Whom, over the past two centuries, has society construed as sexual "victims"? Where and when did the notion of consent so crucial for law and politics today emerge? In this brilliantly insightful work, Pamela Susan Haag traces the evolution of public wisdom on some of society's most private and controversial matters. At once an investigation of social history, popular culture, legal doctrine, and political theory, her book shows how in contemporary America the history of sexual rights is inextricably intertwined with that of liberalism.

Haag examines the nineteenth-century obsession...