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.
