Girls Want Flowers and Fundamental Rights
By Ashley Winstead
You’ve seen the memes: “Girls Don’t Want Flowers, They Want [Insert High-Minded, Snarky, or Silly Thing Here].” Girls don’t want flowers, they want revenge. Girls don’t want flowers, they want equal rights. Girls don’t want flowers, they want a future. Like most successful jokes, the humor here works because it’s married to a kernel of truth: old-school romantic gestures like being given roses feel rather inconsequential when compared to the pressing issues women and other marginalized people have on their minds.
At the heart of what may seem like a silly joke is the serious point that treating people equally is a fundamental component of loving them. Romance novels have always known this, which is why heroes like Mr. Darcy famously humble themselves before their inferior soulmates. The fantasy in a love story like Pride and Prejudice works on two levels: it’s both a romantic fantasy and a class fantasy of a woman born to little means ascending into aristocracy, because her partner sees through nonsensical class distinctions and understands that she’s his equal in every way.
Romance novels understand what women and other marginalized people want and show us a vision of what getting it could look like. It's no surprise, then, that modern romance writers would offer a different vision of what happily ever after (HEA) looks like. By the end of these books, women and other marginalized protagonists are in love and feel freer and more empowered than they were in the beginning. In fact, these romances boldly suggest to readers that people can only experience true romantic fulfillment if they come to their romantic relationships as an empowered person.
Here are six novels that take romance’s social and political power seriously. These books are all alike in insisting that their protagonists—and by virtue, readers—can have it all: our romantic happily-ever-afters and a more just and equitable world.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
This is the book that first opened my eyes to the idea that a political fantasy could be just as wonderful and cathartic as a good sex scene. The world RWRB envisions is one I want to live in: a world in which women can be president, and the prince of England and the son of the president can fall in love and be celebrated for it. It wasn’t just Henry and Alex’s romantic HEA that made this book so beloved and powerful—it was their political HEA as well, the fact that they got to live as a couple in a world that celebrated their love and equal rights.
After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez
If I were teaching a class about how to entwine politics and romance, this book would be at the top of my syllabus. For Lopez’s heroine Alex Torres, there’s no such thing as a separation of the personal and political—as a Mexican-American woman in a small Kansas town run by a wealthy white family that would like to see her community run out, Alex’s mere existence is political. It’s no wonder she has her guard up, and of course her relationship with the gorgeous professor Jeremiah is shaped by the fact that he’s a wealthy white man with his own agenda for her family’s property. Jeremiah and Alex’s journey from rivals to allies is rewarding on both an emotional and political level—the way Jeremiah comes to empower and support Alex in her battle against the racist good ol’ boys is both incredibly sexy and powerfully cathartic for Alex (and the reader).
Pride and Protest by Nikki Payne
In Payne’s excellent debut, falling in love with someone means coming to love their brain and beliefs—those things can’t be separated, or else you’re not loving fully. If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like Pride and Prejudice, you’re right—Austen’s classic serves as a model for this book. DJ and activist Liza Bennett (our Elizabeth) mistakes real estate developer Dorsey Fitzgerald (Darcy) for a waiter when she shows up to protest his latest project. She believes it is going to force long-time homeowners out of her neighborhood, and this kick-starts a heated battle. The love story between Austen’s leads is famously cerebral, so it translates beautifully into Liza and Dorsey’s constant debates, where they’re trying to intellectually one-up each other (hilariously, I might add). It’s a bold choice to set an enemies-to-lovers story within a politically-charged context, because you run the risk of readers identifying with one character’s perspective and remaining rigidly opposed to changing their minds, but Payne handles this tightrope walk well.
Snapped by Alexa Martin
In my opinion, Martin hasn’t gotten nearly enough credit for writing this sharp, funny, romantic love story between Elliott, an NFL communications manager, and Quinton, the quarterback who ignites controversy on his team by kneeling during the national anthem. Snapped is part of Martin’s Playbook series, which focuses on romances starring fictional NFL players. It’s hard to imagine writing about the NFL these days without touching on the controversies that for many have come to overshadow the organization, but even so, it was a gutsy move on Martin’s part. Riskiness aside, writing about a topic that requires this much depth, nuance, and big-picture conversations allows Martin to dive into her characters in ways that feel important, allowing readers to feel like they know both Elliott’s and Quinton’s minds and hearts as they each grow. And the ending of Snapped is romance and political fantasy in its purest form, a truly aspirational vision of how protest can spur action that will give you all the warm and fuzzies.
Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore
It might seem strange to include a historical romance in this list, but Dunmore’s A League of Extraordinary Women series takes a brilliantly anachronistic approach to Victorian romance in order to center suffragists who change history (and fall in love while doing it). In the first of the series, Annabelle Archer must convince influential men to support the amendment of the Married Women’s Property Act in order to keep her scholarship at Oxford. Her particular target is the powerful Duke of Montgomery, who has the Queen’s ear, but the Duke is vehemently opposed to giving married women the right to their own property—at least until Annabelle puts him in her crosshairs. Bringing Down the Duke mixes seduction and persuasion skillfully, showing how Annabelle’s beauty and radical ideas stick in the Duke’s head, both slowly winning him over. His eventual recruitment to the suffragist cause feels as satisfying as any carnal climax, and Dunmore makes it clear that the Duke and Annabelle’s love is true because he acknowledges and values her full humanity.
Ashley Winstead is the author of The Boyfriend Candidate (May 9, 2023; HarperCollins/Graydon House), The Last Housewife (Sourcebooks, 2022), Fool Me Once (HarperCollins/Graydon House, 2022) and In My Dreams I Hold A Knife (Sourcebooks, 2021). She holds a Ph.D. in contemporary American literature and a B.A. in English and art history and lives in in Houston, Texas. You can visit her online at ashleywinstead.com.