An Analysis to Determine if Popular Romance Novels, Read by Today’s High School Students, Reflect the Characteristics and Roles of Women in Current Society

For this study, novels were considered romance if they involved stories in which the central themes focused on the development o f love relationships between men and women, with the primary focus on the women, and included happily ever after endings. (6)

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1. This study was comprised of romantic fiction available for young adults, tenth through twelfth grades, at Laramie Senior High School.
2. The study included twenty romance books checked out most often by students in the last ten years. (7)

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4. The time period within the romance novels was present day; no setting was later than twenty-five years ago. (8)

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This researcher found that the young women in these novels represented only a small part of the teen population in the United States. Almost twenty percent of all Americans are from African, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian decent. Every female protagonist in this study were from Caucasian backgrounds, and most of their families had upper-middle or upper class socioeconomic status. (48)

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It was also noted by this researcher that only thirty-three percent of the characters studied were employed; most of them were from wealthy homes, so they did not have to work. However, in the United States today, over fifty percent of young women under age nineteen have jobs. (49)