Recommendations: Suffragette Romances

Today, it is 122 years to the day since the women of New Zealand walked into to polling stations to place their vote in a parliamentary election. This might seem like a very small anniversary, but it was the first time any self-governing nation had allowed women to vote. The next day, Elizabeth Yates became the first female in the British Empire to be invested as a mayor. 

Today, the New Zealand's suffragette movement is immortalised in the wonderful pedestrian lights of downtown Wellington, which feature the outline of a woman in late Victorian dress. Similarly, prominent suffragette Kate Sheppard is depicted on New Zealand's ten dollar notes. 

Source: New Zealand Parliment

But there is another element to the story of New Zealand's fight for suffrage: thanks to the work of lesser-known Maori suffragettes like Meri Te Tai Mangakahia, Pakeha (white) and Maori women received suffrage simultaneously. To put this in perspective, New Zealand's neighbour, Australia, did not relent and give Aboriginal Australians - male or female - the vote until the mid 1960s,.

To commemorate this turning point in world history, the day it was definitively proven that the sky would not fall in if women voted, I give you some of my favourite romances featuring suffragettes.

The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan
If you haven't read this yet, then I seriously question your life choices. Set in the late Victorian era, it's about Frederica 'Free' Marshall, who runs a suffragette newspaper and is facing off against mounting opposition. She's also a key part of the hero's revenge plan. The hero, Edward, is the ultimate swoon-worthy beta hero, and the two share some of the best dialogue ever written. 

My Dearest Enemy by Connie Brockway

A sweet and fun romance featuring that old trope, the will with the unfair clause. Avery Thorne's uncle has stopped him from inheriting the small property he was expecting, instead leaving it to one Miss Lillian Bede. Avery will only inherit if the determined women's rights activist cannot make the property turn a profit within five years. But since a woman couldn't possibly be successful at managing a property, all Avery has to do is whittle away five years. Except that no matter where he travels, Miss Bede's letters find him, and he can't quite bring himself to hate her. 

The Likelihood of Lucy by Jenny Holiday

When Lucy Greenleaf's employer finds out she's been teaching his daughters about that unnatural woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, she's turned out without a reference. Desperate, she turns to her childhood friend Trevor Bailey. Trevor's fought tooth and nail to leave behind his destitute childhood in the rookery, and he's about to cement his position in London society by opening a fashionable hotel. He wants to help Lucy, but he can't have radical women's groups taking place in his hotel! The Likelihood of Lucy's emphasis on the theoretical basis of the suffragette movement is different to the way most authors approach it, and Trevor and Lucy's battles for supremacy are super hot. 

The Firebrand by Susan Wiggs

*Sigh* It's another woman who just wants to run her business in peace but can't because the misogynists feel threatened. During the Great Fire of Chicago, Lucy Hathaway caught a baby someone threw from the window of a burning building. For the last five years, she's raised the girl as her daughter. She meets financier Rand Higgins because she needs a loan for her ladies' bookshop, but quickly realises that he is the child's father, who believes that his daughter perished in the fire. They have to reach an agreement regarding custody, but Rand's position at the bank means he can't be seen to have anything to do with those pesky suffragettes, and Lucy's not about to give up her cause, especially not when she's being pressured to do so by powerful me. The Firebrand suffers a little from precocious child syndrome, but other than that it's a sweet story. 

A Summer for Scandal by Lydia San Andres

Emilia Cruz is a thoroughly modern woman; member of the Women's Suffrage Alliance and writer of salacious stories under a pseudonym. When visiting author Ruben Torres disparages the work of one 'Miss Del Valle', Emilia can't help but defend her work, and Ruben can't help but respond to her passion. The setting of the Caribbean in 1911 and the debate surrounding romance literature and its relationship to feminism makes A Summer for Scandal a stand-out. This was a last-minute addition to this list, since I only finished it last night, but I expect a full review will follow.

Reflection: My #WNDBResolution and List of Diverse Recommendations

Over the past three or so months, I’ve become increasingly aware of the lack of ethnic diversity in the romance/chick-lit world, as well as in many other genres.  In one of my periods of yearning for India (where I spent a year teaching in 2013), I started to search out novels set there.  And when I say search, I mean search.  Because, while there are some out there, they're often not very well publicised.  I’m also sad to say that some of them (particularly the historicals) seem to be written by people who  have never been closer to the Subcontinent than their local Indian take-away.  

But happily, the search for non-Orientalist Indian romance and chick-lit novels brought me to the ‘Multicultural’ category of Amazon’s romance section.  I progressed through huh, it’s so weird that they have a multicultural romance section through hey, a lot of this stuff is really good…why isn’t better known? to why the blooming heck have I never realised the racial bias in what I read?  Around the same time, I also started to notice that there was a real backlash about the whitewashing of covers in YA fiction, and so I got angry about that too.  (I know, covers are my catnip, but they're such a intensely visual example of ingrained privilege and prejudice).  

This increased consciousness was made concrete two days ago when I read this post, wherein a Guardian journalist reflects of her experience of only reading books by Authors of Colour throughout 2014.  This, in turn, lead me to the We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) movement.  They have an initiative called WNDBResolution, which encourages people to pledge to read a certain number of books with diverse characters in the next year.  So, here's my pledge: 

I'll review them on here and take part in the hashtag #WNDBResolution on Twitter to keep in the loop.  I encourage whoever is reading this to give it a go as well; you have nothing to lose, and a whole lot of new perspectives and awesome reads to gain.  To get you started, I've put down some of my recent favourites featuring non-white leads:  

My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

Set in Victorian London with flashbacks to the hero and heroine's first meeting in Chinese Turkestan several years before, My Beautiful Enemy is the story of Ying-Ying-slash-Catherine and Captain Leighton Atwood.  It's a poignant story with an engaging plot that gave me an appreciation for the complex cultural mixing pot that is Central Asia.  

No Sex in the City by Randa Abdul-Fattah

In the chick-lit category is No Sex in the City, about Turkish-Australian Esma, who's trying to balance her faith and the expectations of her parents with the cosmopolitan Sydney life. It's witty and relatable, with a great cast of supporting characters and a cute ending.  Really gave me a new appreciation for the ways in which white Australians can be thoughtless towards their 'ethnic' counterparts.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is not your average romance.  It's the 1920s, and as a Malayan-Chinese career girl, Jade Yeo is a fish out of water, to say the least.  Her desire to live independently and the casual way she treats sex makes for a refreshing change from the bulk of the genre.  Short and sweet, it nonetheless deals deftly with the ripple effects of British colonialism.  As Jade says so eloquently, "It is as if I were a piece of chess in a game played by people who never looked down at their fingers".  

A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev

At four years old, Mili was married in a mass ceremony.  Now, she's at university in the US, biding her time until her absent husband comes to claim her.  Instead, her husband's brother, Sam, is the one who shows up on her doorstep and sweeps her off her feet.  Dev writes beautifully and sensitively about the clash of modern, globalised India with age-old Rajasthani traditions, fleshing out her characters and developing a unique plot in the process.  One of the best books I've read in a long time.  

Talk Sweetly to Me by Courtney Milan

Being a black, female mathematician in Victorian England isn't exactly a walk in the park, as Rose Sweetly well knows.  She does her best to keep her head down, but her neighbour, renowned columnist Stephen Shaughnessy, isn't making it easy.  Rose's wariness about the world brings home the forms of discrimination and oppression that WOC have faced, and continue to do so.  Like all of Milan's offerings, Talk Sweetly To Me is different, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining.  

The Lotus Palace by Jeannie Lin

Set in Tang Dynasty China, The Lotus Palace is about Yue-Ying, a maidservant to a famous courtesan.  When another prominent courtesan from a rival house is found dead, Yue-Ying is caught up in a sea of intrigues that bring her into contact with Bai Huang, an aristocratic scholar and well-known playboy.  The relationship between the hero and heroine was really wonderfully done, and the idea that this novel is set at the same time as Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages blew my mind and opened my eyes to my ignorance about Han Chinese civilisation and history.  

If you have any recommendations, feel free to write me a comment or - even better - post on Twitter with the hashtag #WNDBResolution so everyone can benefit.  Catch you on the other side of my first diverse read for my resolution, Indigo by Beverly Jenkins! 

Review: Trade Me by Courtney Milan (Or, Courtney Milan: Goddess of Intersectionality)

5 stars

Trade Me (released 19/1/15) represents Courtney Milan’s first foray into the ever-burgeoning subgenre of New Adult romance.  For those not familiar with her, Milan has previously written romances set during the Victorian era and is notable for writing outside-the-box stories.  Far from the idle-aristocrat-meets-woman formula, her heroes and heroines are as diverse as a barrister, suffragette newswoman, small-town doctor, fortune-teller and researcher of plant genetics.  Drawing on a wide spectrum of human experience has made her a stand-out amongst historical romance authors, but I was nonetheless apprehensive that a change in genre would signal the end of her position on my auto-buy list.  However, I shouldn’t have worried, because Trade Me blew my expectations out of the water. 

In many new adult novels, the protagonists’ search to ‘find themselves’ in the ‘real world’ of college is shallow and uninspiring, but Milan deftly avoids this trap.  In fact, it was the depth and breadth of her characters that made Trade Me exceptional.  The Chinese-American heroine, Tina, is not only putting herself through university, but has taken on financial responsibility for her family.  While Blake – the son of a billionaire technology magnate – might seem to have it easy, he too is dealing with an array of issues.  When Tina speaks up during a class discussion on food dockets, savaging Blake and daring anyone to maintain their opinion of the working class as ‘lazy’ after experiencing their lives, she never expects him to take her up on her offer to trade lives.  The complexities of swapping lives – and the problems each has retained from their own – is compassionate and nuanced in a way rarely seen in romance novels, and literature in general.  The world the characters inhabit is clearly our world, with all the imperfection that entails. 

When I was perusing other reviews before writing my own, I noticed that some readers felt Milan had tried to tackle too many social issues in one book, or that there was just “too much going on”.  Ironically, the reason they gave Trade Me two or three stars is the reason I found it so refreshingly compelling, and that was the intersectionality that Milan took the time to develop.   

Like Ryan says so succintly, Intersectionality is the study or observance of the ways in which forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination interact.  It works on the premise that biological, social and cultural factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion combine to define how a person or group is perceived and treated. In Trade Me, Tina’s life and personality are influenced by a web of factors – including her Chinese heritage, her lower-class background and her family’s position as members of the persecuted Falun Gong philosophy.  To a certain extent, when Blake takes on Tina’s life, he is also taking on an awareness of his privilege relative to hers.  The beauty of Milan’s writing is in the way in which this intersectionality permeates the characters, settings and plot of the novel, without ever having it define them. Too often factors such as race and class are used as window dressing for stock characters or as a one-trick pony plot device, but Tina and Blake remain people above and beyond their social demographics, and the plot remains separate as well.  Rather than trying to fit too much in, Milan has woven together the many strands that makes each person unique into solid, three-dimensional characters.  In doing so, she blends the best of the romance genre and the best of reality to create a complex, emotionally satisfying story, and who can ask for more than that?