What is “protest art?” The obvious examples come easily: Bruce Springsteen’s searing “Streets of Minneapolis,” the continuing work of The Onion, or Jon Oliver on HBO.
But sometimes protest art is quieter. It speaks far from the centers of power, so quietly that we don’t always recognize it as protest at all. Instead, it reaches the people who most need it, reflecting their experiences back to them and offering something equally powerful: hope.
Sometimes protest art doesn’t imagine the fall of an empire.
Sometimes it imagines healing.
That was the surprising conclusion I reached while excavating the early history of what would become a billion-dollar industry: the romance genre.
I read every winner of the Romance Writers of America’s Rita Awards, from their beginnings as the Golden Medallion in the late 1980s through 2015, hoping to better understand the genre’s evolution.
What I discovered, over and over again, was that these stories were about recovery from trauma, trauma overwhelmingly inflicted by men. Their heroines had survived childhood abuse, abusive relationships, sexual violence, harassment in the workplace, and lives shaped by fear. These novels didn’t dismiss that pain. They acknowledged it, honored it, and allowed readers to recognize themselves in women who had been deeply wounded.
Most importantly, they imagined recovery.
Again and again, these heroines slowly built lives that included friendship, family, purpose, and, yes, love. They learned to trust again. They discovered that what had happened to them did not have to define the rest of their lives.
These authors were creating worlds where women didn’t merely survive. They healed. They thrived. And in doing so, they quietly challenged the idea that suffering was simply the price of existing in a patriarchal society.
I remember the exact moment this realization crystallized for me.
I was reading Anne Stuart’s When the Stars Fall Down (originally published as Banish Misfortune). The heroine is a successful businesswoman on the verge of a promotion when her boss offers her up as bait for the company’s biggest client. Sleep with him, secure the contract, and your career advances.
She tells herself she’ll do it.
This world is unfair, but success means power, and power means control over her own life. Then she catches the smell of the client’s whiskey. The scent instantly transports her back to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her alcoholic father.
What follows remains one of the most devastating descriptions of a panic attack I’ve ever read. The smell. The memories. The overwhelming return of powerlessness. The reader shatters alongside the heroine.
She loses her job and retreats to rural Vermont, where she’s finally forced to confront the trauma she’s spent years burying. Suppressing it only deepened the wounds.
The hero doesn’t rescue her. He recognizes her pain. He offers patience, kindness, and quiet support while she slowly does the difficult work of healing herself. Eventually, she becomes capable of accepting love again, including love from a man. She isn’t “fixed.” She’s seen. She’s believed. She’s cherished.
Some readers might argue that a woman with her history should reject men altogether. That’s a fair response. There’s a reason so many women say they’d choose the bear.
But men remain half the world.
What Stuart, and so many romance writers after her, imagine is something different: men who recognize trauma instead of exploiting it. Men who support healing instead of demanding perfection. Men who become genuine partners rather than additional sources of harm.
Having been married for nearly forty years, I know that vision isn’t fantasy. It’s simply a better version of the world than the one too many women inherit.
That, too, is protest.
Another novel from my Rita project illustrates just how deeply this theme of recovery runs through romance, regardless of setting.
LaVyrle Spencer’s Morning Glory takes place during World War II, but like Anne Stuart’s contemporary novel, it asks the same question: What happens after trauma?
Spencer was known for writing lyrical, deeply compassionate stories about ordinary people. They’re often described as quiet or domestic novels, labels that have sometimes caused critics to overlook what they’re really doing.
They’re stories about healing.
Morning Glory follows Elly Dinsmore, a lonely pregnant widow struggling to keep her farm afloat after the death of her dreamer husband, who loved his family but never managed to provide for them. Desperate, she places a newspaper advertisement seeking a husband.
The man who answers is Will Parker, recently released from prison and burdened by a painful past of his own. He isn’t looking for romance. He’s looking for honest work, a place to belong, and the chance to build a different life.
Together they slowly create something neither believed they deserved. They work the farm. They raise children. They learn to trust one another. Neither heals the other through some grand romantic gesture. Instead, healing comes through shared work, mutual respect, kindness, and the slow realization that they are safe with one another.
The world had wounded both of them. Love doesn’t erase those wounds. It simply gives them room to heal. When I finished the novel, I hugged the book.
Yet to many outside the romance community, Morning Glory is remembered as little more than a quiet historical romance set on a farm. It’s easy to dismiss stories centered on domestic life as “small.” I would argue they’re anything but.
The private spaces where people recover, where families are rebuilt, where trust is restored after betrayal, are often where the deepest revolutions begin.
Perhaps that’s why romance has been so frequently dismissed. It has traditionally focused on women, on emotional lives, and on forms of courage that rarely involve swords or battlefields.
But there is courage in learning to trust again.
There is courage in believing healing is possible.
There is courage in choosing hope after violence.
Those acts may be quiet.
They are no less revolutionary.
The same pattern appears again and again throughout romance, from writers such as Nora Roberts, Jodi Thomas, Jo Beverley, Jennifer Crusie, and Laura Kinsale.
One important note: the Rita Awards reflected the biases of the publishing industry itself. Books by authors of color and stories centered on LGBTQ+ relationships were, with very few exceptions, overlooked. That means the Rita winners offer a fascinating window into one part of romance history, but they cannot represent the genre as a whole.
Still, the stories they celebrate reveal a remarkable consistency.
Again and again, romance imagines that trauma is not the end of a person’s story.
Perhaps no writer embodies that idea more fully than Nora Roberts.
Across dozens of novels, Roberts has written characters recovering from abuse, grief, violence, and profound loss. But nowhere is that theme more powerfully realized than in Eve Dallas, the heroine of the In Death series.
Eve is not simply a survivor. She is an abused child who grows into a woman determined to stand between violence and its victims.
As a homicide detective, she speaks for the dead. She fights for those who never had the opportunity to heal. Every case she solves becomes an act of justice on behalf of someone whose voice was taken from them.
For survivors, Eve offers something equally important: hope. She demonstrates that the worst thing that ever happened to you does not have to define the rest of your life.
When I finished the first novel, I wanted to build shrines to Eve Dallas.
Her relationship with Roarke reflects the same philosophy that runs throughout romance at its best. Roarke isn’t valuable because he’s impossibly wealthy or brilliant. He’s valuable because he understands that healing isn’t linear. He never asks Eve to become someone else in order to deserve love.
He simply walks beside her.
That’s the future these novels imagine.
Not a perfect world.
A kinder one.
Perhaps that’s why romance has so often been dismissed. Stories centered on women’s emotional lives have long been treated as less significant than stories about wars, politics, or great men changing history.
Yet what could be more political than imagining a world where survivors heal? What could be more radical than insisting people deserve tenderness after violence? Critics often describe romance as escapism because it offers happy endings.
I would argue that’s precisely why it matters.
To imagine a world where women heal.
To imagine partners who listen instead of harm.
To imagine justice where life has offered none.
To imagine tomorrow can be better than today.
Those are not acts of denial.
They are acts of resistance.
Hope is the highest form of protest art.
