So I’m a feminist. Which I’m happy to say is a fact hardly worth remarking on in the romance community. (Probably one of the biggest misconceptions about the genre is that its readers and writers, overwhelmingly, are retrogressive types who wish we could all go back to the days when “men were men” and women dwelt idly on pedestals. Not so.)
I’m remarking on the fact anyway, though, because writer/blogger Jessica Luther recently interviewed a handful of us for an article she did for the Atlantic website on feminism and the romance novel. It forced me to be a little more precise about some things that are generally ambiguous for me, and also to recognize the areas where ambiguity feels like the truest statement of my position.
Only a little of what I hashed out in my emails with Jessica actually fit into the final article, though, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to re-hash some of it here. And probably the kernel of it all can be stated as:
I’m a feminist who writes romance. That doesn’t necessarily mean I write feminist romance.
In fact…at the risk of being booted from the romance community…I don’t know whether I believe there’s such a thing as feminist romance. Definitely I don’t believe the genre is inherently feminist. I think we need to observe a more rigorous definition of feminism than “written and read mostly by women,” which is an argument one occasionally hears in support of the genre as feminist.
Also, there are a lot of what I would call nonfeminist or even anti-feminist tropes and storylines in the genre, historically as well as today. I don’t think you can make a feminist case for the persistent emphasis on wealthy or otherwise super-powerful men (dukes, billionaires, alpha werewolves, Navy SEALs) as the only ones worth marrying, for example. (Which doesn’t mean those aren’t valid storylines; only that they’re not feminist ones, by my measure.)
So I’m not comfortable saying romance as a whole is feminist, but does that mean no single romance novel is?
Again, I don’t know. There are definitely romances behind which you can perceive a feminist sensibility. Courtney Milan’s books spring to mind. And as part of the interview, Jessica asked if there were romances I’d recommend to feminists who’d never read one, and I had no trouble coming up with a list. (It starts with Bettie Sharpe’s Ember, by the way.)
But “romance that might appeal to feminists” and “romance that actually is feminist” aren’t quite the same thing.
A big part of the issue for me is that our genre doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists alongside the wedding industry, traditional “women’s magazines,” and countless other forces that pelt a woman with the message that her most important work in life is to attract and retain a man. And in this context, I just don’t know if a genre that privileges the romantic relationship above other aspects of a person’s life – as the romance novel, by genre constraint, necessarily does – can ever really be seen as a feminist document.
Too, I have thoughts I can’t articulate to my satisfaction concerning the genre’s preoccupation with themes of repair and resolution. People heal, in romance. Estranged families reconcile. The wrongly outcast are restored to their proper place in society. Injustice is righted and whatever was out of balance is brought back into balance. At the end of the book, we know everything’s going to be basically okay and we don’t need to worry about those people anymore. I haven’t put my finger on why this doesn’t feel feminist to me (maybe I think feminism entails a bleaker outlook? maybe I want to see order assailed, and broken down, rather than restored? I’m not sure.) but the fact is it doesn’t.
On the other hand.
I think it’s true that the personal is political. And that part of the work of feminism involves asserting the worth and dignity of those things that have historically been discounted and trivialized as belonging to the women’s sphere.
Despite the fact that most all of us on the planet, men as well as women, sooner or later fall in love and generally hope to find someone to go through life with, the whole “falling in love” thing has somehow come to be seen as women’s business. With a lot of opportunities for shame attached, whether because a woman is a Bridezilla, or keeps falling for guys who are Just Not That Into Her, or is so pathetic and naive as to read stories about other people falling in love, complete with happy endings. I think we need to question our cultural belittlement of romantic love, and I think it might be feminist to do so.
Ultimately it’s a question on which I’m unresolved. For me that’s a good thing – from a creative standpoint, I’d rather start with questions than answers. If I had it all figured out, I don’t think the genre would be nearly as interesting or dynamic to me.
But that’s me. Feminism means different things to different people (as was brought home by the recent epic Last Name Debate), and I’m curious to hear other people’s opinions. Does the genre, or individual books within it, meet your definition of feminism? Why or why not? And is anyone else out there in the Undecided camp with me?
I certainly think some romances are more “feminist-friendly” than others. I consider my own romance writing to be feminist, because some of the books I write are essentially gender swaps of classic stories. I like to flip the genders and see if the story still works, or figure out what else I have to change to make it work. This little exercise tends to tell me a lot about our cultural assumptions.
I constantly do that gender-flipping exercise as a reader. “Hmm, what would this story be like if the woman were the one who’d never learned how to love, and the man had the quiet strength that would break down her defenses and redeem her?” Actually that’s one of the things I find intriguing about reading same-sex romance: you don’t go into the story with any assumptions that this person is going to be the one who needs to learn to trust his/her heart, while this one needs to learn to step forward and speak up for him/herself. Everything’s up for grabs.
Gender-flipping is one of the many things I LOVED about Elizabeth Hoyt’s _Thief of Shadows_! Some of these elements you almost never see flipped–essentially, the woman wanted casual sex just for pleasure, while the man wanted sex to mean something and for love to be involved.
I, too, was blown away by Ember and Bettie Sharpe. And do agree that Courtney Milan’s books do have a distinctly feminist voice.
I appreciate that you’ve brought up society’s emphasis on weddings and attracting a mate and that these are seen as feminine (not feminist) things. The point you made that I gravitate towards most was this one:
“And that part of the work of feminism involves asserting the worth and dignity of those things that have historically been discounted and trivialized as belonging to the women’s sphere.”
Because I’ve always felt that in this way, the romance genre is loudly feminist. I don’t find it demeaning to women to value marriage or children or finding a good man. In contrast, I actually find it more empowering when these things are not downplayed.
On a parallel tract, I’ve seen romance and women criticized for being too nice to each other. We don’t “say it like it is”, we don’t call each other out and just go at it. I agree with this statement, I think women are more likely to try to be sociable, build community and rapport, and YES, this does sometimes happen at the expense of always speaking your mind and we bite our tongues sometimes when we shoudln’t. But when these social traits are characterized as feminine and weak (insinuating that a more aggressive and outspoken stance is the feminist and strong one), don’t we devalue that which is positive about female interaction? There are reasons women desire to band together and the ability to do so is a strength. To me, recognizing that is feminism. Being able to define feminism in terms of what we are rather than aspiring to be what we’re not is feminism.
I hope that’s not too convoluted. This was typed on the fly. I guess some of my perspective comes from being raised in a culture where silence and taking some time before acting was not considered weak, but was a sign of maturity and thoughtfulness and inner fortitude. If someone was able to make you angry, then they’ve demonstrated power over you. Yet in American culture, getting openly angry at something is often seen as a sign of strength.
I was thrown from my home culture into the wider American culture where speaking your mind and being assertive was a sign of strength. For that reason, I was branded as shy, timid and weak for most of my life. I feel the same thing sometimes happens when people do value traditional things like marriage and finding the right man.
Thanks for bringing your perspective to this discussion. I was painfully aware while writing this, and also while contributing to Jessica’s article, that there are a whole lot of people out there whose experiences and references are different from mine.
I, too, think that rapport-building is a virtue (as are plain politeness and kindness, also often discounted as weakness and timidity), and that marriage and family are worthwhile goals. Where it gets problematic for me is when those virtues and goals are assumed to be appropriate for one gender and not the other. And when marriage/family is promoted as better, and necessarily more fulfilling, than anything else a woman might choose to do with her life. Obviously a woman who chooses her career (or just the pleasure of being unattached) over a romantic commitment is never going to be the heroine of a romance, but I always notice and appreciate it when that sort of woman turns up in a supporting role. (Unless she turns up as the heroine’s evil rival. That, I don’t appreciate.)
Thanks for this post and the whole discussion, and I agree with a lot of your points – and would also put myself in the “undecided” camp. But just want to quickly flag your last thought here – “Obviously, a woman who chooses her career over a romantic commitment is never going to be the heroine of a romance” – I actually don’t think that is obvious (though it is certainly commonly true). This is a different genre, clearly, but I think about Leslie Knope on Parks and Rec – she chose her career (running for office) over the man she was in love with, and then he chose HER over his career, and so she got to have both. The problem isn’t that a (fictional or real) woman can’t end up both choosing her career and having a satisfying romantic life, it’s that the onus may then shift to the man to make the necessary sacrifices, and that’s something that is very rarely seen or expected.
Which I think just goes to reinforce your disquiet about how it’s not wrong to value marriage/romance/family, but because only women are expected to “choose” those things, there is still something a little anti-feminist about the choice. But instead of accepting that dichotomy and devaluing one side or the other, I think we need (in both society and ideally in romance novels) to push men to foreground that choice.
I just meant that, by definition, a romance has the hero and heroine choosing a romantic commitment. A book in which the heroine chooses something else instead of a romantic commitment can’t, by definition, be a romance.
It’s funny you should bring up Parks & Rec because I thought about the show a lot while writing this post, and also while doing the interview with Jessica (who’s a fellow P&R fan). Narrative-wise, it’s not a romance – the story doesn’t culminate in Leslie finding Mr. Right and committing to him – but the way they handled the Leslie/Ben romance arc has been nearly flawless, in my opinion. I think romances in TV shows tend to lose so much of their power once the couple has been brought together, because the romance was (or was allowed to become) the dominant narrative thread for that couple, and once that story hits resolution, there’s nowhere else to go. There was always more to Leslie’s story than whether or not she was going to get together with Ben, and even when that story started ramping up, they never let it take over the show.
And, yes, the decision to have Ben give up a career he loved and was good at in favor of being near Leslie was ridiculously radical for mainstream tv (or maybe any tv). I hope they find him another challenging job, though, because one of the things that made that relationship so appealing to me was the dynamic of two people who each deeply admires how good the other is at her/his job.
Cecilia, Thanks so much for this post. I’m grateful for its nuance, and ambiguity. I’ve been watching you and other authors admire discussing feminism in the romance genre on Twitter, and I rarely weigh in because frankly I find it impossible to convey the complexity of what I really believe about these issues in a Tweet. Your ideas here resonate deeply for me.
I am a feminist too, and I am certain it informs my characters and my stories. But I don’t know how one can write “feminist” fiction. To me fiction is the antidote to ideology, that shows we humans and our choices are not always rational and consistent, and often more compelling and sympathetic in those moments of fracture. One of the pleasures of romance is to read about how love causes us to act outside of our normal modes and defenses. I am certain all of this comes from my practical theology as a priest (and a woman making her way in the patriarchal institution of the church).
Having said all of that, I am glad the word feminism, with all its contentious definitions, is being thrown around–it only makes us better writers. One author I admire insists she is not a feminist, because feminism denies that we are all formed by the hierarchies of our society. I disagree–I think practical feminism brings self-awareness and power analysis to bear on those hierarchies as we explore them in fiction. I may still write about alpha males, but not without an awareness of why I like them so much, and a sense of irony that I hope makes reading about them more enjoyable.
This is such a good point, and so beautifully expressed. I wonder, though, how books like 1984 or Animal Farm, or maybe The Handmaid’s Tale, fit in. I do think there are some novels with political/ideological backbones – if not outright agendas – that work just as well as any ideology-neutral fiction.
I need to think about this some more…
Good point Cecilia! Maybe it’s more accurate to say that ideological fiction exists (Narrative is a very persuasive form, after all!), but when it’s good, it explores the nuances and complexities of an ideal in a way that is enlightening. I think maybe my reaction to this comes from my particular method as an author, that I wouldn’t want to set out to write something “feminist,” but instead follow my other inspirations and hope my feminist sensibilities underpin the story and character. But, I can see how someone would set out to do that, and it could have integrity, as long as it explored the shadow sides of the “ideal.”
I think my method ends up similar to yours. I’ll often have some kind of feminist impetus when I first conceive of a character or story, but eventually the characters and story take their own path, and the feminist choice won’t always be the most interesting choice to make, or the one that best serves the story. Especially since I set stories in an era when people did unquestioningly equate virtue with virginity, and rarely wondered whether, say, property rights were unfair to women. I want to be able to write stories about conventional people as well as unconventional. Those people deserve love and happy endings too.
Ooh, I always recommend Ember, too. One aspect of this discussion that doesn’t always get raised is how romance fiction is read outside Western culture. I particularly love this interview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali where she talks about how reading Mills & Boon can challenge authority (in the face of the host’s snobbery!): http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/s2958720.htm (go to the transcript and search for ‘cartland’).
Yes, someone brought up that point (that in certain cultures reading romance is an act of defiance) in response to another blog post I wrote a while ago, but I hadn’t seen the interview before. God bless the people who go out and face down the snobbish hosts, is all I can say.
I loved the series on the feminism/romance intersection that you linked to on Twitter the other day. For those who haven’t read those pieces, they’re here:
http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/03/21/in-defence-of-books-written-by-women-for-women/
http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/04/10/for-women-by-women-is-romance-writing-inherently-feminist-ii/
http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/04/27/should-romance-be-feminist-is-romance-inherently-feminist-iii/
I’m completely undecided. I self-identify as feminist, even though I’m completely comfortable with the idea that not every choice I make could be labelled as such. I think part of the problem, for me anyway, is that I believe feminism exists as a reaction constructed in response to the dominant culture I live in. In a “perfect” world we wouldn’t need it.
On the no side, I feel like the argument that because women are the producers and consumers it’s automatically feminist doesn’t hold water. Women are just as equally invested in enforcing gender norms as men are and this shows up in the product ad nauseum. Biology tells us how essential a wide range of diversity is for survival of a species. I can’t understand why it’s hard for people to accept this is true for humans as well. Like you, I feel that the large amount of time spent in romance on things usually belittled as female and therefore worth less, make a good argument for the yes side.
This is the position I strive for. Sometimes other priorities are going to come into conflict with one’s feminism, and sometimes other priorities are going to have the stronger claim. And just as I don’t want to start nitpicking other people’s choices and saying, “How can you call yourself a feminist when you did xyz,” I don’t want to set myself an impossible-to-maintain standard of feminism either.
Exactly. I call myself a feminist because I would just like all genders to have the same opportunities and I really bristle at confining someone to something preordained based on their gender (which I’m guessing is pretty much the basis of civilization as we know it and therefore to abolish it is a total lost cause). In the world I live in right now, the balance of opportunity seems most unbalanced on the side of females, hence, I’m a feminist. A feminist who wants equal opportunity for all genders, not just to trade places with the dominant one. I would love it if my children could just self-identify as humanists but I’m not sure we can get there that quickly. When I see the gender enforcement being meted out in my son’s preschool class by the other young children, it makes me think we have a really long way to go.
I don’t care for the more feminist than though discussions at all, but OTOH, I am totally fine with someone saying “what you did right there, not feminist”. I feel like they are describing a choice or decision I made, not me. I am defined by all the choices I have made, not just one. My struggle is that when I try to apply this idea very broadly, I can’t convince myself it isn’t flawed. I would have a really hard time accepting Rhianna as a feminist, for example.
Ha! I was going to say “Did you see the post at Vacuous Minx on last names? What you’re saying reminds me of a couple comments in the thread there.” But when I went to link to the particular comments, I saw that one of them was from you! So never mind.
One of the things I had in mind when I was writing TOTAHSS was the notion of the undiminished heroine. I wanted Olivia at the end of the book to have ALL her dreams and ambitions, as well as her HEA with Khaled. I wanted her to end up with more opportunities and choices, not less.
Which I guess was my response to “I just don’t know if a genre that privileges the romantic relationship above other aspects of a person’s life – as the romance novel, by genre constraint, necessarily does – can ever really be seen as a feminist document.” Of course the romance is privileged in narrative terms – that’s where the focus of the plot is and the bulk of the writing has to be – but I don’t think that it has to be privileged within the world of the novel. That is, it doesn’t have to be the most important thing to the hero or heroine.
I’m nervous about making blanket statements across the genre, but I think it is possible to write a romance novel within genre contraints that empowers the female characters and which empowers its female readers. Which makes it a feminist document from my perspective.
I’m glad you weighed in. As you probably saw, The Oil Tycoon… was one of the books I named when Jessica asked for recommendations of romances with some feminist appeal.
Yeah, when I say romance privileges the romantic relationship, I mean in the narrative sense. There may be other goals and plotlines, but the story reaches its culmination when the protagonists have sorted out their differences and committed to one another. By definition, a romance novel is about the romance. Everything else is secondary. (I think. There’s probably room for disagreement here, so feel free to disagree.)
A lot of the discussion of whether or not romance (or a single given romance) is feminist pivots around the heroine, and whether she goes after what she wants, gets it, etc. My understanding of feminism puts a lot of weight not only on getting but on giving – my feminist reader brain doesn’t much like stories that tie romantic commitment up with a life of idle luxury in which you get to go shopping on Rodeo Drive and throw your romantically gained wealth in the face of the snooty salesclerks there. I prefer stories in which both partners (or “all partners,” I guess, in the case of menage romance) bring practical skills to the partnership, not only filling gaps in each other’s interpersonal skillset, but making a team that can do better things in the world than they could do on their own.
As I know I’ve said before, what I found so gratifying about the end of TOTAHSS was that I didn’t feel like it was even about Olivia’s professional fulfillment; it was about her obligation to bring her talents and experience to where they were needed. I do love some rigor and obligation in my romance.
I’d like to think feminism is something that frees women. Period. All the conversations about rules and what ifs and Am I and She Isn’t are, in my opinion, part of the judgmental process that elevates one and denigrates another. No one will ever be free in that object/subject dual relationship.
I’ve studied a lot of yoga, including tantric yoga. Not the kind that is all about sex, but rather about sexuality, energy, gender, and the elements of the world around us. The feminine is distinct from the masculine. The idea is not to make them the same, or equal, but simply to rest in awareness and enjoyment of each as they are.
I’ve taught co-ed yoga and specialize in women’s yoga. I can tell you a woman’s body and a man’s body run life energy very, very differently.
As a generality, for the sake of making a point, the feminine is vulnerable, open, emotional, wild, rooted in the home fires, in the earth, in the body, in relationship. Relationship to other women and to men. The Goddess is alive in the creative force as well as the relational force. She does not derive her power from trying to be like men. Or equal to men. Or obeying a single rule or idea from the mind. Her power is intrinsic. It is before everything. It cannot be destroyed.
I very much want women to get out from under the thumb of patriarchy. But, in many ways, we continue to engage in its structure even as we try to free ourselves. Even our discourse is often under the terms and conditions of patriarchy.
How to be free? Just be fucking free. And let other women be free. And hold each other up. It is RADICAL to live vulnerable and real and from the heart.
I think the Romance Industry is totally changing the paradigm of women’s roles. The feminine (not feminist) business model is alive and well, especially with the advent of self-publishing. We help each other. We are connected, supportive. There is not a distinct line between the personal and the professional because they are often the same. We get that about each other.
I think what is feminist about the romance industry is that, more and more, we are able to make our own schedules, tend to the lives that need to be tended to (yes, as mothers, wives, daughters, business women, friends, volunteers) and still move forward professionally. We are able to express our varied and contradictory fantasies and dreams.
My teacher used to say a woman, fully expressed, is like every single beach on the planet at once. The rocky, the soft, the fierce, the frozen. Not one better than another.
Thanks for bringing this perspective, because it’s definitely different from mine. I habitually balk at any “women are this; men are that” generalizations. I find them limiting, and unfair to the men and women who diverge from those norms. (Example: if it’s radical to live vulnerable and real and from the heart, then shouldn’t men, as well as women, be encouraged to live that way?)
That said, I agree with a lot of what you say (and even the things I don’t agree with are well said, and good additions to the discussion). We do need to catch ourselves when we’re slipping into More Feminist Than Thou arguments, and we need to be conscious and respectful of diversity in the definitions of what’s feminist and/or what’s empowering to women.
[...] Luther’s take in her post for The Atlantic, as well as the lively discussions it inspired (elsewhere, that is; the post’s comments are full of the usual trollish dudes). Luther and the writers [...]
I feel like the feminism I see in romance novels is more subtle than the brash and edgy definitions often associated with the word feminist. The heroine is great at her job, and the hero respects that, or comes to respect it during the course of the novel. And the antagonists (villains, well-meaning relatives, etc.) don’t.
Maybe the heroine is clever and quick, and also emotionally sensitive, and the hero LOVES HER FOR IT. Or maybe she’s stubborn and a little emotionally not-so-quick-on-the-uptake and loyal and intelligent, and he loves her for those qualities. My point is that this overall theme is repeated over and over in modern romance novels, and I think it’s influencing all of us who read them, reaffirming that we’re lovable and interesting and deserving of happy endings just as we are. And also through repetition setting up our expectations that the people we will be attracted to and with whom we will fall in love will appreciate us as we are.
The SEAL or the billionaire or the alpha werewolf or whatever is the fantasy part that we love, and why not? The few romance novels I’ve read from 20 years ago or so tended to be more of the flavor that the heroine is almost trying to become someone else just to attract her man. In comparison, I can definitely see that romance novels now have come a long way. And that’s my view of feminism in romance.
I do like stories in which the protagonists love each other precisely for what the rest of the world might see as flaws. But I also like stories in which one or both people start out significantly flawed, and have to do some growing before they’re ready for an adult romantic relationship. I guess that’s part of why the billionaire/alpha werewolf books don’t do much for me – those guys tend to be such colossal fantasy figures that I just don’t find them as interesting as I do a more mundane struggling mortal. I want to relate to and empathize with the men in the romances I read. That’s hard for me to do when they’re drawn on such an outsize scale.
You make a really good point about the protagonists getting developed throughout the book, so when they get their happy ending, we can, I don’t know, believe in it more. One thing I do really enjoy about some of the books from other genres that have a strong romance thread in them (mystery, fantasy in particular) is that the authors get the chance to move along the character development and the romance at a slower pace, over several books.
This is a really interesting thread – I’ve very much enjoyed reading the posts and replies.
You remind me I need to read the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries with Harriet Vane in them soon. Everyone keeps telling me that’s a terrific example of a gradually developed romance arc.
Wow. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this post, Cecilia, how moved I am by your clarity and honesty. And how intensely moved I am as well to explore some things I’ve never quite worked out for myself, even as an unabashed feminist (and I hope self-evidently so) who’s written historical romance and BDSM love stories.
You’re right, I believe, in questioning whether there’s such a thing as “feminist romance.” Or perhaps another way to put it is that there’s no neat fit between the two categories “feminism” and “romance.”
But why shouldn’t that be the case? Why should we assume that fantasy-driven pleasure will neatly dovetail with reality-based aspiration for social change? Rewarding as I have found it to identify as a feminist, I can’t say it’s always been a pleasure. It’s a hard thing sometimes, a challenge. It’s – oh hell, let me just spit out the word – feminism is political and politics is (or ought to be) driven by social realities. And while social reality just doesn’t yield enough dukes or Navy SEALs to go around, there’s also the nagging intuition (related to your point) that even if there were, it would not produce a good society, or even a society at all.
On the one hand I feel silly saying something so obvious. Of course fantasy is fantasy and reality is reality. But so many kinds of activity and expression that have been called feminist over these last couple of decades seem to exist in some murky in-between area between activism, self-help, and entertainment. Romance is a very late and really rather timid arrival to the party of women insisting that one or another thing they find individually gratifying is therefore feminist because they’re women (the poet and essayist Katha Pollitt once singled the newly trendy activity of knitting).
And yet, easy as it is to object this sort of thing, I think that there is a case where pleasure, gratification, entertainment, and feminism do work and play well together, which is of course in the case of erotic writing and its huge ascendency in romance in the past decade or two. This is a personal thing for me, of course, but I’d assert that I’m not the only one of us who grew up trying to learn about female sexuality from the likes of D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer—and who now therefore fiercely cherishes my individual hard-won understanding of erotic gratification and expression, enough so that I want to claim at least part of the writing I do about it as “feminist.” Which even lets me open the door to fantasy and fetish, without which you really don’t have much left when it comes to human sexual reality. (And I didn’t just learn this from writing BDSM; my erotic historical romances are remarkably similar from a formal point of view.)
I do think that in this area my feminism is a driver of my romance and erotic writing, and I’m guessing that it is for other feminist writers in our genre. I think that it’s possible, when looking to create gratifyingly hot writing about sex, to employ understandings that come from what I guess I’d (humorlessly, uncreatively) call “feminist erotic practice” by which I mean is having lived a life of working out these complicated and wonderful body-mind things with one or more good sexual partners in good feminist faith.
I think that the sex case may be the easiest of the answers to your provocative, difficult, and necessary questions. To which we might also append the issue of romance’s privileging of questions of personal life and intimacy dovetails well with the lessons feminism has taught us as a culture in the last couple of decades. Because it’s not just women who are writing about these needs. Crude as a lot of the bromance movies and such things out there are, some men are beginning to share these concerns. So I’d give us a check mark in that area: I think it’s relatively valid to say that the eroticism of comparatively recent romance is to some extent a feminist expression—especially because we so often work out areas of male and female power and equity most successfully in our character’s beds.
While as for your question about us all wanting the alpha power for ourselves (and Pemberley too) – now that’s a hard one. Not to speak of “the genre’s preoccupation with themes of repair and resolution.” Great, wonderful topics, definitely leading the genre away from an easy fit with feminism. I’m gonna sleep on ‘em.
Thanks again for a wonderful essay. More later.
Thanks so much for posting this here. I just love your thinking on these issues.
You remind me in particular, with the mention of knitting as feminist expression, that I really don’t think something has to be feminist to be a good thing for women to do. “By women for women” does, by my measure, have a value all its own, even if I don’t think it necessarily equates to feminism.
I have one more thought about romance as a feminist genre. I am wondering about the fact that so many romance authors use pen names. I would love to see statistics on this, because my gut is that there is a much higher percentage of authors in romance then in other genres. If that is true, then I find it telling.
Pen names are something I’ve thought about a lot, not so much in relation to feminism as in the context of privacy, especially privacy in the digital age.
I use a pen name, as do most of the writers I know (book writers as well as a lot of bloggers). I do suspect they’re more common in romance. Romance authors, especially historical romance authors, tend to pick a graceful-ish name that “sounds” like a romance author (“Courtney Milan” is a good example).
But I also have a feeling that pen names are on the upswing across all genres. Partly because we’re all more aware of privacy in this age when we’re losing so much of it, and partly because online interaction is a big part of being an author these days, and we’re all used to online gaming or comment forums in which it’s customary to pick an avatar or some kind of nickname to represent you. Then too, those of us who have day jobs might have a whole extra layer of considerations in terms of compartmentalizing our various professional identities.
Anyway it’s an interesting subject and I, too, would be curious to see some data.
[...] “Some (Further) Thoughts on Feminism and Romance” by Cecilia Grant [...]
This is an excellent post. Thank you.
I agree with much of what Pam said above. I think romance as a genre might, as a whole, be considered feminist because it celebrates female sexual pleasure in a society that tends to ignore or even denigrate female sexuality. As a whole, maybe our genre can be understood as an attempt to push back against the persistent societal narrative that women who enjoy sex are “fill-in-your-profanity-of-choice-here”.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that romance novels insist a woman needs to be in a stable relationship with a man if she’s going to be fulfilled, and I agree with you: that’s not a feminist view.
If you see the HEA as primary to the genre (and I admit, it’s difficult–if not impossible–not to), then it’s hard to argue the genre is truly feminist, but I think the secret of romance novels is that they’re more concerned with feminine sexuality than with the HEA. Genres like urban fantasy and erotic romance have their roots in romance, but often have more flexibility with the HEA requirement. What ties them to the romance genre, then, isn’t the HEA: it’s the fact that the female protagonists get to be sexual creatures in safety (that is, without fear of reprisal from a patriarchal society.)
Is this what all romance novels are doing, though? Probably not. I like your point that perhaps feminism needs to be more about bringing down order, rather than restoring it, and I’m not sure romance (in general) does this. Maybe what makes individual novels feminist is whether or not they hold up a heroine who’s making her own choices.
Thanks for bringing up these points. One of the things I talked about with Jessica is that, in our culture, a woman’s sexual validation or success seems to start and end with her desirability. What she actually does or experiences in bed – whether she enjoys herself; whether she’s an engaged and generous partner – is secondary to whether her looks and manners are judged desirable or not. And I appreciate the fact that, in (explicit) romance and erotica, there’s a more comprehensive portrayal of female sexual experience.
(Also male sexual experience, by the way! So much of this discussion emphasizes female sexual pleasure in romance, but most of us who write heterosexual romance write the male POV as well as the female, and the men are not selfless sexbots only concerned with the woman’s gratification! Men in romance get their needs met too.)
re pen names. I had several “graceful” romance names picked out. And then I thought about what made “Pam Rosenthal” sound less than graceful. Which is why I used it.
Awesome. Do you remember your potential romance-writer pen names? Now I want to know what they were.
Also…I feel like I might have already read an account of this, maybe on your blog…but how did you decide you’d be Pam R for historical romance and Molly Weatherfield for erotica? The latter name actually sounds more historical-romancey to me.
I’d thought of Pamela Knight as a romance writer name (my name before I married was “Ritterman,” so Knight would be a translation). And a lot of stupid Oscar-Wildey stuff beginning with “Dorianne”. yuk. And since I was already hiding as Molly Weatherfield (because I didn’t know what kind of strange responses Carrie’s Story was going to get), I didn’t really want to hide any more (and esp not hide my Jewish name)
While as for Molly Weatherfield, who came first… well, I always wanted to be Molly, after the tough mirrorshades girl in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. I was going to be Molly Ryder (Ritterman again) when I read something about a porn star named, I think, Holly Ryder, and I thought it did sound like a porn star name. And I was re-reading Catcher in the Rye at the time, and my husband reminded me of Holden’s little sister Phoebe, who writes girls adventure stories about an intrepid heroine called Hazel Weatherfield under the penname of Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield… So it was actually J.D. Salinger who had the ear for graceful romance writer names.
Interesting!
So it’s the hiding thing about pen names that makes me wonder about stats on who has a pen name in different genres. Not that I’m pointing a finger in any way….I read most of the romance books I read in spite of things like covers, not because of them. I actually hate almost 99% of the covers, I think they sell the content short…if I was an author, I’m not sure I’d want my name splashed over those images. I would love to write a Roland Barthes type study on what the covers convey.
I hadn’t considered that a name needed to sound graceful, since an author’s name doesn’t really sell a book to me (ok, I take it back, if a name hints at a ethnicity, I will be a little more curious in my perusal, since I’m always in search of a view a little more challenging then straight from the middle of the bell curve), but I totally get the whole digital privacy thing. I have archived Usenet posts in my real name that might make me squirm a little today, it’s funny what 20 years will do to your perspective.
Lastly, your reason’s for choosing Molly totally rock…it’s the same reason I wanted to name a child Molly (Neuromancer).
[...] one of the books mentioned (the absolutely fabulous A Lady Awakened, which I reviewed here), Cecilia Grant isn’t convinced. Slate thinks it would be a more interesting development if the message was in a larger market, [...]
Coming late to the conversation. I’ve been ruminating on Cecilia’s comment – “Injustice is righted and whatever was out of balance is brought back into balance. At the end of the book, we know everything’s going to be basically okay and we don’t need to worry about those people anymore. I haven’t put my finger on why this doesn’t feel feminist to me”
I don’t have a fully formed response, but I thought I’d hazard taking a stab at this anyway…
The fundamental feminist win—the right to vote—is about entitlement to self determination. With that entitlement comes responsibilities to self and society. This responsibility is essential to the feminist contract, but in the developed world—in the age of the third wave of feminism—this responsibility involves complex choices and compromise.
There is nothing complex about the HEA.
For example—the example most pertinent to my current stage of life—one of the standard assumptions of the HEA is that children will arrive shortly after “the end”, and that motherhood will be the icing on the heroine’s cake. The heroine’s career will not suffer when she becomes a mother, she will never have to face difficult choices around leaving young children in someone else’s care, and her hero will always protect her from both immediate and long term financial security.
While it’s true that parenting can be a wonderful, amazing journey, it’s also true that in real life, motherhood has always been a flash-point for issues of gender inequity. It’s a minefield in current feminist debate, and it is, without doubt, even in the mundane day-to-day detail, far more challenging and life-changing than finding a hero!
Thank you Cecilia for offering an opportunity for meaningful, open discussion around romance and feminism.
Non-fully-formed responses fit right in here :)
I’m pleased that I’m seeing a lot of romances lately in which children aren’t assumed to be part of the HEA, and some in which the hero doesn’t necessarily represent financial security for the heroine… but those romances are still in the minority.
The money thing, especially, is so strange to me: in this day and age when women are earning more than half the college degrees, and many of us out-earn our partners, I don’t understand why the fantasy of the all-providing man persists as strongly as it does. I mean, if the real root of the fantasy is lavish wealth and security, then why aren’t we all fantasizing about being fabulously successful at a rewarding career? Why aren’t there more books in which the heroine is the Beyonce of her world, or maybe a brilliant software mogul? I guess maybe that kind of heroine isn’t relatable to the average reader? I don’t know. I remember reading a LaVyrle Spencer book where the heroine was a country-music superstar, but Spencer did a fine job of making her relatable, I thought.
I’m squirreling away “There is nothing complex about the HEA” for further meditation. I suspect I agree with you, and I wonder if it’s a weakness of our genre. (If so, it’s a weakness shared by pretty much the whole comedic tradition – think of the plays of Plautus or Moliere – through which romance traces its roots.)
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