Despite the undeniable, experiential reality of sexual violence in women's lives, sexual violence as a "public reality", and subsequently as a viable topic for social scientific and historical inquiry, did not emerge until this time. The women's liberation movement created the conditions that made possible--and salient--the articulation of the problem and its alarming normalcy in the lives of women and girls, thus altering public awareness, if not the prevalence of sexual violence itself, in unprecedented ways. Research by feminist psychologists and other social scientists both emanated from and contributed to this sea change in awareness. In this article, the author (a) briefly reviews the political, social, and intellectual contexts in which psychological research on rape became possible in the United States in order to remind readers how new and unprecedented it was for social scientists to study rape; and (b) outlines some of the challenges that have beset this research enterprise over the course of the last 30 years.