ABSTRACT
During the Thatcher and Major years’ changes relating to gender, the organisation and technologies of work, and attitudes to crime had implications for how crime would be represented by the 1990s British cinema. In the 1990s women made increasingly confident inroads into the workforce, especially in the white-collar and service industries. Although the desirability of women as employees was in many cases due to their ‘flexibility’ in tolerating work that was part-time, insecure and illpaid, the impression grew of a society in which women were in the ascendancy in the workplace and beyond. By contrast, masculinity-particularly young, skill-less, goalless working-class masculinity-was increasingly defined as a problem.
