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Why is there a women’s fiction section? Because we live in a patriarchal society in which media created for women is still not accepted as part of the mainstream cultural tapestry. Media aimed at men, e.g. Any movie featuring Jason Bourne is considered ‘a film’. Media aimed at women e.g. 27 Dresses is labelled a ‘chickflick’ – a piece of cinema never destined for the historic canon. Books, and in fact any other kind of text aimed at women, are treated with the same disdain and double standards.
This misogynistic undercurrent has become so ingrained most people don’t even stop to question it. Who’s to blame? Well, historically the equality scales have never really tipped in women’s favour. In the Victorian era, for example, the idea of men and women operating in two separate spheres was popularized by leading thinkers such as John Ruskin. In his 1865 lecture series Sesame and Lillies, he made it clear that women were very different to men:
‘The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle,—and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision.’
So what you’re saying John-Boy is that not only do I have to sit in a dark corner away from all the adventure but I’m not supposed to create or invent anything to save me going out of my mind with boredom?
Alright, this looks bad but I’m not in the business of demonizing historical figures. Ruskin was a product of the society he lived in and he did have some other, better ideas in his time. Getting an annulment on his marriage to Effy Gray because he allegedly couldn’t deal with the reality that women had pubic hair and / or menstrual blood wasn’t one of them (it’s TOTALLY unsubstantiated folks, but the rumours have endured). Bear in mind also that Queen Victoria herself had made her thoughts on what was known as ‘The Woman Question’ quite clear: ‘let women be who God intended, a helpmate for man, but with totally different duties and vocations.’
The real question is, why would something a man said more than 150 years ago mean that I still have to go to a different area of the bookshop to find my Georgette Heyer stories? We didn’t have to support and perpetuate that theory for so long, did we? Well, even with the women’s movement, Victorian ideas dominated our society for many years and we’re still suffering something of a historical hangover. We’ve got better at questioning the Victorian values that underpinned our stance on gender for so long, but it took us a great deal of time and this has had an effect on many areas of our culture, including media consumption
Unconvinced by the argument that Ruskin’s theory still has a hold on us? Toying with the idea that women’s fiction, particularly romance, was a genre created just so ladies could more readily find what they were looking for on the Amazon search page? Take a look at how romance books written by men are categorized.
Romance author Nicholas Sparks made his brand positioning clear in a 2006 interview with USA Today. The man who brought you such hard-boiled narratives as The Notebook, A Walk to Remember and Dear John explained:
“If you look for me, I’m in the fiction section. Romance has its own section… I don’t write romance novels.”
So, what kind of books does Sparks write? He writes in a TOTALLY different genre. His books are ‘love stories’, see the difference?
No. Me neither.
But the bookshops and publishers must. His volumes are indeed categorized in the fiction section. Alongside Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity which apparently isn’t a rom-com, but a fiction book. And David Nicholls who wrote One Day, you won’t find him in romance. He’s over with Hornby and Sparks in fiction. Even The Princess Bride by William Goldman which is a Fairytale Romance (and yes, those capital letters are more than justified) sits in the fiction section.
As author Kaite Welsh explained in her recent article in the Guardian about the rise of ‘single women’s fiction’ (just when you thought it was safe to buy a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary) the category of women’s fiction was invented to rob female authors (and their readership) of much-needed legitimacy in the market: ‘Chick lit and “grip lit” are labelled thus because God forbid they simply be called literature.’
So what’s the good news? Well, none of what’s written above prevents women writers and readers from reclaiming the genre and working it to their advantage. This might be achieved by writing dynamic stories aimed at women or by being unabashed about reading books that others would consider ‘trashy’. By calling someone out whenever they belittle a romance story for its lack of intelligence (because all the Bond stories are insightful masterpieces created only for the most discerning reader / viewer, right?).
Whatever we do, ditching the shame attached to being categorized in romance or picking up a book off that shelf is essential. We do not belittle men for picking up a horror, sci-fi, or spy story. Why should we feel like less for picking up a book that was designed to bring us pleasure?
Helen writes erotic historical romance novellas. You can find out more about them here.
Further Reading
Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
John Ruskin on Bizarre Victoria
Two Approaches on the Philosophy of Separate Spheres