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.
"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)
"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)