The Unmanly Fear: Extortion Before the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This essay concerns the history of extortion in American law and culture, highlighting the shift from extortion as a paradigmatically male enterprise to one inseparably associated with women. Before the nineteenth-century, extortion was figured as an assault on a victim’s consent. Since men monopolized consent, extortion unfolded as a contest between legal subjects over political manhood. After the mid-nineteenth-century, a new class of ‘respectable’ victims, openly terrified by women’s threats, made unprecedented claims for legal protection. In response, well-placed courts wrote consent out of the equation, broadening the scope of extortionous threats to unleash the familiar fin-de-siècle tide of sex scandal.