"There are usually but three principles - the villain, myself and the girl and she was never important…. The leading lady had to be fairly good looking, and it helped some if she had a little acting ability. As far as I was concerned I didn't insist that she have a sense of humor. There was always the danger that such a girl would laugh at a gag in the middle of a scene, which meant ruining it and having to remake it."

What was Keaton's reasoning behind the lack of development in his female co-stars? To push them into the background so he could egotistically be the center of attraction? Doubtful, he was considered to be a generous performer by his peers. The public were paying to see a Buster Keaton film staring Buster Keaton. That in itself dictated a high priority for Keaton screen time. There is also little room in comedy for extended passionate and involved love scenes between the hero and heroin… it just isn't funny. Once a love scene becomes funny it is no longer believably passionate. A quirk of the times seemed to dictate that comedy films had the morals of Victorian culture rather than that of the Jazz Age (the exception being Clara Bow). Sex were not the territory of the young, it was an adult privilege to be earned, not an instant proof of adulthood to be embarked on as soon as the hormones kicked in. A respectable young man of the middle classes was expected to prove his love and maturity through non sexual displays of valor, and show he had the means to support a wife before being allowed the joys, or otherwise, of marriage.

In most of the Keaton features the girl is probably not worthy of the effort Buster puts into winning her, their only apparent value is that Buster wants them. Keaton doesn't attempt to give them any value unlike Chaplin in his films, they at least show tenderness, sensitivity and charm. Keaton's ultimate feeling for his leading ladies makes itself apparent in "Go West" where his ingenue is a brown Jersey cow called Brown Eyes. 

There are a three exceptions in his features, two are Keaton's more nasty heroines, Dorothy Sebastian in Spite Marriage, a brilliant physical comedienne and probably Keaton's most rounded heroine: Marion Mack in The General and, to a lesser degree Kathryn McGuire in The Navigator. All three have scenes where they interact with Keaton on an equal footing, they have personalities and actually do something. Dorothy Sebastian is the nastiest, most scheming of all Keaton's heroines. Her character, Trilby Drew an actress, marries Buster a besotted fan, to spite the man she thinks she is in love with but who rejects Trilby for another woman. On Buster and her wedding night Trilby gets very drunk in a nightclub and Buster has to carry her home. By the time they arrive she has become another Keaton prop that instigates one of Buster's favourite gags. 

He tries to put her to bed. She is a floppy, inanimate object that manages not to cooperate with Buster's intentions. He tries to put her on a chair, he cannot pick her up because she folds in half and slides through his arms. He eventually gets her onto the chair by laying the chair sideways on the floor next to her, 'sitting' her in it and then lifting girl and chair into a vertical position. As soon as he turns his back she has slid off the chair again. This routine lasts approximately ten minutes and the scene was so dear to Keaton that he re-enacted it with his third wife Eleanor both on TV and at the Medrano Circus in Paris in the mid 50's. Sebastian and Keaton had an on screen rapport and affinity that complimented one another other, they also had an off screen affinity that lasted several years.

Marion Mack, Annabelle Lee in The General, rejects Buster after her brother and father tell her Buster has refused to sign up to fight in the Civil War. An erroneous assumption on their part, he was first to try to sign up but was rejected as being more use to the South as an engineer on the railroad. She will not listen to Buster's side of the events and rejects him, the man she supposedly loves, for his lack of courage. She tells Buster she will have nothing to do with him until he is in uniform. Annabelle Lee manages to get kidnapped and when Buster discovers her held captive in the Union Army's headquarters she immediately presumes he has performed his heroics, battling his way through enemy lines, solely to rescue her. He does not deny this although he was in reality trying to save his locomotive, the General, he stumbled across her purely by chance. 

She proves to be totally incompetent in their escape, nearly costing Buster the General, his freedom and his life. Buster gives Annabelle more credit for common sense than she is really due, relying on her to drive the train while he is setting traps for the Union Army following them. She has trouble with the General from the word go, trouble stopping it, puts it into reverse when it should be going forward, forward when it should be in reverse and prematurely sets fire to a bridge which Buster is standing on. She is also very selective in what firewood she is prepared to put in the loco's boiler, throwing aside a piece with a hole in it and choosing dainty, small wood chips much to Buster's annoyance. She spends approximately half the film with Buster as his only companion and foil giving her time to develop her character. She is never intentionally funny, her humour comes from her incompetence which in turn sets into motion Keaton's gags. Annabelle does however turn the tables on Buster, he sees her tying a length of rope between two small saplings. He mocks her for this but later, when the Union train passes through her trap, the rope binds the two marksmen, who are about to shoot at them, to the engine's sides. The saplings becoming entangled in the Texas's wheels forcing them to stop giving Buster, Annabelle and the General a valuable chance to get ahead. Naturally, Buster gets a uniform and the girl in the end, he has once again proved himself a hero.

In the Navigator Kathryn Mcguire , by the very nature of the story is Keaton's only human companion aboard the ship until it is overrun by cannibals towards the end of the film. They have to try to survive alone on an ocean going liner and to do this need to use the ship's galley and its catering size utensils to feed themselves. The girl is moderately helpful to Buster but as usual is inept, she is allowed though to work with Buster and does develop a reality through her actions and interactions. She is still bordering on the standard Keaton heroine, an onlooker, a source of motivation and occasional cheerleader.

In an unusual twist for Keaton women, the climax of Seven Chances has Keaton chased by thousands of women. They take on (for the 1920's) an almost masculine role. The pursuing women are aggressive, assertive and dominant, they hijack a streetcar, the crane at the rail depot, stampede through a football game leaving the players lying like scattered tenpins and they even terrorize an eight man regiment of able bodied police officers sending them running for cover. No man is safe from their intrusion. A bricklayer unwittingly becomes the supplier of ammunition for the women as they stream past him, each removing a brick from the wall he is constructing. After momentarily eluding the horde of women Buster climbs into the back seat of a car to be seen almost instantly emerging from the opposite door followed by one of the larger women. She chases Buster across the road, on the other side of the road, men are digging a ditch, Buster jumps over the ditch but the woman falls in when she tries to follow him. We do not see her emerge but men suddenly start leaping out, some voluntarily, some 'assisted'. 

At the end of the chase Buster heads for the top of a steep, rock laden hill. The women know a shorter route to the bottom (although Buster's seems to be the most direct, as in virtually straight down) and rush to cut him off. As Buster makes his way down the hill he dislodges a rock which in turn knocks another loose instigating a domino effect of bigger and bigger rocks chasing Buster. He sees the women crowded at the bottom of the hill, turns and starts to scramble back up choosing the cascading rocks as a safer option to the clutches of the women below. The women in turn see the rocks hurtling towards them and decide that the desire to get their hands on Buster is outweighed by their need for self-preservation. Buster is the final victor, free to continue his journey to his predictably ineffectual awaiting heroine and… marriage. 

How much of Keaton's personal life and problems spilled over into his films is often debated. Is it likely Joe Schenck would have permitted a blatant display of Talmadge family bashing to be aired publicly? The Talmadge clan stuck together and the lampooning of Buster's wife, Natalie Talmadge and his mother in law, Peg surely would have had his sister in law, Norma taking her husband, Joe Schenck aside for a family discussion. Schenck appeared to have a tighter hold over the Buster Keaton Studio's purse strings than Keaton either liked to admit or knew. Ultimately, Schenck's word was law. Buster was genuinely fond of Joe Schenck, Joe had been very generous to Keaton financially as well as artistically. He paid Buster's family's rent while he was serving in France as a soldier in WW1 and on Buster's return to the US, Schenck took one look at the sickly Buster in a military hospital bed and immediately emptied his wallet giving the money to Buster. But when the chips were really down in the 1930's and 40's Schenck then president of 20th Century Fox made Keaton only empty offers.