Teaching Hindle Wakes

Hindle Wakes provides a fascinating focus of study, not least because it expresses surprisingly modern attitudes to sex and legitimacy. Conflicts created by moral and social codes of behaviour are central to the film's dramatic development. It challenges our assumptions about working-class women and their independence. This is particularly the case with the play which was written before World War I and women's emancipation, but even between the wars, we tend not to think of a working class woman as being prepared to turn down the kind of opportunity offered by a proposal from a wealthy young man and raise a child as a single mother. Evidently middle-class people had more moralistic concerns about extra-marital sex than working-class people.

The film offers a number of possibilities for student study usefully illuminating issues of gender, class and sexuality, as well as representations of work and leisure. It offers an interesting portrait of two important institutions of the 1920s - the cotton mill and the holiday resort; and it can be compared with the play and with other film versions.