novels are frequently portrayed as fairy tales for women. While distin-guishing the two, Smith (1999) emphasized the similarity of themes inboth genres: This is a just world where the good are rewarded.Regarding the process of girls’ maturation, there is a whole literaturethat takes up this theme in a variety of ways. For example, many girls readteen magazines. Readership starts at the preteen stage. Although some ofthese have names like Young Modern, they continue, largely, to convey themessages that a girl/woman finds fulfillment in a man. There are manymagazines aimed first at the teenage audience and later at more maturewomen. Although these offer helpful messages to the woman about how tomanage her career, there continues to be a heavy focus on a girl’s/woman’ssex appeal and instruction in how to attract a man. Analyses of the fictionalliterature (Pierce, 1993) in teen magazines found they continue to presentgirls with stereotypic messages. The conflicts which the girl encountersin these stories usually revolve around boys. The girl is typically unableto resolve her conflicts, and depends on outside sources to do so. In otherwords, girls need others to help solve their problems. They are reinforced inthe idea that their importance derives from their relationships with men.Christian-Smith (1993) showed how this same theme reverberates in se-ries books likeThe Babysitter’s Clubthat are targeted to young girls andpromoted by scholastic book clubs.The strength of the romance orientation is demonstrated in the oft-quoted work by Holland and Eisenhart,Educated in Romance(1990). In-terested in the question of why so few women pursued careers in mathand science, these authors did a longitudinal study in which they followedyoung women at two universities. These were women who entered col-lege with strong high school records and high aspirations for academicachievement and professional careers. About half planned careers in mathor science. What did they find? Less than a third of these women ful-filled these expectations. “Most had ended up with intense involvementsin heterosexual romantic relationships, marginalized career identities, andinferior preparation for their likely roles as breadwinners . . . They seemto have willingly scaled down their aspirations for careers and enteredinto marriage in economic positions inferior to those of their husbands”(pp. 4–5). What these researchers emphasize is that no system of overt andinstitutionalized discrimination forced these women into these behaviors.Instead, the cultural values pressured women into believing that their truegoal was success on the “sexual auction block”. For women, negotiatingtheir sexual attractiveness within the social system at the college was ofprime importance. Although this was also important for male students, itwas one of a number of attributes that contributed to their overall evalua-tion by the peer culture