A Woman's Place is In Love: The Romance Genre's Interpretations of Women's Cultural Roles PART 2
© Suzette L. Mako
(Continuation . . .)
From the most ancient of agrarian cultures, through the beginnings of recorded history, through Babylon, Sumeria and Egypt, this male-driven form of society remained. The Classical age of Greece passed, those too of Rome and Byzantium, and still women were second-class citizens — if they were considered citizens in their own right at all. The loving, positive message of Christianity, with its aspirations of deliverance from bonds and equality in the sight of God, was reinterpreted by power-seekers who were primarily male, to again relegate women to mere pious handmaidens. The Dark Ages came, and women who dared independence in the forms of midwifery or herbal healing were branded as witches, persecuted, burned. The only women who managed to maintain any sense of independence were those who rose to power through the convents: nun and abbesses who ruled great wealth and wielded great power. But a nun's life is hardly the stuff of Romance. The Renaissance burst upon the world with its enlightenments, but these were, again, largely for men, while women languished at tapestry-weaving or bore child after child unto death.
Certainly there were women of distinction in all of these epochs: Nefertiti, Cleopatra and Aspasia, Theodora, the legendary but possibly mythical Guinevere, Joan of Arc, Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine deMedici, Grace O'Malley and Elizabeth Tudor. These women, and others like them, are the grains of truth in the hearts of Romance heroines. But they were few and far between. And so on through Ages of Science, of Exploration, of male-focused Reason, through revolutions both national and industrial, until the Modern age, when . . .
Well, when women found — or rather, fought for — some greater measure of freedom and independence than they had ever had before. Women now have lives beyond the begetting and raising of children, though mothering is still a revered role in women's lives by choice. Women hold jobs with great power and prestige, earn sums far in excess of the dreams of their sisters in ages gone by. Women are in offices of state, seats of learning, on the frontiers of science.
Nonetheless, its is still firmly a Man's World. Those prestigious jobs were attained after beating upon a glass ceiling and those wages, however staggering, are themselves staggered by the wages of men doing the same jobs for higher pay. Politics are a bastion of Old Boy's Clubs. Women who have devoted themselves to intellectual pursuits, logic and analysis are seen as having been de-feminized. There are many male astronauts for every spacefaring Sally Ride.
