The 1930s

Abstract

This chapter discusses how the key features of the British film industry impacted women's labor. It sets women's work in the context of a production boom in the British film industry in the 1930s, a time when the sector was modernizing after the introduction of sound, and film studios were keen to create a new image of themselves. The chapter shows how they achieved this by linking the modernization narrative to masculinity in fan and trade publications and sidelining women and their labor in the process. It then moves on to examine women's labor in costume, continuity, and editing/negative cutting — jobs that have come to define popular understanding of women's contribution to sound-era cinema. The chapter recounts some of the skills required to succeed in these roles and the processes through which they were assigned secondary status in film production hierarchies.