ABSTRACT
Betty Friedan opens The Feminine Mystique, that iconic feminist text from 1963, with this memorable passage: "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States." It is long past time for scholars of popular romance fiction, and of American culture more generally, to take seriously the work of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers and the other original "Avon Ladies", and to read their novels as situated within and responding to the same historical moment as foundational feminist thinkers and foundational sex-positive authors. This chapter examines both the novels and the manifestos as primary source representations of the cultural conversations of the 1970s about gendered oppression, rape culture and practice, female subjectivity, and women's sexual pleasure.
