With complete cooperation and considerable help from Mills & Boon I was able, in 1968, to carry out a survey of their readers; in 1973, five years later, at my request, I made a follow-up study. In both instances the survey was done by sending a postal questionnaire to women on the Mills & Boon mailing list who receive the company's catalogue three times a year. [...] From the large responses, over two thousand replies were taken at random on each occasion [...]. As table 1 shows, the ages of the romance readers are widely distributed, with a slight peak in the age-range 35 to 44. Romance readers are younger on the whole than the general female population [...]. Readers of romances are not predominantly spinsters, although the younger average age of readers does naturally give more unmarried women than the national distribution. However, as Table 2 shows, only a third of romance readers are unmarried and two-thirds either are or have been married. (39)
Nearly half the readers have children of varying ages living at home, 11 percent having children under the age of five and 20 percent having children under the age of eleven. A third of the readers are full-time housewives and 30 percent are housewives with either a full-time or part-time job. Only 22 percent are unmarried and working. Of those with jobs, 10 percent have professional or technical posts and 51 percent have clerical occupations. A further 30 percent have either shop or factory jobs.
Romance readers are a good cross section of the population so far as education is concerned. Bearing in mind that for many years the minimum school-leaving age in Britain was fourteen, it is interesting to see that only 20 percent left school at aged [sic] fourteen or below, and 47 percent left at the age of sixteen or more. Twelve percent were at school or college until they were eighteen. (40)