Yes, perhaps the reason rape seems so much more common is that people in the 1940s didn't understand what rape is.
I want to order a time machine and send you back to have a conversation with your great-grandparents, for whom you seem to have so little respect.
Sure, the "list" isn't real. People wouldn't have been passing it around in the '70s if it hadn't reflected the actual experience of living in the '40s, which many, many people at that time remembered well.
A time machine is not actually available. Your great-grandparents are probably dead. But you can still go read a bunch of books from the amazing, wonderful, astoundingly different, and yes -- not at all perfect -- world that they lived in. Chronological chauvinism is not a healthy emotion.