New York Times disses romance authors

Hey, all, many of you have probably heard about the so-called "book review" of the fall's upcoming romance books, penned by famed literary editor Robert Gottleib, that appeared in Wednesday's issue of the New York Times. If you haven't read the piece, you should check it out, here.

Why the paper thought a man known for editing literary fiction was the best choice for such a piece is more than a bit puzzling. What isn't puzzling is the frustration, disappointment, and outrage felt by romance authors and readers alike by the patriarchal, condescending tone of Gottlieb's piece. Several of those people have written strong blog pieces in reaction: check out Ron Hogan's piece at Medium, "All the Dumb Things You Can Say About Romance Novels, All in One Convenient Place," and Olivia Waite's "Robert Gottlieb is Obviously Smitten" from the Seattle Book Review. And the many, many smart, informed comments people have posted online in the comments section of the article, as well as on the Book Review's Facebook page, are heartening. I hope RWA will send the Times a letter protesting this latest example of shaming the industry, its writers, and its readers.

If you're frustrated, disappointed, and/or outraged by the Times' piece, please let the Times' book review editor know, either by posting a comment in response to the Gottlieb piece online, adding a comment to the Times' Facebook page, or sending an old fashioned snail mail letter to the editor:

Via email: books@nytimes
Via snail mail: The Editor, The New York Times Book Review, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018.

This is the comment I posted on the Book Review's Facebook page:

Wow, sexism, classism, racism, urban bias, ignorance, and misinformation, and even more sexism, all in one book review/roundup. Way to insult so many people at once, NYT.

Bread for all, and Roses, too: Courtney Milan's HER EVERY WISH

Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes,
Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.

As we come marching, marching, un-numbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread,
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses, too.

Bread and Roses strikers

As I was reading Courtney Milan's latest novella, I could not help but think of the Lawrence, Massachusetts "Bread and Roses" strike of 1912. In response to a new Massachusetts law limiting the number of hours women and children could work (from 54 to a mere 52!), textile mill owners in Lawrence cut the wages of their workforce. Expecting such a move, leaders in the Industrial Workers of the World union organized a strike of primarily female immigrant millworkers, workers whom several other unions claimed could not be organized.  The strikers demanded not that their wage be returned to its former level, but that it be raised by 15%. Because working women deserved not only the lowest wage that would allow their survival, but a wage that would allow them "small art and love and beauty," too.

Milan's novella is set hundreds of miles away from Lawrence, in London, England. And it takes place 46 years earlier than Lawrence's Bread and Roses strike, in 1866. Yet its heroine, Daisy Whitlaw, has the same thirst for the small beauties of life as did Lawrence's textile workers. Daisy (whom readers of book 1 in the "Worth Saga," Once Upon a Marquess, will remember as the working class best friend of that book's heroine), a woman who cannot stop reaching for her dreams, no matter how many times her hands are slapped away, opens the story by entering a contest offering fifty pounds to the person who presents the best plan for a new business. Ten semifinalists have been selected based on their written proposals (wise Daisy entered under the name "D. Whitlaw"), and now each must give a public presentation to the members of the parish. Unlike the other finalists (all men), whose proposals include the same old ideas for new stores and businesses, Daisy's proposal is a novel one: Daisy's Emporium, "a small shop of carefully selected goods. Durable, beautiful, and inexpensive. Designed for—" For women, Daisy had planned to say. But the hostility of the crowd, angered that a woman has dared enter the contest, makes it almost impossible for her to deliver her intended speech (Kindle Loc 121).

In spite of the difficulties of her presentation, Daisy is chosen as one of the five finalists invited to prepare a more detailed proposal. The man in charge of the program suggests that her invitation has little to do with her proposal's merit, however:



"We'll see you all next Saturday. And it looks like we have our entertainment in order. After all, we've just lined up the jester." He gave Daisy an exaggerated waggle of his eyebrows and let out a great, braying laugh, one that explained precisely why she'd been chosen. (163).

Daisy, though, can't help but hope that her proposal might have a slim chance of winning, even in the face of such sexist condescension. And so when Crash, her former lover, an impudent, self-confident flirt of a man whose ancestry is so mixed that people who barely know him feel entitled to come up and ask him, "What are you?" offers to serve as audience while she rehearses her speech—"You need to practice in front of someone you hate. Someone who makes your stomach curdle. Someone who will ask questions while you want to smash his face in," (i.e., himself)—Daisy finds herself accepting.

A 1868 velocipede race in France

And finds herself not practicing her speech, but being thrust upon a velocipede, learning self-confidence by learning to ride this newfangled wheeled contraption. And learning a lot more about Crash in the process, a man with whom she had once thought herself in love. A man so arrogant and self-assured that she'd thought nothing could wound him—especially not herself.

Though Crash and Daisy appear to be polar opposites, Milan shows that their common experiences of facing discrimination—sexist discrimination for Daisy, racist discrimination for Crash, and classist discrimination for them both—the two have far more in common than they, or we, ever thought. And that both deserve more, far more, than society tells them they should want.

Not just bread, but roses, too.


Photo credits:
Bread and Roses strikers: New England Historical Society
Emporium: Haute Design
Velocipede race: The Online Bicycle Museum

Courtney Milan

Her Every Wish

The Worth Saga, #1.5

self-published

The Challenges of Cross-Class Romance

In romance, the most common version of the cross-class love story is the familiar trope of Cinderella. Forced into a life of servitude by a cruel step-mother, the folktale Cinderella (with a little help from her fairy godmother) rises from the ashes of her degradation to marry into the glittering world of the royalty. Yet in most versions of the folktale, Cinderella's class background is not all that different from the prince's; before her mother's death and her father's remarriage, Cinderella lived not a life of poverty or labor, but of gentility. Cinderella's rise, then, is not really much of a crossing of class at all, but rather a restoration of a class status unfairly wrested from her.

Pretty Woman's Edward comes a-wooing
via fire escape

Many re-envisionings of the Cinderella trope in modern romance dress, ones which feature lovers from truly different class backgrounds (Pretty Woman, for example) conclude with a declaration of love or a wedding, suggesting that once the cross-class lovers acknowledge their feelings, an ending as happy as Cinderella's will inevitably follow. But as two recent blog posts on the blog of Class Action, a national nonprofit group committed to exploring social class and class privilege and bias, demonstrate, tensions in a real-life marriage between people who grew up in different social classes can often stem not just from differing personalities, but also from class-based assumptions about the way the world should and does work.

In "When Love Crosses Class Lines," Jessi Streib, a sociology professor at Duke University, writes about her research into the marriages of college-educated couples, in which one partner of the couple was raised in the middle class, the other raised in the working class. Though the 32 couples she interviewed rarely mentioned class as a cause of any of the challenges they had experienced in their relationships, Streib found evidence that the disagreements couples had could often be traced to class differences, rather than simply chalked up to individual partners' characters or personalties. "Partners from different class backgrounds typically had different ideas about how they wanted to go about their daily lives, and so marriages between people who grew up in different classes required navigating these differences," Streib argues. Partners raised in working-class families tended to take a more laissez-faire attitude toward life, wanting to live in the present, assuming the future would take care of itself. In contrast, those raised in middle-class families felt more comfortable planning for the future, and organizing the flow of daily life—what Streib terms the "managerial approach." Streib found these different attitudes affected seven separate aspects of married life: finances, paid work, leisure, housework, time, parenting, and emotions—all areas in which married couples must make decisions on a daily basis.

One of the few working-class families seen on TV: cast of Roseanne

Streib's findings are echoed in the experience of counseling psychologist Barbara Jensen, who specializes in working with cross-class couples. In her Class Action blog, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Jensen illustrates how differing cultural assumptions lead to tension in one particular marriage. Carla, raised in a working-class family, finds husband Steve, who hails from a middle-class family, overly cold to her family. For his part, Steve doesn't understand why they have to spend so much time with Carla's relatives; aren't they grown-ups now? Steve doesn't understand why Carla shares her emotions and secrets with his boss's wife; Carla doesn't understand why they need to spend social time with his boss. Both Carla and Steve bring with them the social expectations of their class: for Steve, emotional boundaries signal respect for others, excessive emotional sharing signal rudeness, while to Carla, emotional boundaries signal coldness, reserve. For Carla, social time means spending time with equals, with friends, not with people who hold power over you; for Steve, cultivating those higher up in the power structure is an expected part of life.

Romance novels often feature cross-class couples. But rarely do the conflicts the couples experience stem from the different social expectations each member of the couple brings to the relationship. Or if they do, typically one member of the couple must give up what are portrayed as "immature" behaviors and assumptions in order to become worthy of the other partner's love. For example, in Sarah Mayberry's Harlequin Superromance Suddenly You, working-class hero Harry must give over his carefree life of living in the moment, choosing instead to take responsibility for his father's business, before middle-class heroine Pippa will accept that he's not going to leave her in the emotional and financial lurch as his best friend Steve did. Much ink has been spilled suggesting that romance fiction indoctrinates readers into patriarchal values, but little has been written about its ideologies of class. After reading Mayberry's book, I began to wonder—does romance also work to instill middle class assumptions and values in working-class readers?

As both Streib and Jensen point out, negotiating cultural differences stemming from class differences need not be an either/or. The couples with whom Streib spoke "usually reported being happy together. Class infused their marriages, but it did not extinguish them." Jensen notes that a class-conscious counselor will not simply urge Carla to adopt Steve's middle-class values, but to help both partners to understand that their differences stem not just from personal preference, but from the class-based assumptions each learned from their families of origin, and to "listen with compassion to each other's needs, dreams, and fears"—no matter whether said needs, dreams, or fears stemmed from middle-class, or working-class, values.

What romance novels can you think of that truly grapple with class difference? Do any of them feature couples, like Jensen's Carla and Steve, "learning roles and rules from both of their parents' families" and sharing "their favorite aspects of either culture" rather than one set of class assumptions ruling over the other?

Feminism and Male Aggression: Cara McKenna's AFTER HOURS

Feminists have struggled long and hard to persuade the public that violence against women is the inevitable end result of the unequal power relations between men and women that have historically characterized the world's societies. Since the 19th century, feminist activists have worked to overturn laws that encourage and perpetuate male on female violence, such as those allowing a husband to physically "chastise an errant wife," or an intimate partner to engage in sexual relations with a woman without her consent. In the twentieth century, they've worked to support studies about violence, and to publicize the results, statistics that demonstrate the continuing prevalence of such abuse. And feminist activists have played key roles in crafting the United Nations' Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 1993, and the United States Congress's Violence Against Women Act in 1994.

No one could argue that increasing the awareness of the prevalence of violence against women is a bad thing. A 2012 Special Report from U.S. Department of Justice cites a 64% drop in non-fatal intimate partner violence in the United States between 1993 and 2010, due in large part to increased legal services for victims and increased public awareness of a problem that was once just swept under the rug.

Yet the publicity meant to educate and to advocate on behalf of women can have the unfortunate side effect of engendering distrust, even fear, in women, not only of violent men, but of men in general. Reading the statistics gathered by the Office on Violence Against Women and the the Minnesota Center Against Violence & Abuse at the University of Minnesota, statistics reporting that 1.5 million American women are raped or physically assaulted by a man they know every year, 22.1% of American women report having been physically assaulted by a current or former partner, and that one in three female murder victims are killed each year by an intimate partner, it's hardly surprising if women fear that violent men are lurking not only around that shadowy, empty street corner, but behind the face of every male community member, every male colleague, every male relative. How can women balance the need to be aware of male violence against their sex with the reality that the majority of men will never raise a hand to harm?

The male protagonist of Cara McKenna's AFTER HOURS is hardly a wolf hiding in sheep's clothing, a violent man hiding behind a pleasant demeanor. No, Kelly Robak appears to be all wolf. When Erin Coffey, newly beginning her job at as an LPN in a hospital ward designed for men who suffer from persistent, disruptive psychotic episodes, sees him standing in the patient lounge, her brain instantly flashes "inmate," not "patient." "His head was shaved to brown stubble, and even from twenty feet away I could make out the scar running from beneath his ear down his neck," Erin notices as she watches him, his "large arms crossed over his equally large chest." When Erin finds out that he's not a patient, but an orderly, one large enough to wrestle down a patient in the midst of a psychotic episode (it usually takes three), she's somewhat reassured. "After all, this was a man who'd keep me from bodily harm," Erin tells herself.

But when bossy, likes-to-be-in-control, "thug of a man" Kelly begins to push Erin to extend their relationship to after hours, Erin's doubts comes roaring back. In her family, Erin's always been the rescuer, nursing her dying grandmother, protecting her younger sister Amber from their mother's indifferent parenting, defending Amber and Amber's young son Jack from her verbally abusive boyfriend. What would she do with a man like Kelly, who orders for her in a restaurant without asking what she likes, who won't let her pay for drinks, who tells her straight out he's "real my-way-or-the-highway"? Understandable that such a man, at the beck and call of others all day long on the job, would want "what I want, the way I want it," but such a man is hardly likely to appeal to even "the most middling feminist," Erin thinks.

And Erin does consider herself a feminist. "My sister and mom were welcome to his type, and all the pleasurable mistakes those men offered. As for me, no thank you. All set. If you want me, I'll be at the coffee shop, looking for a nice boy of manageable proportions with no scars and a basic grasp of feminism," she tells herself when her attraction to Kelly threatens her good intentions.

Yet the more Erin sees of Kelly, the more she begins to realize that there is more to him than just aggression. Kelly has a calming influence on the patients, and cares about their welfare. He can be mischievous, or a controlling hothead, "in the neon intimacy of the bar," but cool and civil on the job. His crass assertions can be read as sexist, or merely as searingly honest. "We've got a little something between us, don't we?" he asks Erin early in their relationship, recognizing what she can't bring herself to acknowledge. When she simply says, "If you say so," he finds her lack of honestly disappointing: "He winced like I'd just tried to knee him in the balls. 'Okay, we can be like that.' " His honesty forces Erin to be honest in her turn, honest both about her attraction to him and about her doubts about the wisdom of acting on it.

Erin soon realizes that Kelly "wasn't quite like the men who'd turned my mom and sister's lives inside out. He was hardworking and seemed honest, and unless he made a pass when he dropped me off, his intentions were harmless enough, But he'd painted himself as a cousin of those men—aggressive and admittedly selfish, admittedly a bit of a bully. I'd always been so determined never to fall for one of those types." To the self-sufficient Erin, falling for an aggressive man seems to be a worrisomely anti-feminist act.

But there is a difference between an aggressive man and a violent one, McKenna's novel insists. And it's a feminist act to be able to differentiate between the two. AFTER HOURS shows Erin, and through Erin, the reader, how to tell the difference. First, by setting up sister Amber's boyfriend Marco as a negative foil to Kelly. After Erin and Marco have a verbal altercation that leads to shoving and injury to Erin, another colleague at the hospital notes,"Bullies tend to prey on weak people, people they perceive as worthless." Marco's behavior fits this description to a T, but Kelly's doesn't, Erin thinks: "It was Kelly... I'd always seen as a bit of a bully. But he didn't want an easy target. If he was after anything, it was a challenge." Later, talking with Kelly about the incident, she realizes,"You... you're kind of an ass, but you know it. He's just a big, spoiled toddler with a loud truck and a drinking problem. And absolutely no self-awareness. No respect for anyone else's needs or feelings. I don't think it registers, that other people even have feelings." When Amber's son is hospitalized, it's not Marco, but Kelly, who shows up to be emotionally supportive, despite his deep discomfort with situations beyond his control.

Second, by showing that Kelly not only recognizes that other people have feelings, but is invested in learning the signals, both verbal and non-verbal, that Erin uses to convey her emotions. "Where'd you go?" Kelly asks her after she grows still and stiff during their first sexual encounter, wanting him and fearing him and worried that he won't stop at the line she's verbally drawn. "He kissed my ear, and when I spoke it was like he'd stepped inside my mind," she thinks when he doesn't take her false reassurance as permission to keep going. Here, and at other points in the story, Kelly works to understand Erin's feelings, urging her to express them, and to help her deal with them when they become overwhelming.

And finally, perhaps most importantly, Kelly understands that no means no: "I can't go all the way tonight," Erin tells him, even though part of her wants to, wants to break away from her good-girl role and have hot, unprotected sex, even knowing that in the morning "it'd feel awful" having ignored her own responsibilities to herself, her own self-respect. In older romances, the fact that the heroine feels desire was often enough to justify the hero's "taking" her, even over her verbal protestations. Erin recognizes the prevalence of this cultural assumption, not just in romance, but in society in general: obvious arousal has "been permission enough for too many pushy men." "But a lust-heavy sigh in my hair erased" her worries, as Kelly stops. "I want you... But not tonight. Not that far," she reminds Kelly, just to be sure. "I heard you the first time," he responds, with "not a jot of irritation in his tone—just a fact." Rather than upbraid her for being a tease, or pushing her to give in, or shaming her into backing down, Kelly takes care to follow the letter of Erin's law, aware that she is the ultimate arbiter of what happens to her own body.

Erin gradually realizes that Kelly's aggression is only one facet of his complex character, a character with many nuances. It's not that he's really different, deep down underneath, that the aggression is just a mask to cover vulnerability, as so many romances of the past have asserted in order to excuse their heroes' aggressive behavior. Instead, Erin learns that that Kelly is both bossy and kind, domineering and thoughtful, calming and provoking. He wants Erin to allow him to be in charge during sex because he enjoys taking on that role—"It's the illusion of control I want, not actually forcing anyone to do something they're not into"—not because being controlling is the only way he can be. Once Erin recognizes that she, too, can play different roles (submissive sex partner, dominating sex partner, competent nurse, strong sister, vulnerable aunt) she can give over the fear that her desire for the bossy Kelly is inherently odds with feminism:

Where in the tenets of feminism did it say it was liberating to stubbornly deny yourself pleasurable sexual experiences just to spite a bossy man? No place. Feminism isn't a zero-sum game. Choosing not to sleep with Kelly, and our scoring zippo additional orgasms off each other? That was zero-sum. Banging each other's brains out for one memorable weekend? Win-win.

But accepting Kelly as a lover, even engaging in BDSM, does not mean she must cede her identity to him; as she prepares for their tryst, she thinks:

Cute but comfortable underwear, freshly shaved legs but my downstairs left to its own devices, because I was no man's personal porn star. I was Kelly's sex slave but also a feminist, and the crooked line had to be drawn someplace. And that place was in the perfectly lovely, feminine, God-given soft curls between my legs, I decided.

Erin and Kelly have to get beyond a few more assumptions about what it means to be a feminist, and what it means to be a man, in order to walk that "crooked line" of feminism and reach their "happily for now." Because while feminism promises that love can and should exist without violence, it never promised that love can be completely without fear. But a woman who looks like a bunny but has the sharp claws of a raccoon might just be the perfect person to  truly see, and to love, a wolf with a bit of soft wool and the occasional gentle "baa" mixed in with the scary, snapping teeth.

Photo credits:
Violence Against Women statistics: YWCA
Don't be a Bully: zazzle
Sex-Positive Feminism: Boston University Take Back the Night

ARC courtesy of NetGalley

Cara McKenna, After Hours.

Penguin/Intermix, 2013.

Next time on RNFF:

Setting up submission guidelines

Feminism and Social Class in Kristan Higgins' MY ONE AND ONLY

Because many of its early and most vocal proponents were white and middle-class, feminism has often been accused of being tone-deaf when it comes to the concerns of working-class women. Is the same true of romance novels?

I can think of many romances that feature working-class heroes (or at least, heroes with working-class jobs, such as construction workers, mechanics, and the like, even if they don't speak or think in a different social register than their middle-class heroines). But when was the last time I read a romance with a maidservant, a factory worker, or a shopkeeper as the female lead? Unless, that is, the romance is version of the Cinderella story, with said working-class heroine swept away from her life of drudgery by means of her love for a far more economically-privileged hero.

She's got both dresses; now she just needs the prince...

Perhaps, since romance is often viewed as an escape from everyday drudgery, it is unrealistic to expect blue-collar heroines and working-class concerns to take up much shelf space in the romance section at the library or bookstore. Yet even in romances with clearly middle- or upper-class heroines, denigration of working class women can seep into the background. Sometimes done deliberately (the crass woman providing comic relief), other times simply part of the assumptions of the narrator of heroine, such belittling portrayals can undermine the more positive messages in an otherwise feminist romance.

One of the reasons I admire Kristan Higgins' My One and Only is the way it forces its readers to recognize the prevalence of negative depictions of working class women, by forcing its protagonist, divorce lawyer Harper James, to confront her own anti-feminist classism. Harper comes from working-class stock (her grandfather a fisherman, her dad working construction), and lives in the one working-class neighborhood on pricey Martha's Vineyard. But Harper attended Amherst College, "receiving a stellar education at an extremely feminist-slanted college," which instilled the confidence "that the world held no boundaries," she and her classmates "planning to Do Important Things" (63). The novel thus suggests that Harper's desire to become an environmental lawyer stems not only from her commitment to preserving nature, but from her education at that high-falutin' bastion of feminism, Amherst.

But another potential reason lies in the story's depiction of Harper's stepmother. Only a year after her real mother left her thirteen-year-old daughter, never to return, Harper's taciturn father came home from a Las Vegas conference (one, ironically, focused on green building materials) with thrice-married BeverLee, a walking, talking "Trailer Park Barbie" whose most "intellectually simulating literature" consisted of Us Weekly (33, 35). From Harper's first mention of "BeverLee of the Big Blond Hair," readers know that this is a woman the educated lawyer has little desire to emulate. Though Harper never comes out and condemns BeverLee for her class position, the class-based markers Harper uses to describe her tell us that BeverLee is different from Harper, different in a way that invites Harper's (and readers') laughter, perhaps even scorn. From the spelling of her name to her Texas twang, from her love for weddings "whether in the family, the tabloids, or on one of the three soap operas she watched religiously" to her constant refrain of cheery platitudes, from the cigarette she holds in one hand to the can of Jhirmack extra hold hairspray in the other, BeverLee serves as the anti-Harper, the embodiment of educated feminists' fears of being labelled as lacking "class," in the multiple senses of the word.

Yet the roots of Harper's classism lie deeper than the obvious villain of college-instilled feminism. The narrative holds off on telling us about these roots until fairly close to the end of the book, at the point in the story when Harper begins to understand the reasons why her first marriage failed so spectacularly. Not only because Harper feared to commit herself wholeheartedly to said marriage, as her ex-husband believes, and not just because he refused to acknowledge her needs, as she believes. But because Harper has spent so much time being afraid of being abandoned again that she's too scared to tell her ex what she needs and desires, especially when said needs and desires might hurt him.

But BeverLee knows what Harper needs, and has been there for her throughout her growing up, despite Harper's constant rejection. Only after Harper acknowledges this, acknowledges how much she's been blinded by her class-based judgments of "Trailer Park Barbie" BeverLee, can Harper move on and repair the other relationships in her life that she's damaged by her refusal to see them in all their multifaceted sides—especially the one with her "one and only" love, ex-husband Nick.

Interestingly, while the novel insists that mother-daughter relationships can transcend class boundaries, it simultaneously suggests that romantic relationships cannot. At least not when class is constructed in terms of education and level of intellectual engagement. Harper's current boyfriend, "young Dennis," is all that a girl could want—easygoing, good-looking, a hard worker, a heroic firefighter. Yet it is not his rattail, his junky car, or his continually calling her "Dude," that signals to readers that Dennis is far from Harper's perfect match. Instead, it is the lack of intellectual exchange in which the two are able to engage. Dennis's interests do not include much beyond the Red Sox and playing on his X-box, interests that can hardly keep the attention of keenly intelligent Harper for more than a few minutes at a time. Condescendingly directing Dennis's life as if she were his mother rather than his lover, Harper demonstrates to readers far earlier than she recognizes herself that she is no match for the kind but decidedly dim Dennis.

A contradiction in class-based messages? Or an accurate assessment of the differences between parental and romantic love? Would love to hear your thoughts...

And would love to hear of any other romances with working class heroes AND heroines, or cross-class romances in which class-based assumptions cause difficulties in the relationship, rather than being simply glossed over in a Cinderella-imposed romantic haze.

Photo/Illustration credits:

Cinderella costume: Wild Nights Fancy Dress Company

Trailer Park Barbie: Trish-the-stalker, Deviant Art

Kristan Higgins, My One and Only

HQN, 2011

Next time on RNFF:

Children in romance