Summary of “Women Read the Romance” by Janice Radway

            Radway’s purpose in this article, published in 1983, was to demonstrate how patriarchal institutions, the systems of society controlled by male-dominated gender themes, were dysfunctional and thereby, causing dissatisfaction for women.  While the focal point of the article was a study of how and why women escape their disappointments through romance novels, the existence of novels was not to blame.  Radway did not intend to criticize women’s interest in romantic fiction nor chastise their collective dissatisfaction with performing unappreciated, mundane tasks.  Instead the author was condemning societal dogma, which held that women be ultimately satisfied with the role of wife and mother as the pinnacle of their competence.  Janice Raday adeptly crafted her ‘call to arms’ for social awareness around the central question: What urge drives women to escape into romance novels?  She skillfully illustrated the need for social change using the reading preferences of Smithton women and the central character, Dot Evans, a protagonist who understood women’s romantic fiction preferences.

            Dot Evans was almost 50 years old when the 1980s interviews were conducted by author Janice Radway.  Thereby, Dot was born and raised during the Great Depression in the 1930s and 40s, and would likely have been married after WWII, when the model of a women’s success was to be supported by her husband, run a household, and raise children in a safe neighborhood.  Husbands at that time, who were also raised during the Depression and served as soldiers during WWII, would have been thought themselves successful if they could be ‘providers’ of the family’s basic needs for sustenance and security.  The men and women of Dot’s era did not strive for Maslow’s esteem or the pinnacle of self-actualization; their focus was on fulfilling basic physiological needs and safety – bottom rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Thus, as America changed in the post war years, while Dot was raising her family, the needs of its citizens changed yet the social institutions had not kept pace.  Radway was underscoring this in “Women Read the Romance.”

            We know from the article that Dot was extremely bright and articulate.  So, Dot would say that the women of her generation gladly assumed a role in society with which they were satisfied initially, but once their fundamental needs for safety and security were met, they soon discovered their role did not nourish their growing needs for a healthy self-identity – concepts which arose after WWII and evolved as the country entered the social revolution of the 1960s. 

            From the article, it was clear that Dot and her peers were unprepared for the arduous, and oftentimes unrewarding, work of the caregiver.  They temporarily escaped feelings of overwhelm and inadequacy through romance novels, which allowed them to embrace fictional women, and vicariously project for themselves, as entities to be nurtured.  Unlike their husbands, who had not been raised as (nor did they evolve into) nurturers, romantic heroes were able to express emotional closeness and connectivity.  Romantic heroines sought a pathway to identify the root cause for their husband’s indifference. As such, Radway explained that Dot’s peers best identified with a romantic heroine whose husband was disconnected at-first, oftentimes cruel or aloof, but who transformed into someone tender and passionate after having his wife free him from a previous hurt, which had been hindering his full range of emotional engagement in the relationship.  Dot’s peers identified with this circumstance because it answered women’s need to awaken their husbands’ consciousness, gain their emotional connectivity, and engage them in helping to realize their wives’ fullest potential (self-actualization). 

            On the surface, Radway’s article appears to be a dissection of Smithton women’s preferences in romantic novels, their reasons and rationale for escaping their everyday toil and frustrations into a fantasy world of astonishingly masculine, yet fundamentally compassionate heroes.  However, caught in marriages of convenience, and stifled by expectations that do not allow them to realize their potential, Smithton women are a vehicle for the author to reflect on the male hegemony that limited women’s aspiration to childrearing and wifely duties.  Radway’s article used a discussion of women’s need to fantasize through romantic fiction as a way to rally for the need to raise collective awareness that change in social institutions was needed.