The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories

Susan Ostrov Weisser
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Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our “postfeminist” age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women’s nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today’s media, with profound implications for women...

Review
"In this timely, valuable, relevant study, Weisser examines the ways in which traditional ideas of romantic love endure, despite decades of feminist scholarship and critique challenging sexism and misogyny and calling for change. Her prose is accessible, lively, and informed, and her discoveries outlining where feminism and romance dovetail and diverge have far-reaching implications to be valuable to anyone interested in gender studies, narrative theory, and cultural studies. Highly recommended." -- Choice