Each day my inbox is full of emails about upcoming books romance readers might like to read. And, if publishers are right about romance readers–and who is to say they are or are not?–what we want to read are feminist romances. This week I received blurbs for an historical romance whose heroine works to smash the patriarchy, a classic romance reboot that challenges modern ideas of masculinity, femininity, and power, a feminist women’s fiction novel that features a woman challenging convention and boundaries, a thriller that showcases the burgeoning feminism of the early 1960s, an historical fiction for those who love feminist history, one billed as feminist twist on Sherlock Holmes, and an ardently feminist contemporary romance just to name a few. (The quotes in italics are from the actual blurbs.)
Feminism is clearly all the rage in our world which, yay! I’m all for feminism–I have described myself as such since I learned the word. That said, I’m not sure what feminism means here. Does it mean a disavowal of traditional cultural norms such as heteronormative relationships, marriage, kids, and articulated gender norms? About equal rights? It’s unclear to me–and, honestly, it really is–what a feminist romance/women-centric story needs to have in it to make it such.
I googled “What is feminism?” and screened for results from the past year. Masterclass says there are seven types of feminism. Britannica says we are in the fourth wave of feminism and that this wave focuses on sexual harassment, body shaming, and rape culture. Kim Cattrall, at Glamour’s Women of the Year Event 2022, says “Feminism to me is about equal rights, so I feel that no matter where I am, sticking up for my point of view as a woman, especially as a woman of my age….”
For me, a feminist romance is one in which women get to choose the lives they want. They can choose to be CEOs, moms, wives, lovers, queer, monogamous, straight, asexual, or whatever else makes them replete. Feminist romances have men who support the vision and emotions of the women/men they love. I see feminism in Serena Bell’s contemporary romances, in Evie Dunmore’s historical romances, in Leigh Bardugo’s fantasies, and in pretty much all of Julie Anne Long’s novels.
How about you? What do you think makes a romance feminist? What are some examples of feminist stories you’ve loved? Any you’ve hated? Is this a trend you applaud? Is it even a trend or–let’s hope not–just a marketing tool?
For me, a feminist romance is one where there is no double standard. So for instance, if the hero and heroine are separated after they fall in love, she is not expected to be chaste while he shags every woman he meets to show how Sexually Virile yet Emotionally Bereft he is. Stalking and assault are not portrayed as excusable when the hero does it. Likewise, there are no madonna-whore comparisons (I love LaVyrle Spencer’s Morning Glory and have read it three times now, but its treatment of sex workers is… problematic).
Feminist romances, for me, don’t try to make their heroines conform to an arbitrary standard, whether that standard is “all strong women challenge the patriarchy head-on” or “all good women want biological children”. Women should also not be considered lesser if they prefer feminine-coded activities. Usually when I come across a historical heroine who knows martial arts and wants to save the rainforest, I brace for her to be compared to the empty-headed females who do embroidery or enjoy parties, as though there’s something inherently inferior about needlework or social skills.
What I like to see in feminist romances are, as Dabney said, women having choices, men supporting women, and friendships between women. Years after I read Courtney Milan’s The Heiress Effect, I remember how the two women who were sniggering at the heroine at the start of the book turned out to be more than the usual nasties who get their inevitable comeuppance courtesy of the author, and they became the heroine’s friends. That was so refreshing. I want to read about women who stand up for themselves, who respect and like other women, and who find their happiness and fulfillment in their own individual ways.
Yes to all of this, Marian. It’s about having choices and having those choices respected.
Totally agree!! @marian !!! I’m not so good at fully articulating the why…but to me, feminist romance is when both the H and h push back against societal and cultural norms, with the male gender supporting women exploring areas they would normally be barred from and vice versa.
Feminist POV is why I loved Alicia Cameron’s Katerina and the Reclusive Earl so much (one of my top 3 reads in 2022). The character’s journeys reflected the breaking down of barriers and restrictions, not conforming to norms and encouraging and actively supporting each other efforts to be their authentic selves…in addition to representing themes of invisible disabilities and STEM interests. Even better the H/h “abdicated” their traditional roles of Earl and Countess and left these responsibilities to their retainers (explored more in Leonora and the Lion’s Venture, Sisters of Castle Fortune, #4). I would be interested to hear any opposing opinions though!!
As someone with an invisible disability who works in STEM…this romance was a revelation to me. There are layers and themes non-often written about within the historical romance context. Highly recommend.
I’m reading fewer and fewer romances because I feel constantly preached at. I’m a post graduate educated single, childless by choice woman in her fifth decade of life. I appreciate all the advantages that feminism has brought me in my life. I appreciate a lot of fourth wave feminism however when I read books from the 2000s there is feminism. I never felt smashed by it. Now it is completely unsubtle. It’s like a baseball bat. Yeah I get it, feminism rah rah rah. I’m personally looking forward to when the pendulum swings away. I found Evie Dunmore’s last book infuriating and completely unsatisfying. To be fair it was great til 80% and then all downhill from there. It felt like the choices that were made were to ram home feminism and were not true to the character. As such I am done with Dunmore.
I reviewed that Evie Dunmore book and agree with you completely about the ending. I thought that for the most part, the feminist issues were quite well integrated into her stories, although she had to perform some real authorial contortions to make the HEAs work.
I’ve seen those pitches and I have to say that my immediate reaction is ALWAYS “marketing”. I’m a former marketing/PR person, and to me it’s blatantly obvious that calling every romance “feminist” is the latest marketing fad.
Basically, I’m with you. An m/f HEA should be about the hero and heroine being in a relationship of equals and absolutely NOT one where the heroine gets everything she wants at the expense of the heroes wants and desires (we’ve seen quite a few of those recently) or where she treats him like crap just to show how ” strong” and “independent” she is. For me it should be about the woman getting to make choices for herself, in her work life and her romantic life – if she wants one and her partner supporting her in those choices – and vice versa.
To me, m/m is such a favorite because the intrinsic power differential between men and women is not at play.
In m/f, it is often society that pushes women into a corner (aunties want babies, patriarchs push dynasties, social media push beauty, sports, food and clothes are traps for messages on body shaming, work dynamics skew to powerful males…) .
So a hero would need to actually fight all these expectations from society together with the heroine. In historicals, against any group or family ties, usually, since they are usually part of the established order,
This does not make for good romance, most of the time.
Even in the last Loretta Chase, the sadness at the limits on women shone through. She is so good that it was still a great book, and a funny one, but in lesser hands, you either get preached at, or you have limited fun.
So for me, current romance offerings in m/f work only rarely, and authors currently writing historicals have it tough because they need to find believable solutions that are historical ( see our ongoing discussion on historical authenticity…).
I want empowered women, but I also want fun in my romances.
So, SF, Fantasy, or m/m work best for me. There, the whole uphill battle of feminism can be circumvented or a different society created.
I am always happy when a stellar writer manages to pull it off, and authors like Kelly Hunter regularly do. Her heroines work as role models for empowered equality for me, without preaching.
I was going to write a post, but you said it much more eloquently than I would have. I’ve seen people ask why a woman would want to read mm romances where they have no representation. But the truth is I’ve rarely felt any representation in m/f romances. I mainly feel vaguely sad (or too often outright angry) at the gender politics, or power differential, as you put it. It’s frankly more relaxing to read something that doesn’t remind me of all the problems women have faced and are still facing in life. So yeah, SF, fantasy and mm are my go-to genres.
Your comment about not feeling represented in m/f resonates with me, too. I’m struggling to come up with the title of a single m/f romance where I’ve ‘seen myself’ in the heroine or identified with her. I honestly can’t think of one.
I see lots. Bits and pieces, sure, but m/f romance is still totally working for me. I think, though, that I have
lowreasonable standards for behavior. I find perfect people uninteresting!That’s true.
But I think geography is a big part of why you see it and I don’t. The vast majority of romance is written by American authors and set in American locations. My life experience is very different – which is one of the reasons I never read or reviewed much contemporary romance. The same is true of m/m romance of course – but I suppose that I go into those knowing that I won’t be identifying with a heroine and expecting my experience to be different because there’s no female lead character who is supposed to ‘represent’ me or ‘be like’ me, I certainly read a LOT more contemporary romance now than I ever did a few years back when I was reading m/f romance exclusively.
There are many ways I might connect with characters in any story. I read mostly British, NZ, and Australian authors right now, and almost all m/m, but I often connect with their journeys, their past, etc., as I’m sure you do. These are human connections, not female specific ones.
I readily admit that much of my disconnect in m/f romance is about what women have to put up with in men. There is too much real life harm done by men’s attitudes towards women, and I have too much trouble putting that aside while reading for pleasure. A man acting like a jerk to another man doesn’t trigger the same reaction in me as a man acting like a jerk to a women. It doesn’t mean I like it, but the very fact that it doesn’t have a correlation in my own life makes it have less emotional impact.
i certainly don’t want or expect perfection in the characters. That’s not the problem. But I have no tolerance for the way women are treated in real life, and I can’t seem to let go of that while reading (totally my problem, I know). I’m sure it has a lot to do with my personal history, but when men act like jerks to women I get angry and it ruins my reading experience. SF and fantasy (including some m/f) and m/m romance work for me because I can distance myself from the gender politics of real life.
Yes to all of this! I hardly read m/f romance any more because the gender straightjackets bother me so much. For me, it’s not just about characterisation that I can or can’t relate to, but about what counts as sexy. I recently tried a popular m/f contemporary romance in which the hero refused to let the heroine make her own way home after a night out because she was so attractive it wasn’t safe for her to do so. I think this was intended as a compliment and a sexy show of protectiveness but all I could hear were the toxic implications about who gets raped and why. For me, feminist writing isn’t about girl power or man-hating, but about ways of envisioning men and women that feel liberatory and unconstrained. I will note, however, that occasionally an author plays around with gender stereotypes in a way that still feels feminist to me. Cara McKenna is an example.
One book that worked for me was Tinderbox, by Rachel Grant. From my review:
“The alpha male special forces hero isn’t my favorite, and I got a little tired of the word “mine,” but the heroine’s agency and competence balanced this nicely. It also helped that, along with the heroine who could honestly take care of herself, the author gave us a hero with more layers than just the caveman one.”
I think “agency and competence” in a heroine, and not anger, attitude, or “pluckiness,” is the key for me enjoying a m/f romance. But it doesn’t matter how well the heroine is represented, if the male is still a misogynistic jerk I don’t enjoy the book. I honestly am sick of reading stories about redeeming (or taming) the alpha male. I want more nuanced men in my romances, especially in m/f romances. I don’t find it relaxing to read yet another story about how women are treated by men, and what the women have to do to overcome it. Too often it seems the reader is suppose to be applauding the hero for changing, which feels the opposite of a feminist outlook.
One of the few books about women overcoming societal limitations that worked well for me was A Dangerous Kind of Lady by Mia Vincy. Vincy’s writing is compelling and her hero, Guy, was complex and not a one-note alphole.
I hate being lectured to, and as soon as a book starts doing so, I’m likely to close it. One thing that really annoys me is a heroine in a historical who keeps whining about the things she can’t do. I want to scream at her that she has far more power and freedom than the vast majority of the population—i.e. the poor, male and female.
But to get off that soap box, I probably thought of myself as a feminist before most of you were born, since I go back to the days when working women had a choice: secretary, nurse, or teacher. The first question employment agencies asked was, “Can you type and take shorthand?” So I mainly think of feminism as choice. Preferably without any sneers at those who don’t want the corner office. After all, there are also men who don’t want it, who would rather have time.
I think it’s deeply anachronistic even to think about it. They didn’t think like that, until the word was created to describe a movement. It was different, and to try to slot a historical heroine into a slot set by people from the 1970s on just won’t work. It will result in an anachronistic heroine. People who quote Mary Woollenstonecraft have often never read the book in question, and they don’t understand what she was advocating and why.
You can have strong women, women forced into independence, even the odd few who chose to be independent (rare as hens’ teeth). But to take them out of their context and then try to make it work is like putting a piece of a jigsaw into a different jigsaw. It won’t fit.
Dabney, I love your definition of a feminist romance. I think many contemporary, SF, and fantasy romance novels meet your criteria even though the characters may not be labeled as feminists or engage in feminist pursuits. However, I find that books with a heroine who is explicitly labeled as a feminist often are full of conflict and endless jockeying for position, which I do not enjoy in my romances. The heroine is often too strident, too angry, too odd, too man-hating, etc. Authors tend to have these characters lecture their men and act like they’re always right. The man is always wrong-footed and needs to mend his ways and learn to fully support his lady before she deigns to be pleasant to him. Boring, predictable and strife-ridden, I simply cannot read these types of books. And yes, I do consider myself a feminist.
BTW, I do watch Miss Scarlett and the Duke, and that has exactly this sort of dynamic, and I have to say it gets a little old. I wish the characters could get along better, but I do manage to enjoy it well enough to watch occasionally.
I like men. Writ large. Sure, there are asshats but, overall, they are my jam. Books that start from the premise that most men suck just don’t work for me.
Yes! I prefer books where both parties come together as equals, perhaps not in rank, but with a sense of their own worth and an ability to respect others, even if they have a difference of opinion. I can’t stand a lot of lecturing and criticizing. There is enough friction in the real world, so my romances need to take me away from all that.
I was thinking about different ways to explore feminism in historical romance, and a book I read some time ago came to mind. Though unfortunately it was a good example of what didn’t work.
In the story, the heroine is being courted by two men. The first is a pompous nasty bore, and the second is the hero. The heroine asks the first man what he thinks of women having the right to vote, and he scoffs at the stupid notion. Of course, when she asks the hero the same question, he gives the expected answer.
There were two problems with this. The first was its predictability. No one wants a misogynistic hero, but I also don’t want to feel that even before picking up the book, I know where everyone will stand on social issues. I’d rather not read about a world where all the good people believe one thing and all the evil people believe the opposite, and no one ever changes their minds, so therefore it’s easy to tell the two groups apart. I’d like to see at least a little nuance instead.
The other problem was that the hero’s feminism began and ended with him saying what he was supposed to say, like ticking off a box on a form. He didn’t have to put his money where his mouth was. He never had to face a situation such as his employer discriminating against a woman. He didn’t undergo any hardship or make any sacrifices for his beliefs. The story didn’t even develop his reasons for why women should have the vote.
It’s easy to say the correct words. It’s not so easy to stand behind them in the face of opposition – and that’s what I’d like to see more of.
You put it so well!
Exactly!,
And I would also wish for historical accuracy and enjoyment- what KJ Charles does for m/m.
Interesting topic to mull over. I believe that there are at least four “feminist” characters in Pride and Prejudice: Lizzie gets her man by refusing to be anything other than herself, is intelligent and no fool and does not let him bully her in any way. Jane sets her sights on Mr Bingley early on and, yes, she too, quietly gets him without losing her identity or making unnecessary waves; good girl, well done! Lydia, well, she too gets her man, and in the most outrageous way for the time and social constraints in which she lived. Whether Lydia will remain with Wickham is a moot point but, in reality, she does exactly what she damned well pleases, gets out from under parental control and trumps two older sisters at the altar. Kitty – who knows – but I always had hope for Kitty that she would make a success of whichever chap she set her sights on. I hope she learns from both Lydia and Lizzie and takes from them their lessons learnt. Mary is, for me, the least likely sister to be considered a feminist although she gets away with boring the hell out of the poor folk who have to listen to her murder the piano. And perhaps the most honest of the feminist characters in P&P is Charlotte Lucas: a dark horse, that girl, and totally honest with her goals. She wanted her own house that she could run exactly how she wanted and by taking on the obnoxious and irritating Mr Collins, she got just that. And free meals at the Big House with Lady Catherine de Bourgh. And perhaps Lady C, too, can be construed as a feminist – who had the nerve to deal with her other than another feminist: Lizzie. Game girl, Lizzie. In sum, P&P is for me an early prototype feminist novel. The ladies trump the day in every instance. Even Darcy was going to have his hands full.
I just want some recommendations for feminist romance!
That would make a good ask topic!
I’d say anything published in the past five years by Sarah MacLean, Courtney Milan, Priscilla Oliveras, Cat Sebastian, Vanessa Riley, Alyssa Cole, Talia Hibbert, Rachel Lynn Solomon, K. J. Charles, or Sherry Thomas would all be feminist romances.