Abstract
Investigations by governmental agencies and reform organizations in the first two decades of the twentieth century reported that working girls and women were subjected to widespread sexual harassment and exploitation by employers, supervisors, and, in the retail and service sectors, customers and clients. Portrayals of sexual harassment of working girls appeared in many of the cross-class romance films that were made between 1914 and 1919. One set of cross-class romance films portray the working-class heroine, not as a victim of sexual predators requiring the intervention of a wealthy man who will marry her but as an agent who chooses to attempt to overcome her economic circumstances by using her sexual assets or allure. Class conflict was dramatically portrayed in cross-class romance films made between 1915 and 1918, and it was solved or neutralized by the cross-class romance. Once the bad capitalist was reformed through love or was replaced by a good son or daughter who was in a cross-class romance, a just peace was attained in the relationships of employers and workers. The disappearance of labor-capital conflict from cross-class romance films after 1918 is explained.1
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Sharot, S. (2017). Sexual Exploitation and Class Conflict. In: Love and Marriage Across Social Classes in American Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41799-8_4
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