Romance novels show how history bends toward justice
My preferred way to wind down is to read a Romance novel, especially a Historical Romance with a political conflict. The world is on fire and we are stuck in our homes as a critical election draws near, but a really good Romance novel can take me on a journey with fascinating characters and a fast-moving plot that, of course, includes a love angle and a happy ending. The stories with a political conflict go beyond pleasure-reading for me. Though they give me a chance to run away from the world’s problems, they help me cope with them too.
I love escaping into the “poofy dress” Historicals because I can pretend the iPhone hasn’t been invented yet and indulge in that younger version of myself, the one who raided my mom’s closet and played dress up. Like other Romance novels, these stories show women navigating family, career, and relationship struggles. Female desire is treated as normal and not a shameful thing, as it so frequently is in real life. In other words, we see women living with all the messiness that comes with being a real person. I’m also desperate for something fun where you know in a way that you cannot possibly know in any other aspect of your life that it’s all going to be OK.
As we celebrate the anniversary of the 19th amendment this month, I find myself thinking a lot about the history of how we got here, to this moment, mere months away from an election where Donald Trump and Republicans are actively working to prevent individuals from voting. I think about how the 15th amendment enfranchised formerly enslaved men to vote, how women of all backgrounds (BIPOC, white, queer, poor, wealthy) had no choice but to fight for 50 more years for the passage of the 19th amendment. That amendment may have enfranchised millions of women, but Native Americans and those of Asian ancestry were not legally able to vote yet. Black women and men continued to face tremendous barriers to voting. I think about how John Lewis, famed leader in the Civil Rights Movement, was one man of scores of others who did the work to get the Voting Rights Act passed, and how that act was decimated in 2013, how we are dealing with the consequences today.
Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore and An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole are especially relevant to the moment we’re in right now: celebrating women winning the right to vote while the fight continues to ensure everyone can actually exercise that right on November 3.
Bringing Down the Duke follows brilliant, yet dirt poor student and suffragist Annabelle Archer in late 19th-century England who tries to convince aristocrats in government to abolish the Married Women’s Property Act, which prevented women from keeping their own property when they married. This was in 1879. Property-owning women (or those married to a man who owned property) were granted the right to vote in 1918 in Britain. All women, regardless of property, could finally vote a decade later; 1920 in the USA.
An Extraordinary Union follows quick and courageous Elle Burns who poses as a slave in a Virginia home during the Civil War in order to spy for the Union Army. She gathers intel vital to taking down a Confederate plot in 1862. The Civil War ended in 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued two years prior, but Texas ignored the memo until June 19, 1865. The 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the vote, was ratified in 1870.
These two Romance novels are stories about women fighting for justice, for the rights they should have had from the get go. They are based in a reality of the recent past and show not the achievement of the end goal (winning the vote, ending slavery and the Civil War) but importantly the work and the risk involved in winning the much smaller victories. In other words, they show the small steps on that much longer road toward justice.
Bringing Down the Duke and An Extraordinary Union also resonate on a personal level. These stories are by women, about women. They do what good fiction does: show the world through someone else’s eyes and heart. In these stories, women have the space to feel deeply, whether it’s joy, anger, or any other damn thing she pleases. They do extraordinary things while going through the minutiae of their daily lives, while dealing with risk and failure, while working through both personal and romantic challenges. It drives me nuts when stories dismiss romantic feelings or relationships as if they operate in some sphere totally separated from the rest of your daily life. Love is not separate. John Lewis, monumental figure that he was, was also a man who married and had a child.
We’ve heard the quote “the arc of history bends toward justice” (though this year feels more like "one step forward, two steps back"). Annabelle Archer and Elle Burns remind me that history doesn't bend on its own. It is bent by the hard work of heroes like John Lewis but also by the less-celebrated work of women—by Annabelle, a suffragist, who is the hardest working and smartest person in any room; by Elle Burns, who takes on phenomenal risk to herself when she poses as a slave in a Confederate-controlled home. Annabelle struggles to be heard against the stigmatism of her poverty. Elle struggles against racism and white supremacy. Both of these women are continuously underestimated because of their gender. When I look for inspiration, when I need a reminder that small actions today can payoff in the end, when I need to escape into a world where I know these actions have positive, long-reaching consequences, I find it in the stories of Annabelle and Elle.