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showed strong effective women." He assumes a 5,OOO-year-old conflict be–
tween men and women that takes particular forms in diverse societies. But
his work is too atheoretical, missing an animating vision, and by its conclusion
one is caught muttering, as political scientist Jane Jaquette has pointed out, "A
woman's work is never done."
By contrast, the texts by Thurston, Banta, Scott, and Loraux, and
those edited by Haus and Higgonet and associates, offer solid food for
thought, many pleasures to the reader, a plethora of challenges to received
wisdom, and as they do so display feminist scholarship at its most engaged
yet thoughtful best. Their subjects range from the popular romance novel to
classic Greek tragedy; from the construction of bodily imagery to war as a
"gendering activity"; from Foucaultian insights to culture-constituting imagery.
Feminism serves, for these scholars, as inspiration, as challenge, as focus, as
organizing theme. The political commitments of the writers involved, insofar
as these are made explicit, range from Marxist to vaguely liberal. I note this
to allay any suspicion that one particular brand of feminism is more suscepti–
ble than some other to the dogmatics of the circle dance. This is not
necessarily so. Liberals as well as radicals and socialists of many stripes can
and have formed the circle and narrowed the boundaries of discourse by
eliminating, or seeking to eliminate, undesirable elements.
To happy specifics, then. Thurston writes in a generous, populist spirit.
She notes the extraordinary number of adult women reading romances
(more than twenty million by her estimate), not so that she can then throw
up her hands
in
horror and condemn their mindlessness but in order to take
seriously the literary genre that engages them. And what she finds is fasci–
nating. The new paperback romance novel came to full bloom during the
same years that saw the rise of feminist politics and writing. While those who
have bought into the notion that the "masses" are "overwhelmingly passive,
manipulated, and dominated from above" see in the romances a reaction to
feminism, Thurston finds feminist themes running through many of the texts.
The heroine is an individual in her own right. She "possesses a passionate
drive for self-determination and autonomy." The romance narrative is one of
"reciprocal sexual satisfaction." Male heroes shed tears. In three-fourths of
the texts in which a rape occurs, the point that it was not the woman's fault is
made explicitly by the male hero. And so on.
Rather than being the"opiate of the female masses," these tales that
reach millions are reflective of an upsurge in female assertiveness, especially
of the erotic sort. The romances, Thurston claims, "constitute the first large
and autonomous body of sexual writing by women addressed to feminine
experiences," and she worries that feminist antipornographers would drum
this literature out of business
if
they succeed in their efforts. This may, in fact,
be an explicit intent of one segment of the antipornography ranks, since the
sexuality elaborated in the romances is normatively heterosexual - or so
