Gender & Rape
Law in the United States at this time only states that women can be raped. One peculiar highlight of rape reporting was the movement towards reporting on girls more so than women. Estelle Freedman notes the shift of focus over time, stating that as more time went by, the stories started to focus on the most shocking rapes: children. In the case of the Appeal, their reporting does not seem to fit this claim; eight of their stories from 1880 explicitly state that their victims were children, while six cases use the word child or girl in 1900. This also deviates from the movement in crime reporting of newspapers to focus on more sensational stories.
While gender is quite set in who the offender and victims were, historian Estelle Freedman suggests that there is a stereotypical type of man who commits rape. She describes the type of offenders that appeared in the paper were “desperados, tramps, or ruffians” and papers also enjoyed to report on men of power such as “doctors, clergy, or public officials.” The basic connection among these men is that “they have been deprived of sexual outlets.” To investigate both ends of this spectrum of rapists, the Appeal provides us with the case of tramps in “THE SAARMAN MURDER” and the case of clergymen in an article of “All Sorts” pertaining to a Kalamazoo reverend.
In “THE SAARMAN MURDER,” the fact that the husband was not immediately considered a suspect exemplifies the idea that a man of good or typical background cannot be behind such fiendish actions; tramps were easily the most believable source of any of this trouble, so the authorities went after them instead. In terms of reporting, the way the story contains a lesser call of justice compared to stories of the 1880s highlights the smaller focus on morality and more on the sensational details that makes it seem more like fiction rather than the objective truth. This focus fits with what historians found to be a Victorian melodrama shift to entertainment sensationalism of the early twentieth century.
While much shorter and less detailed than “THE SAARMAN MURDER”, the story of the Kalamazoo clergyman allows us to see a crime from the point of power. Compared to other stories of tramps and non-white offenders, the description is quite simple and even addresses the servant girl rather than the Reverend. There is no angry tirade of justice made against the rapist, merely just a note of the crime, but this terse address could stem from the fact the story comes from another newspaper and the notice of the girl could be one of the Appeal’s sarcastic comments. The lack of any accusations differs from the narrative that Freedman builds in her article which states that stories will be harsh on the offenders, despite their status, and doesn't fit the reporting of crime in the 1900s which was more willing to go into detail about such astonishing crimes.