The Forgotten Sexploitation Film That Carried a Real Political Punch
Sexploitation cinema lives in the cheap seats of film history, where storylines run on string bikinis, paper-thin scripts, and the promise of a tawdry thrill. Most of those movies exist purely as a clock-watching exercise, designed to be consumed and discarded. Every so often, however, a film slips through the grindhouse gutter with something stranger packed inside the skin of exploitation. The hosts of Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts love those moments, the ones where the camera lingers on a bare body and a barbed political argument. A particular 1974 release, buried under years of VHS obscurity and regional censorship trouble, belongs to that small club.
Stephanie Rothman's "The Working Girls" arrived in cinemas at a moment when exploitation was treated as disposable trash by critics and a cash machine by distributors. Yet Rothman, one of the very few women directing genre films during the New Hollywood era, loaded the picture with a structural critique of how women are forced into the economy and what they do once they realise they are being squeezed. The movie barely registered at the box office, was quietly cut to ribbons by classification boards around the world, and was effectively erased from the conversation about politically charged cinema.
To Australian viewers in particular, the film's path through our censorship regime tells its own story. Before the introduction of an R18+ classification in 1997, this country refused to allow adults to watch most of the films that other Western markets treated as routine. That meant sexploitation titles were routinely butchered, banned, or only available in heavily mangled censored VHS editions sold at suburban markets. So when we look back at a forgotten, politically charged sex film from 1974, we are also looking at the strange history of how this country watched its cinema.
The Australian context matters for another reason. Drive-in cinemas around the western edges of Sydney and the bayside suburbs of Melbourne carried American exploitation throughout the 1970s, and a film like "The Working Girls" might have played a couple of those lots before being pulled. The local market was hungry for imported pulp, and the response of Australian filmmakers was to invent Ozploitation, a homegrown wave of sex-and-violence comedies that bent around the censorship rules by leaning on humour. That compromise shaped what Australian audiences saw and what American exploitation could hope to do here.
A brief history of sexploitation and its political possibilities
Sexploitation as a genre emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s as a workaround for the Hays Code era, with producers like Russ Meyer, David F. Friedman, and the Corman circle pushing softcore into downtown theatres as education or marriage manual films. The marketing was brazen, the budgets razor-thin, and the politics usually non-existent, designed instead to push viewers past their tolerance level with cutaways and breathy soundtracks.
What makes the genre interesting to revisit, though, is how often the margins of exploitation produced genuine subversion. Women-directed exploitation, in particular, often inverted the usual male gaze to expose rather than celebrate exploitation. Stephanie Rothman, Roberta Findlay, Doris Wishman, and a handful of others understood that audiences paying for a glimpse were also paying to be told a story, even if the poster pretended otherwise.
The pre-Reagan counterculture made sexploitation a tempting vehicle for leftist critique. Films could deliver full-frontal nudity on a poster and still smuggle in a critique of capitalism, patriarchy, or the Vietnam-era draft. Because theatres and drive-ins screened these pictures without festival coverage or trade reviews, the politics slipped past gatekeepers and landed on the same screens that served the standard T&A programmers.
The Working Girls and what it tried to do
"The Working Girls" was a New World Pictures release produced through Roger Corman's orbit, though Rothman used the assignment as a Trojan horse for her feminist politics. The story follows four women from strikingly different walks of life: a teacher who loses her job, a housewife whose marriage dissolves, a labourer who is sacked for organising, and a writer whose work is dismissed. All four end up working in the same establishment, and the film charts their negotiation of power inside that arrangement.
What separates the picture from the average women-in-prison or brothel film is that Rothman refuses to punish her characters with a moralising ending. The film asks who benefits from women's unpaid domestic labour, who loses when women are pushed out of respectable work, and whether the men around them actually want liberation or just cheaper services. None of those questions get answered neatly, and Rothman shoots the sexual content with a clinical gaze that treats the body as a workplace rather than a spectacle.
The cast features Claudia Jennings and Jennifer Lee in early roles that would later be reclaimed by exploitation fans. Both performers lean into the material, refusing the helpless victim routine that powered so many of their contemporaries. The result is a film that looks and sounds like exploitation on the poster and reads like a left-wing pamphlet in the dialogue.
Reading the political message in the flesh
The feminist argument at the centre of "The Working Girls" is straightforward but surprisingly rigorous for the format. Rothman argues that the sex industry, in all its grimy complexity, is a logical outcome of an economic system that refuses to value women's labour outside the home. The film sketches each woman's path into the establishment as a chain of layoffs, divorces, and evictions, refusing the convenient fantasy that any of them chose this line of work from idle hedonism.
The class critique runs through every scene. The housewife's wealthy husband can afford to act wounded about her new work, while the teacher's union refuses to back her wrongful dismissal. A regular client, presented as a sensitive intellectual, turns out to want a transaction rather than a relationship, exposing the hypocrisy of the sexual revolution when it meets the wallet. The film's most uncomfortable scene pits the women's solidarity against one of their own clients, and the writing refuses to soften the violence of that encounter.
Rothman was working in a tradition that ran from Betty Friedan through to the early sex-positive feminists of the 1970s, and the movie captures both sides of that debate. The characters argue about whether their work is liberation or surrender, and the movie never fully settles the question. That ambiguity is the political message: there is no clean exit from a system built on exploitation, and the only honest move is to keep arguing about it.
Why it disappeared
A film this messy was always going to struggle in a marketplace that preferred simpler formulas. "The Working Girls" opened to mixed reviews, was booked into a handful of drive-in circuits, and quickly got pushed off screens by bigger New World releases. The home video market in the United States picked it up briefly before the rights slipped into a tangle that kept it off shelves for years.
The film's marketing artwork, however, outlived the movie itself. The painted poster of four women in lingerie became a fixture of exploitation retrospectives, tape trader catalogues, and trash cinema coffee table books long after the film itself had vanished from legal distribution. That kind of afterlife, where the iconic marketing artwork becomes better known than the picture it sold, is a familiar pattern in the genre, and "The Working Girls" is one of its purest examples.
Australia made the picture's life even harder. The Australian Classification Board had no R18+ category until 1997, which meant anything beyond a soft PG could be either cut or refused classification outright. The film's explicit content put it into the refused territory, and only heavily cut print versions circulated in the underground market in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. That cut so much from the political content that the picture never recovered its argument for local audiences.
The film's politics also made it unwelcome in conservative Southern US markets where the bulk of sexploitation revenue lived. Without a friendly distributor or a vocal champion, it slid into the graveyard of titles known only to obsessives. By the time the home video boom of the 1980s arrived, the picture had become a footnote in the careers of Claudia Jennings and Jennifer Lee rather than a film in its own right.
The Australian angle
For Australian listeners, the picture's local story is the most interesting bit. Until the late 1990s, our classification system simply lacked the R18+ tier that most other comparable democracies had, which meant adults were technically prohibited from watching many films their peers elsewhere could rent at a suburban video store. That strange vacuum produced the Ozploitation wave as a domestic compromise: films like "Alvin Purple" and "Stork" used comedy to smuggle in nudity, and local directors learned to push the limits without triggering the board.
Drive-ins around the western edges of Sydney and the bayside suburbs of Melbourne carried American exploitation during the 1970s, and a film like "The Working Girls" might have played a couple of those lots before being pulled. The home video market that exploded in Australia in the early 1980s was filled with cut versions of films, often supplied by local distributors who had negotiated heavily censored masters in exchange for a release. That is the version most Australians who encountered the film in our country actually saw.
The 1997 addition of the R18+ classification finally allowed uncut versions of many older titles to circulate locally. The Sydney Mardi Gras, which had grown into a national celebration by then, framed a very different conversation about queer representation and sexual freedom. In that context, films that took sexuality seriously, including politically serious sexploitation, finally had a cultural audience willing to receive them on their own terms.
Where it sits next to its peers
Sexploitation with a political edge is rare enough that any candidate can be measured against a handful of titles. The film sits in conversation with Doris Wishman's "A Night to Remember," Stephanie Rothman's earlier "Group Marriage," and Roger Corman's own "Von Richthofen and Brown" in terms of intent, but it also has to compete with louder, better-marketed exploitation pictures from the same year. The comparison below sketches how the forgotten picture holds up against a few reference points.
| Film | Year | Director | Political Message | Audience Reception |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Working Girls | 1974 | Stephanie Rothman | Feminist critique of women's economic precarity | Limited release, quietly cut by censors |
| Caged Heat | 1974 | Jonathan Demme | Women-in-prison critique of patriarchal violence | Cult following, theatrical play |
| Score | 1974 | Radley Metzger | Bourgeois hypocrisy and the limits of sexual liberation | Arthouse crossover, limited release |
| Sweet Sugar | 1972 | Paul Ladriere | Exploitation of female labourers in tropical camps | Drive-in circuit, exploitation loyalists |
| Alvin Purple | 1973 | Tim Burstall | Local comedy workaround for strict censorship | Mainstream Australian hit |
The table makes clear that "The Working Girls" had plenty of company, but few of those pictures combined feminist argument, exploitation form, and the specific economic critique in quite the same way. Alvin Purple stands out as a local reference point, since it documents the exact censorship pressure Rothman's film would have faced on Australian screens. Sweet Sugar and Caged Heat trade on more familiar exploitation formulas, while Score comes closest in tone and ambition but lacks the class argument that gives Rothman's picture its edge.
Why it deserves a second look
Revisiting a forgotten sexploitation picture today is a small act of cultural archaeology, and "The Working Girls" rewards the dig. The film treats its female characters as workers first and bodies second, which is a striking inversion for the form. Even the sex scenes carry the weight of economic transaction rather than erotic fantasy, and the film's refusal to give its audience a clean moral resolution is rare for the genre.
For listeners who came of age in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, the picture is also a reminder of how restrictive the local screen environment really was. Films that took sexuality seriously were routinely denied a proper release, and the cut versions that did circulate could not deliver the political argument that gave the original any weight. The R18+ classification finally gave adults the right to choose, but the lost years of censored culture are still being recovered.
The hosts of the podcast dig into titles exactly like this one, where the marketing suggests one thing and the film does something more serious. If you want to hear the full discussion, settle into an episode, pour something cold, and let a forgotten movie do its slow, strange work on you.