We have a tremendous cultural need to understand marital relations as consensual and harmonious, notwithstanding the contrary evidence we confront about the nature of some unions. [...] Never do we hear more about the joys of marital love, trust, and intimacy in a contemporary legal context than when courts, lawmakers, and commentators justify the preservation of a husband's legal right to rape his wife. - Jill Elaine Hasday, Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try. - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper * American culture in the 1960s signified an in-between stage, a ramp built off the conservatism of the 1950s towards the intense political upheaval of the 1970s. In the book, Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now , Alexander Bloom describes a disillusionment with the system to ensure stab...