The erotic herterosexual romance, with content that is sexually appealing and stimulating to a large number of women, came into existence during the 1970s, when the social climate combined with a distribution strategy that put these romances into retail outlets that legitimatized them for mass consumption by women… Their legitimacy was further enhanced by the fact that stories were allowed to evolve as erotica without much notice and under the guise of a different label—romance.
Carol Thurston (The Romance Revolution, 9)