We in romance have a unique power as writers. We write characters for women who dare to step outside the norm. We have characters who defy convention and do what’s right, regardless of what people think.
We as a society have a different problem right now. In Richmond California, a crowd on onlookers stood by and participated in the gang rape of a young woman. No one called police. No one tried to stop it. No one alerted the teachers.
No one acted, and the reigning theory is the fear of what the mob might do or think.
It’s damn hard to stand up to a crowd of people and try to stop something. It’s damn hard to stand up and say this is wrong, or I don’t care what you think. Think of the scandal. The whole crowd might have called you names or turned on you or worse. So you sold your soul and remained quiet while evil had its way once more.
Something happens to our daughters as they grow up. As children, they play and have a grand old time, and have opinions but as they transition from tweens to teenagers, social pressure plays an even bigger role on our daughters than our sons. By that I mean, our girls are expected to be cute and smart and popular and honestly, who doesn’t envy the head cheerleader when she gets to date the basketball team captain? I won’t even lie: my teenage years were spent buried in books reading about women who dared defy convention and marry who they wanted, damn the scandal.
That’s a pretty powerful thought. Damn what people think about you. Damn what society expects of you. Damn was your parents expect if its not going to make you happy. One of the greatest gifts my mom ever gave me was to raise me with the knowledge that whatever I decided to do, she’d support me so long as I was happy. I found out later in life that my dad thought I should be a lawyer but that was much after I’d already joined the army. Now, that’s not to say that my folks didn’t have some heartburn about me joining up. I was 18 years old, overweight and an average student who sucked at sports and worked at McDonalds. But, I joined anyway and they were there to kiss me goodbye and tell me they loved me, regardless if I was going to wear fatigues to work for the next few years.
But I digress. The whole point of that tanget was to point out that even though I had some pretty strong social fitting in issues, my folks supported me in doing what I wanted. A lot of women in today’s day and age don’t have that. I see mom’s pushing their daughters to have plastic surgery or daughters pushing for it because it will make them pretty and therefore popular.
In a romance novel, particularly historicals, the heroine defies convention in some way. She either ends up in an unconventional situation, like Maddy in Flowers from The Storm who is incredibly stubborn, or like Jocilyn in Savage Thunder, who falls in love with a man who’s a half Native American, half white. Both characters thumb their nose at what society expects in the end and both have some pretty powerful societal influence pushing them to conform.
The first time I picked up a historical over here, I rolled my eyes and thought: great another girl trying to get married.
Why, I wondered, was scandal such a big deal? I mean, honestly, as a female in the military, I’ve had plenty of rumors started about me, to include the pinnacle of my deployment, making the latrine wall. When I was younger, they used to really bother me but I learned quickly that not only can you not stop rumors, you’ll just lose sleep over them if you let them get to you. So to me, I’m like really? Scandal and rumors are a big deal?
Well, yeah, they are.
The refusal to conform is a testament to the romance heroine’s subversive power. They do the right thing, even when society says not to. The romance heroine would pick up the phone and try to stop the rape that occurred outside a high school rather than worry about what the crowd thought.
Maybe romance is a good thing for our daughters to read, to try and find a way to stand up to the crowd and what the popular kids are doing and dare to find their own way in the world.