Radway focused her research on a group of 42 avid romance readers in a fictionalized town she called "Smithton," Pennsylvania. She found that for these women—mostly middle-class mothers and wives—reading was far from a passive act.
: The readers sought stories where a hero is initially cold but eventually provides the heroine with intense care and tenderness. Radway posited that women used these stories to fulfill emotional needs for nurturance that were often unmet in their real-life roles as the primary caregivers for others. Reading the Romance
Janice Radway's (1984) is a foundational text in cultural studies that transformed how scholars view popular fiction. Rather than just analyzing the text of romance novels, Radway used an ethnographic approach to study why actual women read them. The Core Study: The "Smithton Women" Radway focused her research on a group of