Against a Wife's Will?

In Oregon, a husband goes on trial for rape

In Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, Wife Irene wept in bed after she had been raped by her husband. The next morning, Husband Soames ate breakfast comforted by the thought that "no one would know--it was not the sort of thing that she would speak about." Besides he had but prevented his wife "from abandoning her duty."

Today such an act could land a husband in jail. On Oct. 10, Greta Rideout of Salem, Ore., was allegedly raped by her husband John. She called the local Salem Women's Crisis Service, which advised her to call the police. That would have been unthinkable not only in Galsworthy's England but even in Oregon until last year. Common law and most U.S. statutes were clear: with the marriage vows came the assumption of sexual consent. But encouraged by women's rights advocates, the Oregon legislature changed the state's rape law in 1977 to remove marriage or cohabitation as a defense. So the police arrested John, 21, an unemployed cook, and charged him with raping his wife. Last week John found himself on trial awaiting the verdict of a jury of eight women and four men, and facing up to 20 years in jail.

Greta, who filed for divorce soon after the incident, claims that John chased her through a field near their apartment building, dragged her inside and raped her as their 2 1/2-year-old daughter watched and cried, "Mommy, Mommy!" Defense Lawyer Charles Burt admitted that sexual intercourse took place, but he denied that John had used force. Greta kneed her husband in the groin, Burt told the jurors, and John then slapped her in the face. The defense portrayed the young couple's rocky four-year relationship as "quarrel, make up, have sex."

To undermine her credibility, Burt also painted Greta, 23, as a sexually troubled woman. Her peccadilloes, admitted before trial, included extramarital affairs, two abortions (one for a child not her husband's), and a lesbian relationship (the last she later denied). She enjoys the publicity that has accompanied the prosecution of her husband, said Burt; according to witnesses, she announced that she is going to "be rich and famous" after signing a movie contract to tell her story. Before the trial Burt protested: "There are enough problems with the marital relationship without allowing one spouse to charge the other with a 20-year felony." Husband John, he later told the jury, "honestly believed that if you are married to a woman you have a right to sex."

That view may be losing ground. Delaware and Nebraska have adopted new laws allowing wives to charge live-in husbands with rape, and a similar statute in New Jersey will go into effect next September. More states permit wives who are separated from their husbands to charge rape, and women's groups elsewhere are becoming vocal on the subject. They resent what Nancy Burch, director of the Oregon women's center that Greta first contacted, calls the "archaic notion that a woman is her husband's property." The Rideout case is the first of its kind under the new laws to go on trial in the U.S., but at least one woman in Nebraska has already filed a rape charge against her husband. After the Rideout case, there are sure to be others.

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