Modleski's ''Loving with a Vengeance'', "to begin a feminist analysis of women's reading", considered three popular fictional genres: the Harlequin romance, the Gothic novel and the daytime US soap opera. Modleski argued that the formulaic nature of these genres gave readers the freedom to construct their own response, at a distance from the text. Her next book, ''The Women Who Knew Too Much'', examined seven Hitchcock films: ''Blackmail'', ''Murder'', ''Rebecca'', ''Notorious'', ''Rear Window'', ''Vertigo'' and ''Frenzy''. Modelski now challenged the terms of taking 'distance' from a text, arguing that "the desire for distance itself [is] ... bound up with the male's insistence on his difference from woman." By contrast to male violence, the 'feminine' could embrace "narrative empathy, spectatorial passivity, and the subconscious imaginary".
In ''Feminism Without Women'', Modleski argued that "male power frequently works to efface female subjectivity by occupying the site of femininity", and that the writer has a responsibility to re-articulate women's shared experience.
