Summary of Chapter 7: "Women Read the Romance"

       Radway’s chapter focuses on one group of women brought together by Dot Evans, a bookstore employee, and their love of romance novels. The women go to Dot for advice on which romance novels to read and Radway focuses on why they enjoy romance novels and how they use the books as an escape. Radway's study on these women was from about sixty hours of interviews in 1981. Most of them were married and enjoyed the escape that romance novels gave to them from the day-to-day craziness from their lives and neglectful men. I found this to be very interesting that Radway decided to look into this and see the motivations behind their love of romance novels and how they only liked certain books.

      Romance novels, at least the ones back in the 80s, tended to follow a formula of how a woman would fall in love with a man that she once was at odds with. There were some of these books that dealt with leading men that at least temporarily abused or hurt the women that they fell in love with. These books gave the romance genre a bad name, but Dot and her readers refused to read any of the books in which the women were abused or brutally hurt by a man that she ends up falling for. Dot was able to find which books to avoid so the women could relate more to the stories and give them a break from their own lives. I think it is great that these women worked together to find which stories depicted women in a way they could relate to, because if the men in the story were too mean, it would be difficult to believe that the characters could actually fall in love.

    Many of the women used these novels as an escape from the dissatisfaction with their own lives, but the characteristic of the men in the novels are almost unattainable in our society. I was surprised about how Radway described that women want men to be nurturing and loving, but the patriarchal family structure encourages men to be aggressive, competitive, and unemotional. I feel like this is not as true now as it once was, but I believe that it still happens. The women look to these books to fill in the gaps in their own lives, which helps to make them happier, but it also gives them a false view of the world. I would be interested in seeing this study conducted now to see how things have changed. I think that the formula for the romance novels is probably still very similar, but I am curious to see if the reasons for reading them may change.