"She was, she would later say, "living on peanut butter sandwiches." She and her husband, John Rideout, often fought; sometimes he hit her or demanded sex. On the afternoon of October 10th, when he did just that, Hibbard fled to a neighbor's house. Rideout followed her, cornered her in a park, and took her home. Once inside, she said, he punched her several times in the face and pulled down her pants."
"That this might be rape, legally speaking, was a brand-new idea. Until the mid-seventies, much of the sex in the United States was regulated not by the theory of consent but by that of property: a husband could no more be arrested for raping his wife than for breaking into his own house. In 1977, Oregon became one of the first states to make spousal rape illegal, and even then some politicians thought the law should apply only to couples living apart."
Greta Hibbard, twenty-two and living in rural Oregon with a two-year-old daughter, endured poverty and frequent abuse from her unemployed husband, John Rideout. On October 10th he forced sex after pursuing her from a neighbor's house, punching her and exposing her while their toddler watched. Until the mid-1970s many laws treated marital sex under property doctrines, shielding husbands from rape charges. Oregon outlawed spousal rape in 1977, but some lawmakers sought narrow application. Rideout's arrest led to Oregon v. Rideout, the first U.S. trial of a man accused of raping his cohabiting wife and a formative test of consent-based law.
Read at The New Yorker
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