Father-Daughter Rape

Father-Daughter Rape appears at the very moment when the nation's headlines report widespread sexual child abuse. It is an impassioned outcry that shatters the conspiracy of silence of the "incest taboo." Elizabeth Ward opens this powerful book with a series of personal accounts by women of their being raped or molested in childhood by fathers, brothers, or other men in whom they had trusted. By setting these harrowing accounts in a wider political context. she places the blame, so often laid upon girls and their mothers, squarely upon the abuse of male power. Her feminist analysis carefully evaluates the existing literature and assaults traditional psycho-analysis for its failure to give credence to reports of child abuse. One of the more important breakthroughs in feminist politics has been the smashing of th incest taboo...Ward's book is enormously valuable as the first major feminist study of incest."