History of Feminism

Bodice-rippers and their contemporary counterparts were popular during the 1970s, occupying the same cultural space as the feminist movement but seeming to represent its polar opposite. As feminists were fighting patriarchy, romance novels were propping it up. Despite a major shift in the genre in the late 1980s and early 1990s that saw the near-disappearance of rape and the emergence of much stronger, more modern heroines, the idea remains that feminists and romance readers exist on opposite ends of the spectrum. This is not the case.

Dr. Jackie C. Horne, a writer, independent scholar, and author of the site Romance Novels for Feminists, says that the women who now write romance novels grew up enjoying the benefits of the feminist movement. These authors, Horne says, "take feminist ideas that were once novel, provocative, on the very edge of inconceivable for granted, as givens." In Alice Clayton's Wallbanger and Lauren Dane's Lush, both heroines are adamant that their careers not suffer in order to make a relationship work. They negotiate long-term committed relationships with men who treat them as equals. And, as is par for the course in most romance novels, these women seek out sexual pleasure and they enjoy sex. These are not the romances of the 1970s.

*

Grant sees this tension between feminist ideology and the traditionally conservative genre as a welcome challenge to feminist romance authors. "How, respecting the genre and working within its defined parameters, can I write a love story that's palatable to me?," Grant asks herself when deciding the plot for her next novel. "Are there specific trends and devices it might be worthwhile to subvert?" In Grant's first novel, A Lady Awakened, the heroine uses the hero in order to get pregnant. She is not initially interested in emotional intimacy or love. The heroine is the one taking charge of her sexuality and her future while it is the rake who we find crying about how he feels used and eventually begging his love for a long-term commitment.

Sarah MacLean is a New York Times bestselling author of historical romances including Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake and her most recent release, One Good Earl Deserves a Lover. MacLean says her novels are feminist because "the heroine is the hero of the story and she is taking action." It is not that she is pushed into making a change in her life because of an outside force but rather that, "she decides her life is unacceptable and she pushes" against that. MacLean uses the heroine of Nine Rules as an example of this, saying that "at its core from the title on, [the book] speaks to the breaking of the rules I try to write into all of my books." The heroine feels that she is too old to marry, is frustrated by her boring life, and so decides to draft and complete a list of nine things that women in 1813 in England rarely get to do. She smokes, she drinks, she fences, and she kisses men.

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/beyond-bodice-rippers-how-romance-novels-came-to-embrace-feminism/274094/