One of the tasks of the 20th century, retrospectively understood, was the recasting of norms for female lives. One of the chief tasks of aesthetics since Romanticism has been defining new attitudes toward sexual themes in the arts. Cinema played an important role in both processes, alternately reflecting expectations and instigating modification. The changes, like the cultural tectonic shifts of the Renaissance, were apparent even to thoseclosest to it. As a character in Josephine Tey's 1948 novel opines, ‘since entertainment came into the country with the cinema, God bless it, an end has been put to witch-hunting’. ‘Women were never seen until films arrived’, Ernst Betts asserted categorically.

Many of the elements of Romanticism carried over into the world of cinema: the swooning female and the swashbuckling hero were both stamped in our collective consciousness in significant part by Romantic artists, renouncers of the allegorical substructure of fiction by which all love was potentially of the divine, which in turn had seemed to guarantee that emotion might be reconciled with reason, or at least with faith. The art of Romanticism instead celebrated emotions for their own sake, and although previous art had been by no means utterly chaste, this shift much enlarged the scope not only for lascivious imagery but for frank celebrations of carnality.