Abstract

This article examines the role of the female love-interest within films popular with British audiences in the interwar period in order to illuminate audience anxieties about male and female employment. The article argues that widespread concerns about changing patterns of male and female work in the 1920s and 1930s were moderated by a popular construction of female love that emphasized heterosexual love and female employment as mutually exclusive. ‘Hit’ films with British audiences in the period tended to feature a love-interest who ultimately declared her interest only in love while simultaneously renouncing her own access to wealth and status. Consequently, popular film became an important site for the articulation of interwar anxieties about gender and work as audiences consumed this repetitive narrative, .