Sexual division of labor in modern romance

I didn’t expect to be writing about that this week, but the reminder of romance clichés in the Modern Princesses’ blog about Beyond Heaving Bosoms, combined with the two first short stories of the contest on LesRomantiques.com, brought about this interrogation. Indeed, modern romance is full of dukes, earls or uncommonly wealthy commoners, of sheiks and billionaires and successful businessmen. That’s for heroes. Heroines, on the other hand, are much more ordinary people: employees, subordinates, freelancers. Thank God we see more and more businesswomen, as well as heiresses in historicals, but that cannot hide the general pattern that tends to place men in positions at least as powerful as women.

In Remember When, by Judith McNaught, the main female character is “an executive with a large and growing corporation”. An inspiring role model, huh? But of course her male counterpart then had to be “the aggressive, enigmatic entrepreneur who had made history by putting together a very large, very profitable conglomerate before he was thirty years old.” It wouldn’t do to have the man appear socially inferior to the woman. Although the author gives a surprisingly standpoint feminist reason for that:

“I thought women were more interested these days in discovering how high they can climb on the corporate ladder.”
“We are, but unlike men, we’re learning early that we can’t define ourselves by our success or lack of it at work. We want more from life than that, and we have more to give than that.”

- Remember When, Judith McNaught (Pocket Books, 1996)

It sounds almost like an argument by Lynne Farrow, which I had hated back when I’d first read it:

Observing and evaluating life routines must be the occupation of the comparatively idle, those with less responsibilities, i.e., men. Similarly, an old joke points at the delusionary importance men invest their work with: the head of the family reports to his friends, “I make the big decisions in the family like whether Red China should be admitted to the UN and my wife makes the small ones like if we need a new car and what school the kids should go to.”

- “Feminism as anarchism”, Lynne Farrow (Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader)

There is, however, a very real tension for women between the refusal of their traditional roles on the basis of equality, and their natural distrust of men’s world: a world which has been built in exclusion of women, and is thus by definition hostile to us. I think Top Girls showed this paradox very clearly: how the feeling of power which derives from being “as good as men” combines with the feeling of defeat at becoming as bad as them. At some point Joyce sarcastically tells her sister something along the lines of: Would you have supported Hitler if he had been a woman, Hitlerina? Men’s world is based on exclusion and domination; can we realistically end the exclusion of women and their domination by men without transforming the world in the same move?

Feminism doesn’t mean female corporate power or a woman President; it means no corporate power and no Presidents.

- “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection”, Peggy Kornegger (The Second Wave, 1975)

When I started seriously reading romance, I had the vague and spontaneous intuition that the general social and professional inferiority heroines were kept in was feeding sexism and misogyny. Though no explicit message usually goes with it, the pattern seems to encourage women to put aside their personal ambition, and instead satisfy their aspiration for a good life through finding a husband with a well-paid job and an enviable status. I longed to see more heroines do well by themselves, heroines for whom marrying the man would improve nothing in terms of wealth, standing or power.

But then I had second thoughts. What if the poor-girl-marries-the-prince plots were a women’s invention, the only way for them to be loved for who they are, and nothing else? If you look at fairy tales in their original versions, the heroines who get to marry the prince are always princesses themselves, or at least noblewomen, whatever temporary state of destitution events have forced them into. I am sorry to say that stories featuring a richer, better-off and more beautiful woman are overwhelmingly fantasized and written by men, and why doubt it? Men always think they deserve the best, never mind all the poor, plain and awkward girls out there.

I was quite struck by Liz’s Open Letter to “Nice Guys” of the World, not least because I feel I have personally experienced that sort of veiled, twisted misogyny. Women are insensitive and shallow for not going for the “nice”, shy, unpopular guys, while it’s only fair for men to hit on us because we have nice hair, legs or butt. Or because we have money, connections and success. Where I’m getting at is, although I’ll welcome a greater diversity and equality in the main protagonists’ professions (female nannies and secretaries don’t turn me on, neither do corporate guys)―a process which might actually already be underway―I think it’s modern romance’s job to make sure that women in literature continue to get disinterested loving from men who are worth the big trouble of matrimony.

Do you find modern romance belittling to women in its gendered choice of careers? Have you read romance novels which turned the power relation upside down in a successful manner? (Off the top of my head: The Merchant’s Gift, by Julia London; The Charmer, by Madeline Hunter, The Girl with the Golden Gun, by Ann Major; First Lady, by SEP; Black Rose, by Nora Roberts…)

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