Love and Marriage Across Social Classes in American Cinema

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Love, Marriage and Class

   • Stephen Sharot

   Pages 1-19

3. Before the Movies: The Cross-Class Romance in Fiction

   • Stephen Sharot

   Pages 21-48

4. From Attraction and the One-Reeler to the Feature

   • Stephen Sharot

   Pages 49-81

5. Sexual Exploitation and Class Conflict

   • Stephen Sharot

   Pages 83-119

6. Consumerism and Ethnicity

   • Stephen Sharot

   Pages 121-162

7. The Cross-Class Romance in the Depression

   • Stephen Sharot

   Pages 163-194

8. Male Seducers and Female Gold-Diggers

   • Stephen Sharot

   Pages 195-226

9. The End of the Golden Era and After

   • Stephen Sharot

   Pages 227-258

10. Conclusion: Formula, Genre, and Social Experience

    • Stephen Sharot

    Pages 259-266

11. Back Matter

    Pages 267-273

    PDF

This book is the first comprehensive and systematic study of cross-class romance films throughout the history of American cinema. It provides vivid discussions of these romantic films, analyses their normative patterns and thematic concerns, traces how they were shaped by inequalities of gender and class in American society, and explains why they were especially popular from World War I through the roaring twenties and the Great Depression. In the vast majority of cross-class romance films the female is poor or from the working class, the male is wealthy or from the upper class, and the romance ends successfully in marriage or the promise of marriage.

   

• love
• marriage
• social class
• romance
• gender
• seduction
• Hollywood
• cinema

“Stephen Sharot, professor of sociology and anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, presents here the first comprehensive and systematic study of cross-class romance films throughout the history of American cinema. … Love and Marriage Across Social Classes is a great journey.” (John A. Dick, Marriage, Families & Spirituality, Vol. 29 (1), 2023)

“This book is useful for American cinema scholars for its encyclopedic coverage of these films and for the patterns it observes across the quantity of films it explores. Sharot also provides enough context of both developments in the film industry … . Accomplishing much more than merely a history of a prominent film subgenre, the book joins the complex historical and sociological conversation about class and gender in twentieth-century America.” (Paul Arras, Journal of Popular Culture, 2018)

• Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Tel Aviv, Israel

  Stephen Sharot

Stephen Sharot (D.Phil. Oxford) is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research focuses on representations of class and their relationships to gender in popular cinema. He is the author of five books and numerous articles in the sociology of religion.    

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