Finally, Herman’s (1997) account suggests the organized demand for medical care by these distressed veterans—and the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) commitment to funding years of extensive scientific research—is responsible for the growing body of scientific evidence that corroborates the social shift away from blaming the victim of trauma, in particular the trauma of domestic abuse. The significance of veterans’ protest and its effect on enlisting the VA to study and treat combat stress was not lost upon participants of the feminist movement. In the 1970s the usually well-educated, white, and middle class feminists began listening to and politicizing the heretofore private (and ignored) lives of women revealed in the conversations of small, grass-roots organized consciousness raising groups. Because the informal rule guiding most of their conversations was that women’s experiences—including sexual experiences—were neither to be challenged nor minimized, women revealed increasingly deeper levels of sexual trauma, somewhat as layers of an encyclopedia’s palimpsest of the human body reveal individual systems and structures, see-through page by see-through page. As women in these small groups trusted one another to hear and be moved to public actions in response to revelations of the psychological trauma of stranger rape, they felt increasingly free to reveal the more private horrors of date rape, spousal rape, and, at last, incest. Thus, just as, laid atop one another, the pages of a human body palimpsest hint at the profound interrelationships of the human systems, so did the reported levels of women’s sexual assault, from total strangers to the men most trusted to protect them, suggest to Herman and other feminist scholars that men systematically “enforc[e] the subordination of women through terror” all the while these same men were forwarding the notion that “rape fulfilled women’s deepest desires” (p. 30), Freud’s legacy from his investigation of hysteria.