The Romance Approach to Women’s Issues

It’s clear that romance novels speak to women about women’s issues. They are the only books where women always wins, and that’s very powerful.

Ah, romance novels. For decades – centuries, even – romance novels have provided escapist fantasy for women. In recent years, there’s been a tendency to equate popular romance novels with the unsavory, referring to them as “bodice rippers” and “housewife porn.” Some preachers have taken to the pulpit to condemn popular romances – even Christian romances – as damaging to marriage, and popular books and magazine articles have referred to women “addicted to romance novels” who grow dissatisfied with their ordinary, good husbands and long for the impossibly perfect, rugged and handsome men depicted in popular romance novels. But there’s another point of view about the place of these novels in the lives of women and it bears examination, especially because it rings far more true for women of today.

First, some facts and statistics:

-          Percentage of popular paperback books that are romance novels: 55

-          Percentage of romance writers who are women: 99

-          Percentage of romance readers who are women: 91

-          Number of people who have read a romance novel in the past year: 41.4 million

If you extrapolate that out, more than 37.5 million women read at least one romance novel in the past year – and that doesn’t include all the women who may be embarrassed to admit that they read anything that fluffy and insubstantial. That’s a powerful lot of women reading romances. So what do they find in these largely derided pieces of fiction that is so attractive?

A growing number of professionals in the fields of literature, religion and psychology suggest that far from escaping into a fantasy world where they are constant victims being rescued by impossibly strong men, women who read romance novels are finding empowerment in them.

Consider this. In a romance novel, the central character is a woman. She always wins. She is the center of the story. Her actions move the other characters, advance the plot and resolve the conflicts. In the modern romance novel, the woman is not a pathetic dependent. She is a strong survivor. And the things she survives are things that loom large in the pantheon of women’s issues in today’s world: domestic violence, human trafficking, emotional abuse, poverty and crime. The female heroine of a romance novel may be kidnapped by drug cartels, trapped in an abusive marriage, battle human traffickers or fight a chauvinistic real estate developer intent on taking over her ranch to build a new shopping center. She may track down the kingpin of an illegal adoption ring or go toe to toe with a con man running Internet scams and love/money scams. The one common thread they share: through her wits, intelligence and ingenuity – and sometimes through her physical prowess and determination – she always wins.

At the Christianity Today blog, writer Caryn Rivadeneira writes about her first guilty foray into reading romance novels. With all she’s read about the evils of the romance novel, she writes, “I figure by the end, I’ll either hate my husband or hunger for more of the escape they offer.”

Instead, she finds a far different realization – “It’s nice to enter a world where broken people get their pieces put back together,” she writes.

Those who read today’s romance novels would take that a step further and posit that a well-written romance novel is the ultimate people empowerment tract, a story where broken people recognize the women’s issues that hold them back and take the steps to put themselves back together. And that, my friends, can be powerfully empowering.