The Consumer Society Reader

The extent of the connection between romance reading and my informants’ understanding of their roles as wives and mothers was impressed upon me first by Dot herself during our first two-hour interview which took place before I had seen her customers’ responses to the pilot questionnaire. In posing the question, “What do romances do better than other novels today?,” I expected her to concern herself in her answer with the characteristics of the plot and the manner in which the story evolved. To my surprise, Dot took my query about “doing” as a transitive question about the effects of romances on the people who read them. She responded to my question with a long and puzzling answer that I found difficult to interpret at this early stage of our discussions. It seems wise to let Dot speak for herself here because her response introduced a number of themes that appeared again and again in my subsequent talks with other readers. My question prompted the following careful meditation:

It’s an innocuous thing. If it had to be . . . pills or drinks, this is harmful. They’re very aware of this. Most of the women are mothers. And they’re aware of that kind of thing. And reading is something they would like to generate in their children also. Seeing the parents reading is . . . just something that I feel they think the children should see them doing. . . . I’ve got a woman with teenage boys here who says “you’ve got books like . . . you’ve just got oodles of da . . . da . . . da . . . [counting an imaginary stack of books].” She says, “Now when you ask Mother to buy you something, you don’t stop and think how many things you have. So this is Mother’s and it is my money.” Very, almost defensive. But I think they get that from their fathers. I think they heard their fathers sometime or other saying, “Hey, you’re spending an awful lot of money on books aren’t you?” You know for a long time, my ladies hid ‘em. They would hide their books; literally hide their books. And they’d say, “Oh, if my husband [we have distinctive blue sacks], if my husband sees this blue sack coming in the house. . . . ” And you know, I’d say, “Well really, you’re a big girl. Do you really feel like you have to be very defensive?” A while ago, I would not have thought that way. I would have thought, “Oh, Dan is going to hit the ceiling.” For a while Dan was not thrilled that I was reading a lot. Because I think men do feel threatened. They want their wife to be in the room with them. And I think my body is in the room but the rest of me is not (when I am reading).¹

Only when Dot arrived at her last observation about reading and its ability to transport her out of her living room did I begin to understand that the real answer to my question, which she never mentioned and which was the link between reading, pills, and drinks, was actually the single word, “escape,” a word that would later appear on so many of the questionnaires. She subsequently explained that romance novels provide escape just as Darvon and alcohol do for other women. Whereas the latter are harmful to both women and their families, Dot believes romance reading is “an innocuous thing.” As she commented to me in another interview, romance reading is a habit that is not very different from “an addiction.”

Although some of the other Smithton women expressed uneasiness about the suitability of the addiction analogy, as did Dot in another interview, nearly all of the original sixteen who participated in lengthy conversations agreed that one of their principal goals in reading was their desire to do something different from their daily routine. That claim was borne out by their answers to the open-ended question about the functions of romance reading. At this point, it seems worth quoting a few of those fourteen replies that expressly volunteered the ideas of escape and release. The Smithton readers explained the power of the romance in the following way:

They are light reading—escape literature—I can put down and pick up effortlessly.

Everyone is always under so much pressure. They like books that let them escape.

Escapism.

I guess I feel there is enough “reality” in the world and reading is a means of escape for me.

Because it is an Escape [sic], and we can dream and pretend that it is our life.

I’m able to escape the harsh world for a few hours a day.

They always seem an escape and they usually turn out the way you wish life really was.

The response of the Smithton women is apparently not an unusual one. Indeed, the advertising campaigns of three of the houses that have conducted extensive market-research studies all emphasize the themes of relaxation and escape. Potential readers of Coventry Romances, for example, have been told in coupon ads that “month after month Coventry Romances offer you a beautiful new escape route into historical times when love and honor ruled the heart and mind.”² Similarly, the Silhouette television advertisements featuring Ricardo Montalban asserted that “the beautiful ending makes you feel so good” and that romances “soothe away the tensions of the day.” Montalban also touted the value of “escaping” into faraway places and exotic locales. Harlequin once mounted a travel sweepstakes campaign offering as prizes “escape vacations” to romantic places. In addition, they included within the books themselves an advertising page that described Harlequins as “the books that let you escape into the wonderful world of romance! Trips to exotic places . . . interesting places . . . meeting memorable people . . . the excitement of love. . . . These are integral parts of Harlequin Romances—the heartwarming novels read by women everywhere.”³ Fawcett, too, seems to have discovered the escape function of romance fiction, for Daisy Maryles has reported that the company found in in-depth interviewing that “romances were read for relaxation and to enable [women] to better cope with the routine aspects of life.”⁴

Reading to escape the present is neither a new behavior nor one peculiar to women who read romances. In fact, as Richard Hoggart demonstrated in 1957, English working-class people have long “regarded art as escape, as something enjoyed but not assumed to have much connection with the matter of daily life.”⁵ Within this sort of aesthetic, he continues, art is conceived as “marginal, as ‘fun,’ ” as something “for you to use.” In further elaborating on this notion of fictional escape, D. W. Harding has made the related observation that the word is most often used in criticism as a term of disparagement to refer to an activity that the evaluator believes has no merit in and of itself. “If its intrinsic appeal is high,” he remarks, “in relation to its compensatory appeal or the mere relief it promises, then the term escape is not generally used.”⁶ Harding argues, moreover, on the basis of studies conducted in the 1930s, that “the compensatory appeal predominates mainly in states of depression or irritation, whether they arise from work or other causes.”⁷ It is interesting to note that the explanations employed by Dot and her women to interpret their romance reading for themselves are thus representative in a general way of a form of behavior common in an industrialized society where work is clearly distinguished from and more highly valued than leisure despite the fact that individual labor is often routinized, regimented, and minimally challenging.⁸ It is equally essential to add, however, that although the women will use the word “escape” to explain their reading behavior, if given another comparable choice that does not carry the connotations of disparagement, they will choose the more favorable sounding explanation. To understand why, it will be helpful to follow Dot’s comments more closely.

In returning to her definition of the appeal of romance fiction—a definition that is a highly condensed version of a commonly experienced process of explanation, doubt, and defensive justification—it becomes clear that romance novels perform this compensatory function for women because they use them to diversify the pace and character of their habitual existence. Dot makes it clear, however, that the women are also troubled about the propriety of indulging in such an obviously pleasurable activity. Their doubts are often cultivated into a full-grown feeling of guilt by husbands and children who object to this activity because it draws the women’s attention away from the immediate family circle. As Dot later noted, although some women can explain to their families that a desire for a new toy or gadget is no different from a desire to read a new romantic novel, a far greater number of them have found it necessary to hide the evidence of their self-indulgence. In an effort to combat both the resentment of others and their own feelings of shame about their “hedonist” behavior, the women have worked out a complex rationalization for romance reading that not only asserts their equal right to pleasure but also legitimates the books by linking them with values more widely approved within American culture. Before turning to the pattern, however, I want to elaborate on the concept of escape itself and the reasons for its ability to produce such resentment and guilt in the first place.

Both the escape response and the relaxation response on the second questionnaire immediately raise other questions. Relaxation implies a reduction in the state of tension produced by prior conditions, whereas escape obviously suggests flight from one state of being to another more desirable one.⁹ To understand the sense of the romance experience, then, as it is enjoyed by those who consider it a welcome change in their day-to-day existence, it becomes necessary to situate it within a larger temporal context and to specify precisely how the act of reading manages to create that feeling of change and differentiation so highly valued by these readers.

In attending to the women’s comments about the worth of romance reading, I was particularly struck by the fact that they tended to use the word escape in two distinct ways. On the one hand, they used the term literally to describe the act of denying the present, which they believe they accomplish each time they begin to read a book and are drawn into its story. On the other hand, they used the word in a more figurative fashion to give substance to the somewhat vague but nonetheless intense sense of relief they experience by identifying with a heroine whose life does not resemble their own in certain crucial aspects. I think it important to reproduce this subtle distinction as accurately as possible because it indicates that romance reading releases women from their present pressing concerns in two different but related ways.

Dot, for example, went on to elaborate more fully in the conversation quoted above about why so many husbands seem to feel threatened by their wives’ reading activities. After declaring with delight that when she reads her body is in the room but she herself is not, she said, “I think this is the case with the other women.” She continued, “I think men cannot do that unless they themselves are readers. I don’t think men are ever a part of anything even if it’s television.” “They are never really out of their body either,” she added. “I don’t care if it’s a football game; I think they are always consciously aware of where they are.” Her triumphant conclusion, “but I think a woman in a book isn’t,” indicates that Dot is aware that reading not only demands a high level of attention but also draws the individual into the book because it requires her participation. Although she is not sure what it is about the book that prompts this absorption, she is quite sure that television viewing and film watching are different. In adding immediately that “for some reason, a lot of men feel threatened by this, very, very much threatened,” Dot suggested that the men’s resentment has little to do with the kinds of books their wives are reading and more to do with the simple fact of the activity itself and its capacity to absorb the participants’ entire attention.

These tentative observations were later corroborated in the conversations I had with other readers. Ellen, for instance, a former airline stewardess, now married and taking care of her home, indicated that she also reads for “entertainment and escape.” However, she added, her husband sometimes objects to her reading because he wants her to watch the same television show he has selected. She “hates” this, she said, because she does not like the kinds of programs on television today. She is delighted when he gets a business call in the evening because her husband’s preoccupation with his caller permits her to go back to her book.

Penny, another housewife in her middle thirties, also indicated that her husband “resents it” if she reads too much. “He feels shut out,” she explained, “but there is nothing on TV I enjoy.” Like Ellen’s husband, Penny’s spouse also wants her to watch television with him. Susan, a woman in her fifties, also “read[s] to escape” and related with almost no bitterness that her husband will not permit her to continue reading when he is ready to go to sleep. She seems to regret rather than resent this only because it limits the amount of time she can spend in an activity she finds enjoyable. Indeed, she went on in our conversation to explain that she occasionally gives herself “a very special treat” when she is “tired of housework.” “I take the whole day off,” she said, “to read.”

This theme of romance reading as a special gift a woman gives herself dominated most of the interviews. The Smithton women stressed the privacy of the act and the fact that it enables them to focus their attention on a single object that can provide pleasure for themselves alone. Interestingly enough, Robert Escarpit has noted in related fashion that reading is at once “social and asocial” because “it temporarily suppresses the individual’s relations with his [sic] universe to construct new ones with the universe of the work.”¹⁰ Unlike television viewing, which is a very social activity undertaken in the presence of others and which permits simultaneous conversation and personal interaction, silent reading requires the reader to block out the surrounding world and to give consideration to other people and to another time. It might be said, then, that the characters and events of romance fiction populate the woman’s consciousness even as she withdraws from the familiar social scene of her daily ministrations.

I use the word ministrations deliberately here because the Smithton women explained to me that they are not trying to escape their husbands and children “per se” when they read. Rather, what reading takes them away from, they believe, is the psychologically demanding and emotionally draining task of attending to the physical and affective needs of their families, a task that is solely and peculiarly theirs. In other words, these women, who have been educated to believe that females are especially and naturally attuned to the emotional requirements of others and who are very proud of their abilities to communicate with and to serve the members of their families, value reading precisely because it is an intensely private act. Not only is the activity private, however, but it also enables them to suspend temporarily those familial relationships and to throw up a screen between themselves and the arena where they are required to do most of their relating to others.

It was Dot who first advised me about this phenomenon. Her lengthy commentary, transcribed below, enabled me to listen carefully to the other readers’ discussions of escape and to hear the distinction nearly all of them made between escape from their families, which they believe they do not do, and escape from the heavy responsibilities and duties of the roles of wife and mother, which they admit they do out of emotional need and necessity. Dot explained their activity, for instance, by paraphrasing the thought process she believes goes on in her customers’ minds. “Hey,” they say, “this is what I want to do and I’m gonna do it. This is for me. I’m doin’ for you all the time. Now leave me, just leave me alone. Let me have my time, my space. Let me do what I want to do. This isn’t hurting you. I’m not poaching on you in any way.” She then went onto elaborate about her own duties as a mother and wife:

As a mother, I have run ’em to the orthodontist. I have run ‘em to the swimming pool. I have run ’em to baton twirling lessons. I have run up to school because they forgot their lunch. You know, I mean, really! And you do it. And it isn’t that you begrudge it. That isn’t it. Then my husband would walk in the door and he’d say, “Well, what did you do today?” You know, it was like, “Well, tell me how you spent the last eight hours, because I’ve been out working.” And I finally got to the point where I would say, “Well, I read four books, and I did all the wash and got the meal on the table and the beds are all made, and the house is tidy.” And I would get defensive like, “So what do you call all this? Why should I have to tell you because I certainly don’t ask you what you did for eight hours, step by step.”—But their husbands do do that. We’ve compared notes. They hit the house and it’s like “Well all right, I’ve been out earning a living. Now what have you been doin’ with your time?” And you begin to be feeling, “Now really, why is he questioning me?”

Romance reading, it would seem, at least for Dot and many of her customers, is a strategy with a double purpose. As an activity, it so engages their attention that it enables them to deny their physical presence in an environment associated with responsibilities that are acutely felt and occasionally experienced as too onerous to bear. Reading, in this sense, connotes a free space where they feel liberated from the need to perform duties that they otherwise willingly accept as their own. At the same time, by carefully choosing stories that make them feel particularly happy, they escape figuratively into a fairy tale where a heroine’s similar needs are adequately met. As a result, they vicariously attend to their own requirements as independent individuals who require emotional sustenance and solicitude.

Angie’s account of her favorite reading time graphically represents the significance of romance reading as a tool to help insure a woman’s sense of emotional well-being. “I like it,” she says, “when my husband—he’s an insurance salesman—goes out in the evening on house calls. Because then I have two hours just to totally relax.” She continued, “I love to settle in a hot bath with a good book. That’s really great.” We might conclude, then, that reading a romance is a regressive experience for these women in the sense that for the duration of the time devoted to it they feel gratified and content. This feeling of pleasure seems to derive from their identification with a heroine whom they believe is deeply appreciated and tenderly cared for by another. Somewhat paradoxically, however, they also seem to value the sense of self-sufficiency they experience as a consequence of the knowledge that they are capable of making themselves feel good.

Nancy Chodorow’s observations about the social structure of the American family in the twentieth century help to illuminate the context that creates both the feminine need for emotional support and validation and the varied strategies that have evolved to meet it. As Chodorow points out, most recent studies of the family agree that women traditionally reproduce people, as she says, “physically in their housework and child care, psychologically in their emotional support of husbands and their maternal relation to sons and daughters.”¹¹ This state of affairs occurs, these studies maintain, because women alone are held responsible for home maintenance and early child care. Ann Oakley’s 1971 study of forty London housewives, for instance, led her to the following conclusion: “In the housekeeping role the servicing function is far more central than the productive or creative one. In the roles of wife and mother, also, the image of women as services of men’s and children’s needs is prominent: women ‘service’ the labor force by catering to the physical needs of men (workers) and by raising children (the next generation of workers) so that the men are free from child-socialization and free to work outside the home.”¹² This social fact, documented also by Mirra Komarovsky, Helena Lopata, and others, is reinforced ideologically by the widespread belief that females are naturally nurturant and generous, more selfless than men, and, therefore, cheerfully self-abnegating. A good wife and mother, it is assumed, will have no difficulty meeting the challenge of providing all of the labor necessary to maintain a family’s physical existence including the cleaning of its quarters, the acquisition and preparation of its food, and the purchase, repair, and upkeep of its clothes, even while she masterfully discerns and supplies individual members’ psychological needs.¹³ A woman’s interests, this version of “the female mystique” maintains, are exactly congruent with those of her husband and children. In serving them, she also serves herself.¹⁴

As Chodorow notes, not only are the women expected to perform this extraordinarily demanding task, but they are also supposed to be capable of executing it without being formally “reproduced” and supported themselves. “What is . . . often hidden, in generalizations about the family as an emotional refuge,” she cautions, “is that in the family as it is currently constituted no one supports and reconstitutes women affectively and emotionally—either women working in the home or women working in the paid labor force.”¹⁵ Although she admits, of course, that the accident of individual marriage occasionally provides a woman with an unusually nurturant and “domestic” husband, her principal argument is that as a social institution the contemporary family contains no role whose principal task is the reproduction and emotional support of the wife and mother. “There is a fundamental asymmetry in daily reproduction,” Chodorow concludes, “men are socially and psychologically reproduced by women, but women are reproduced (or not) largely by themselves.”¹⁶

That this lack of emotional nurturance combined with the high costs of lavishing constant attention on others is the primary motivation behind the desire to lose the self in a book was made especially clear to me in a group conversation that occurred late in my stay in Smithton. The discussion involved Dot, one of her customers, Ann, who is married and in her thirties, and Dot’s unmarried, twenty-three-year-old daughter, Kit. In response to my question, “Can you tell me what you escape from?”, Dot and Ann together explained that reading keeps them from being overwhelmed by expectations and limitations. It seems advisable to include their entire conversation here, for it specifies rather precisely the source of those felt demands:

This conversation revealed that these women believe romance reading enables them to relieve tensions, to diffuse resentment, and to indulge in a fantasy that provides them with good feelings that seem to endure after they return to their roles as wives and mothers. Romance fiction, as they experience it, is, therefore, compensatory literature. It supplies them with an important emotional release that is proscribed in daily life because the social role with which they identify themselves leaves little room for guiltless, self-interested pursuit of individual pleasure. Indeed, the search for emotional gratification was the one theme common to all of the women’s observations about the function of romance reading. Maureen, for instance, a young mother of two intellectually gifted children, volunteered, “I especially like to read when I’m depressed.” When asked what usually caused her depression, she commented that it could be all kinds of things. Later she added that romances were comforting after her children had been especially demanding and she felt she needed time to herself.

In further discussing the lack of institutionalized emotional support suffered by contemporary American women, Chodorow has observed that in many preindustrial societies women formed their own social networks through which they supported and reconstituted one another.¹⁸ Many of these networks found secondary institutional support in the local church while others simply operated as informal neighborhood societies. In either case, the networks provided individual women with the opportunity to abandon temporarily their stance as the family’s self-sufficient emotional provider. They could then adopt a more passive role through which they received the attention, sympathy, and encouragement of other women. With the increasing suburbanization of women, however, and the concomitant secularization of the culture at large, these communities became exceedingly difficult to maintain. The principal effect was the even more resolute isolation of women within their domestic environment. Indeed, both Oakley in Great Britain and Lopata in the United States have discovered that one of the features housewives dislike most about their role is its isolation and resulting loneliness.¹⁹

I introduce Chodorow’s observations here in order to suggest that through romance reading the Smithton women are providing themselves with another kind of female community capable of rendering the so desperately needed affective support. This community seems not to operate on an immediate local level although there are signs, both in Smithton and nationally, that romance readers are learning the pleasures of regular discussions of books with other women.²⁰ Nonetheless, during the early group discussions with Dot and her readers I was surprised to discover that very few of her customers knew each other. In fact, most of them had never been formally introduced although they recognized one another as customers of Dot. I soon learned that the women rarely, if ever, discussed romances with more than one or two individuals. Although many commented that they talked about the books with a sister, neighbor, or with their mothers, very few did so on a regular or extended basis. Indeed, the most striking feature of the interview sessions was the delight with which they discovered common experiences, preferences, and distastes. As one woman exclaimed in the middle of a discussion, “We were never stimulated before into thinking why we like [the novels]. Your asking makes us think why we do this. I had no idea other people had the same ideas I do.”

The romance community, then, is not an actual group functioning at the local level. Rather, it is a huge, ill-defined network composed of readers on the one hand and authors on the other. Although it performs some of the same functions carried out by older neighborhood groups, this female community is mediated by the distances of modern mass publishing. Despite the distance, the Smithton women feel personally connected to their favorite authors because they are convinced that these writers know how to make them happy. Many volunteered information about favorite authors even before they would discuss specific books or heroines. All expressed admiration for their favorite writers and indicated that they were especially curious about their private lives. Three-fourths of the group of sixteen had made special trips to autographing sessions to see and express their gratitude to the women who had given them so much pleasure. The authors reciprocate this feeling of gratitude and seem genuinely interested in pleasing their readers. Many are themselves romance readers and, as a consequence, they, too, often have definite opinions about the particular writers who know how to make the reading experience truly enjoyable.²¹

It seems highly probable that in repetitively reading and writing romances, these women are participating in a collectively elaborated female fantasy that unfailingly ends at the precise moment when the heroine is gathered into the arms of the hero who declares his intention to protect her forever because of his desperate love and need for her. These women are telling themselves a story whose central vision is one of total surrender where all danger has been expunged, thus permitting the heroine to relinquish self-control. Passivity is at the heart of the romance experience in the sense that the final goal of each narrative is the creation of that perfect union where the ideal male, who is masculine and strong yet nurturant too, finally recognizes the intrinsic worth of the heroine. Thereafter, she is required to do nothing more than exist as the center of this paragon’s attention. Romantic escape is, therefore, a temporary but literal denial of the demands women recognize as an integral part of their roles as nurturing wives and mothers. It is also a figurative journey to a utopian state of total receptiveness where the reader, as a result of her identification with the heroine, feels herself the object of someone else’s attention and solicitude. Ultimately, the romance permits its reader the experience of feeling cared for and the sense of having been reconstituted affectively, even if both are lived only vicariously.

Dot’s readers openly admit that parts of the romantic universe little resemble the world as they know it. When asked by the questionnaire how closely the fictional characters resemble the people they meet in real life, twenty-two answered “they are not at all similar,” eighteen checked “they are somewhat similar,” and two asserted that “they are very similar.” None of Dot’s customers believed that romantic characters are “almost identical” to those they meet daily.²² In a related set of responses, twenty-three revealed that they consider the events in romances to be “not at all similar” to those occurring in real life. An additional eighteen said that the two sets of events are “somewhat similar,” while only one checked “very similar.”

It is interesting to note, however, that when the questionnaire asked them to compare the heroine’s reactions and feelings with their own, only thirteen saw no resemblance whatsoever, while twenty-two believed that the heroine’s feelings “are somewhat like mine.” Five women did not answer the question. The general shift from perceptions of no similarity to detection of some resemblance suggests that Dot’s readers believe that the heroine is more realistically portrayed than other characters. At the very least, they recognize something of themselves in her feelings and responses. Thus while the lack of similarity between events in the fantasy realm and those in the real world seems to guarantee a reading experience that is “escapist,” emotional identification with the central character also insures that the experience will be an affectively significant one for the reader.

These conclusions are supported by comments about the nature of escape reading culled from the interviews. Jill, a very young mother of two, who had also begun to write her own romance, commented, for example, that “we read books so we won’t cry.” When asked to elaborate, she responded only that romances portray the world as “I would like it to be, not as it really is.” In discussing why she preferred histor-icals to contemporary romances, Susan explained that “the characters shouldn’t be like now because then you couldn’t read to escape.” “I don’t want to read about people who have all the problems of today’s world,” she added. Her sentiments were echoed by Joy who mentioned in her discussion of “bad romances” that while “perfection’s not the main thing,” she still hates to see an author “dwelling on handicaps or disfigurements.” “I find that distasteful and depressing,” she explained. This sort of desire to encounter only idealized images is carried over even into meetings with romance authors. Several told of their disappointment at meeting a favorite writer at an autograph session who was neither pretty nor attractively dressed. All agreed, however, that Kathleen Woodiwiss is the ideal romance author because she is pretty, petite, feminine, and always elegantly turned out.

When I pursued this unwillingness to read about ugliness, despair, or serious human problems with Dot, she indignantly responded, “Why should we read depressing stuff when we have so much responsibility?” Ann made a similar remark, mentioning that she particularly dislikes books that attribute the hero’s “nastiness” toward the heroine to a bad love affair that soured him on other women. When I asked her for her reasons, she said, “because we’ve been through it, we’ve been ditched, and it didn’t sour us!” This comment led immediately to the further observation, “Optimistic! That’s what I like in a book. An optimistic plot. I get sick of pessimism all the time.”

Her distinction between optimistic and pessimistic stories recurred during several of the interviews, especially during discussions of the difference between romances and other books. At least four of the women mentioned Colleen McCullough’s best-selling novel, The Thorn Birds, as a good example of a tale that technically qualified as a romance but that all dislike because it was too “depressing.” When urged to specify what made the story pessimistic, none cited specific events in the plot or the death of the hero. Rather, they referred to the general tenor of the story and to the fact that the characters were poor. “Too much suffering,” one reader concluded. In similarly discussing a writer whose books she never enjoys, Dot also mentioned the problem of the depressing romance and elaborated on her usual response to such a story. She described her typical argument with herself as follows:

“Well, Dorothy, you were absolutely, physically exhausted, mentally exhausted because everything was down—it was depressing.” And I’d get through it and it was excellently written but everyone worked in the coal mines. They were poor as church mice. They couldn’t make ends meet. Somebody was raped, an illegitimate kid. By the time I got through, I said, “What am I reading this for? This is dumb.” So I quit.

In a related discussion, Dot’s daughter, Kit, observed that an unhappy ending is the most depressing thing that can happen in a romance. She believes, in fact, as does nearly everyone else, that an unhappy ending excludes a novel that is otherwise a romantic love story from the romance category. Kit is only one of the many who insist on reading the endings of the stories before they buy them to insure that they will not be saddened by emotionally investing in the tale of a heroine only to discover that events do not resolve themselves as they should. Although this latter kind of intolerance for ambiguity and unhappiness is particularly extreme, it is indicative of a tendency among Dot’s customers to avoid any kind of reading matter that does not conform to their rigid requirements for “optimism” and escapist stories. Romances are valuable to them in proportion to their lack of resemblance to the real world. They choose their romances carefully in an attempt to assure themselves of a reading experience that will make them feel happy and hold out the promise of utopian bliss, a state they willingly acknowledge to be rare in the real world but one, nevertheless, that they do not want to relinquish as a conceptual possibility.

10 Escarpit, ibid., p. 88. Although Dot’s observations are not couched in academic language, they are really no different from Escarpit’s similar observation that “reading is the supreme solitary occupation.” He continues that “the man [sic] who reads does not speak, does not act, cuts himself away from society, isolates himself from the world which surrounds him . . . reading allows the senses no margin of liberty. It absorbs the entire conscious mind, making the reader powerless to act” (p. 88). For a detailed discussion of the different demands made upon an individual by reading and radio listening, see Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to the Study of Radio and Its Role in the Communication of Ideas. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940, pp. 170-79.

12 Oakley, Ann. The Sociology of Housework. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974, p. 179. See also Oakley, Ann, Woman’s Work: The Housewife, Past and Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1976, pp. 60—155; McDonough, Roisin, and Rachael Harrison, “Patriarchy and Relations of Production,” In Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, edited by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 11-41; Kuhn, Annette, “Structures of Patriarchy and Capitalism in the Family.” In Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, edited by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 42—67; Sacks, Karen, “Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property.” In Women, Culture and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974, pp. 207—22; and Lopata, Helena Znaniecki, Occupation: Housewife. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, passim.

13 In addition to Lopata, see Komarovsky, Mirra. Blue-Collar Marriage. 1962. Reprint. New York: Random House, 1964; Myrdal, Alva and Viola Klein. Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work. 2d ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968; Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963; Mitchell, Juliet. Woman’s Estate. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971; and Steinmann, Ann, “A Study of the Concept of the Feminine Role of 51 Middle-Class American Families.” Genetic Psychology Monographs 67 (1963): 275—352.

18 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 36. For studies of contemporary working-class versions of these networks, see Stack, Carol, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row, 1974; Young, Michael and Peter Willmott. Family and Kinship in East London. London: Penguin Books, 1966; and Lamphere, Louise, “Strategies, Cooperation, and Conflict among Women in Domestic Groups.” In Women, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 97—112. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974.

ENDNOTES