dishonor their husbands, and were “publicly” punished for “shrewish and sexually aggressive” behavior (WA Brown 13). Even though the white women’s bodies were not promoted as something sexual, the idea that their bodies were only for the purpose of sex was present in the fact that conducting oneself in an overtly sexual manner was prohibited for white women. On one side is the body of the Native women, where the only purpose is to give enjoyable, no strings attached sex to colonial men. The other side, where sexuality is demeaning and dishonorable, is the body of the white woman. One side is at more of a disadvantage because that side, the one the Native American woman is on, was never looked at as a person but instead as an object. Perhaps an even more stark differentiation is the treatment of white women versus black women’s bodies in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth
The commonality between most all cases is that the men were in positions of power. Similar to how “early constructions of African and black women’s bodies and sexuality played a central role in rationalizing…and [giving] license to sexual violence against enslaved women,” the strict enforcement of a lack of sexuality in white women gave men power over white women as well as a justification for any violent acts committed upon women they considered their property. Evidence has been provided of white men beating their wives, attempting to kill their wives, and of raping their wives or her friends (WA 154). It is because the crimes are committed by husbands that white women can relate to women of color. Males have been superior to women for most all of time, and spousal abuse would have been less likely to get reported and then prosecuted, much like any sexual crime toward women of