Both the legal definition of rape and the social responses to it have changed dramatically over the last twenty-five years. The sorts of assaults classified as criminal, the willingness of women who have been raped to turn to the criminal justice system, the rules of prosecution, and the penalties imposed on those found guilty have all been the explicit subjects of public debates initiated in the early 1970s by activists who broke the silence of earlier decades. Activists' engagement with the policy process throughout the 1970s altered institutions and policy at the local, state, and federal levels, and also affected the development and claims of the broader women's movement.

In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon referred to Aid to Families with Dependent Children as “the program we all normally think of when we think of ‘welfare.’” When President Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it” in the early 1990s, everyone knew that he meant AFDC. “Welfare” had become a code word for public assistance given mainly to unmarried mothers, mostly young women of color. Few terms evoked as much hostility among Americans as “welfare.” No other public benefits carried its stigma. The political left, right, and center all attacked it.

State-building in America is a tortuous process. Policy entrepreneurs who seek to establish new state capacities face significant ideological and institutional constraints. These constraints often limit the scope of their entrepreneurship and typically force them to compromise or adapt their ideals to fit political circumstances. Yet, although its path of development has been convoluted, there is an American state and not a trivial one at that. Indeed, the same features of the polity that constrain state-building can also motivate and support it.

The founding fathers laid down a number of principles for successful governance in the new republic. Among these, in the formal sense, were written constitutions, the division of power among three branches of government, checks and balances to prevent abuse of power, the rule of law, and equality before the law. Most of these ideas were English in origin and had been practiced, in varying degrees, in the colonies. The failure of the colonial polity, the founders believed, had occurred because at times British power in North America had been exercised in opposition to notions of sound governance. In addition, the founders heeded public opinion and accepted, somewhat reluctantly, broad participation by white males in the political process. Having experienced British tyranny, they embraced free speech and a free press. While these various principles, the founders agreed, were ingredients that could produce a republic, such a republic would be viable only if the people and their political leaders possessed virtue.