How a community of romance novel readers became activists: ‘opened my world’

Jody Lee had long toyed with getting into politics. She spent years working at the US state department before moving to Mercer Island, a suburb of Seattle, with her family. The 57-year-old threw herself into volunteering; sometimes, people asked whether she wanted to run for the local school board. But Lee never felt ready to make the leap.

Until she started reading romance.

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 turned romance novels into a much-needed escape for Lee. A friend introduced her to Fated Mates, a romance-focused podcast that gets about 100,000 unique listeners per month, and Lee became a devotee. Whenever the hosts, author Sarah MacLean and critic Jennifer Prokop, brought up the proliferation of book bans in US schools and the need to fight them, Lee listened.

“It just kept dripping into my brain,” she said. “It was enough that I was like: ‘You know what? I can do this.’”

Lee won a seat on the Mercer Island school board in 2023.

The years since the pandemic have proven to be boom times for romance: in 2023, booksellers sold 36m print copies of romance novels, compared to 18m in 2020, according to the consumer analytics firm Circana. And although the female-dominated genre has long been dismissed as a frivolous guilty pleasure, conversations about its political dimensions have perhaps never been more visible – or organized.

Over the last four years, many in the romance community, sometimes known as romancelandia, have thrown themselves into activism. Fated Mates, the podcast that compelled Lee to run for office, operates a phone-banking campaign called Fated States, which has logged more than 900,000 calls in support of Democratic candidates and causes since 2020. Separately, a group of authors who write under the names Alyssa Cole, Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan started an organization called Romancing the Vote, which has since 2020 raised more than $1m for voting rights groups.

“If we move through the world believing that joy is the first line of defense against tyranny – and I truly believe that – then what better than romance novels?” MacLean said.

Years ago, MacLean said, “a very, very famous, venerated voice in romance” approached her to warn that MacLean would lose readers if she kept talking about politics. But in MacLean’s view, romance has always been political.

As an example, she points to the ur-text of American romance novels: The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss. The historical romance sold more than 2.4m copies upon its publication in 1972, becoming the first “bodice ripper” and cluing the publishing industry into the fact that women buy books. The book’s plot is convoluted, but its moral arc is simple: a heroine struggles with and against a hero who embodies the most stereotypical masculinity – he’s successful, strapping and only dimly aware of the very concept of emotions – but she ultimately wins a happily-ever-after through the force of her love. This arc is still found throughout romance.

“Her capacity for love, for joy, for hope, for power in these kinds of softer ways ultimately breaks down this really stern, taciturn toxic masculinity,” MacLean said of heroines in romance. “Romance, for me, opened my world beyond the tiny little town I grew up in and gave me a sense of ‘it could all be mine’, if I was willing to take the risk.”

She does add a disclaimer: “I do not recommend anyone go read The Flame and the Flower for kicks.” Written in an era where marital rape was not yet widely recognized, the book features a shocking amount of sexual assault, including by the hero.

There are plenty of modern-day romances that conclude with one man and one woman settling down into domestic tranquility, complete with a lavish wedding and 2.5 children. (Thanks to the burgeoning subgenre of “dark romance”, there are also plenty that whitewash relationships between rapists and their victims.) But many popular romance writers today – such as Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall and Helen Hoang, to name just a few – take a more progressive view of gender roles, portraying marriage and babies as options rather than necessities. Between 2022 and 2023, booksellers also sold more than 1m LGBTQ+ romance novels – a 40% spike over the previous year, according to Circana.

MacLean rejected that venerated romance novelist’s advice to avoid politics. After Alabama passed a total abortion ban in 2019, she and Prokop released a Fated Mates episode that discussed depictions of birth control and abortion in romance. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, paving the way for a conservative US supreme court supermajority that ultimately overturned Roe v Wade, MacLean and Prokop talked about it on Fated Mates.

Other denizens of romancelandia have also become far more overt about their political views. Days after the 2024 election, bestselling author Joanna Shupe, who is known for writing romances set in the Gilded Age, took to TikTok to announce that she was happy to lose readers who disagreed with her.

“If you’re reading historical romance to relive some sort of white nationalist patriarchy fantasy, because that’s what you see in my books, wow – I am horrified. We are not simpatico, sister,” Shupe said in a video. Because her characters reckon with threats to reproductive rights, anti-immigrant sentiment and the concentration of wealth, Shupe said she feels obligated to point out the parallels with contemporary times.

Fated Mates has devoted two episodes to covering recent efforts to ban books, which pose a particular threat to romancelandia. During the 2023-24 school year, the free-expression organization PEN America uncovered more than 10,000 instances of book banning across the United States – the highest number ever recorded. A PEN analysis of more than 1,000 books banned in that school year found that nearly 60% featured sex or sex-related content, while about 40% featured characters of color or characters who identify as LGBTQ+.

Novels by Sarah J Maas, who writes bestselling “romantasy” novels, are among the most-banned books in the US. Schools have also banned books by McQuiston and Hall, as well as those by popular romance writers like Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry and Colleen Hoover.

“There’s all of these books now with people with limb differences, people with mental health struggles, PTSD or anxiety or depression. There’s characters with disabilities and different sexualities and genders and from different backgrounds,” said Sarah Wendell, who runs the romance review site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, which garnered more than 500,000 page views in November. “You’re going to see characters who, in the real world, are in legitimate danger. In the books, they get a ‘happily ever after’. That is extremely radical right now,” she said.

After Wendell blogged on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books about feeling heartbroken by Donald Trump’s victory, dozens of people commented on her post to share their own outrage as well as advice on how to stay politically engaged.

Lee, the Seattle-area woman who successfully ran for a seat on her local school board, believes that part of her job is diverting or shutting down any interest in banning books.

“We are fighting quite hard not to let it get even a tiny toehold,” said Lee.

Prokop and MacLean plan to do more phone-banking, including for gubernatorial and state legislative races, in 2025.

“What is the point of having a platform if you’re not going to use it to talk about the things that you care about the most?” Prokop said. “I’ve always believed in the idea that books are a vehicle for getting people to look at the world around them and say: ‘Hey, maybe I don’t like this. There’s something I can do about it.’”