Why do heroines always need to be “protected"?
What would heroes do if the world was safe for women?
How many times have we read the scene where the hero insists that the heroine stay at home, inside, behind locked doors while he alone ventures out to save the day. “I need to know you’re safe,” he rasps, desperate with his love and determination to fight the villain. She protests. He protests—she will be too distracting. He will be too worried about her. He cannot be the hero unless she is safely tucked away.
I got to thinking about the gender dynamics of protection when I was writing a scene for Duchess By Design. The set up: the hero and heroine had a fight on a New York City street. Naturally, the heroine storms off, lost in the crowds, and probably never to be seen by the hero again. This was a huge problem for the book, as this was just chapter four.
I started typing about how the hero followed her…”for her safety.”
Except it was broad daylight and she was the native New Yorker and he was some stuffy out of town duke and thus more in danger than she. (And also NYC super safe).
Delete delete delete.
But I was struck at how easily it can be to default to the hero exhibiting stalkerish, domineering behavior to demonstrate his care and concern (but also to move the plot forward). I couldn’t help but wonder: what does it do to the story if she isn’t in physical danger? What is a hero left to do?
There would appear to be a contract of sorts. Men make the world a dangerous place to use it as an excuse to protect women, usually by keeping them confined at home. I distinctly remember one of my first nights in Paris in college before I knew anyone, pining in my windowsill and wanting to go out but “knowing” as a petite young woman it was risky to go out alone. What a waste of a night in Paris!* Look at any Regency heroine or historical woman who didn’t dare venture into the world without a chaperone. Her reputation was at risk perhaps more than her physical safety. In the early days of the novel, it was said that women couldn’t write it because they never ventured very far beyond the drawing room (which we eventually did, and we also found plenty of drama in the drawing room).
It’s not all men. It’s not even one man. It’s just the hint of a threat from one that circumscribes a tremendous amount of female behavior. Look at the popular answer to the question of what women would do if there were no men on earth for 24 hours: go on walks at night.
I’m not the first person to think about how the notion of protection is used to keep women at home and “safe.” The women’s rights activists of the 19th century wrote about it their book, The Complete History of Women’s Suffrage:
…the freedom of mankind has ever been sacrificed to the idea of protection.
and
“Under authority and this false promise of "protection," self-reliance, the first incentive to freedom, has not only been lost…”
What they saw is that a “dangerous world” and the need for “protection” created dependent women who were unable to support themselves or make their way in the world because it had been too risky to walk around town on their own, so it was too risky to get an education and too risky to engage in business themselves. Instead, they could only offer housekeeping and childrearing services in exchange for protection. But what was too often the case then (and now too), the greatest danger for most women is the man they live with.
They continue:
“Though woman needs the protection of one man against his whole sex, in pioneer life, in threading her way through a lonely forest, on the highway, or in the streets of the metropolis on a dark night, she sometimes needs, too, the protection of all men against this one. But even if she could be sure, as she is not, of the ever-present, all-protecting power of one strong arm, that would be weak indeed compared with the subtle, all-pervading influence of just and equal laws for all women. Hence woman's need of the ballot, that she may hold in her own right hand the weapon of self-protection and self-defense.”
The idea of protection is intimately woven with the idea of female independence.
The world needs to be dangerous so we need men to protect us and in doing so, we are dependent upon them. Huh.
And then I was reading Ms. Magazine, particularly an interview with legal scholar Diane Rosenfeld about what bonobos—our closest evolutionary cousins—can teach us about preventing sexual violence. Rosenfeld says that patriarchy relies on patriarchal violence which she describes as the “prevalence and variation of male sexual coercion necessary to maintain the patriarchal social order.” Taking it a step further, she sees that no laws made in this system will ever protect women. Instead, we need to be like the bonobos where “the power to thwart male sexual aggression” comes via “collective self-defense.” Basically, no Bonobo would hurt his sister and every bonobo sees every female as his sister. No male risks activating “a troop of allied females.”
I can’t help but imagine how one slight about romance novels from an outsider and Romancelandia comes out in force.
(And btw: she sees the Equal Rights Amendment as key to changing our patriarchal legal system).
Romance writers have gotten great at writing sexual health—the hero pausing to put on a condom, both parties clearly and enthusiastically consenting to the sexy times about to happen. But when it comes to writing about safety for women, we can fall back onto notions about protecting reputation aka virginity in historical romance or use write overbearing, domineering behavior into our heroes or rely on the threat of danger to female character for plot and drama.
But when we write this into our fiction we are, in some sense, writing the world as it is. “Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction — so we are told,” Virginia Woolf once famously said. We rely on that danger in fiction for suspense—the the thrill of the heroine sneaking out at night comes from the danger we know she faces. We get a thrill from a heroine breaking the rules.
But I love seeing romance play with this. As romance readers know, every time the hero says “Please, I need to know you’re safe,” the heroine smiles and nods and waits until he’s gone to sneak off and save the day herself.
But what if the world just wasn’t dangerous?
This is a great observation that never really comes up in romance discussions! I suspect my love of heroines rescuing/protecting heroes stems from a subconscious pushback against a world where women always have to worry about safety.