Working Girls in the West: Representations of Wage-Earning Women (review)

Reviewed by: Working Girls in the West: Representations of Wage-Earning Women Donica Belisle Working Girls in the West: Representations of Wage-Earning Women. Lindsey Mcmaster. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007/2008. Pp. 224, $85.00 cloth, $32.95 paper In Working Girls of the West, Lindsey McMaster explores portrayals of working women in western Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining texts produced by writers, governments, social reformers, and journalists, she argues that authors employed the figure of the young, single, and white waged woman to represent all that was good and bad about modernization. One might expect a book on discursive construction to sideline questions of accountability, but power is central to Working Girls. McMaster takes reformers, legislators, and employers to task for devaluing and exploiting working women’s labour. McMaster is also cognizant of working women’s marginalized status, and explores their subjectivities and actions. What results is not what some might see as a post-structural abandonment of material concerns, but an investigation into how empire, race, gender, sexuality, and class affected wage-earning women. Gender historians will be familiar with some of the book’s findings. The first chapter covers middle-class efforts to lure white women to the region to act as civilizing mothers of the so-called British race, and as domestic servants. The second is an extended version of McMaster’s excellent 2002 chapter in Essays on Canadian Writing, which examines portrayals of working women in fiction by Agnes Maule Machar, J.G. Sime, Isabel MacKay, and Bertrand Sinclair. The last three chapters show how fears about immigration, industrialization, and urbanization encouraged reformers to focus on working women’s morality at the expense of their material needs. Partly echoing Carolyn Strange’s findings about Toronto, McMaster illustrates [End Page 561] that many believed white wage-earning women were on a slippery slope toward prostitution, hastened there by their deviant morality, as demonstrated by their abandonment of motherhood, as well as by their inability to fend for themselves against what were believed to be lecherous men, including Asians, in the workplace. McMaster’s best chapter – on strikes – investigates femininity and labour activism. Whereas union men tended to hold political discussions, Vancouver’s female laundry workers who struck in 1918 held dances. Yet as Nan Enstad discovers in her study of New York garment workers during this period, strikers’ pursuit of fun did not preclude militancy. Vancouver’s laundry workers in fact used violence to defend their positions, as did working women in Winnipeg who, during the General Strike, assaulted delivery drivers and set fire to streetcars. Receiving much attention from the press, both groups redefined labour militancy, challenged feminine docility, and defined the modern woman as confident and independent. Working Girls’ most valuable contribution is its exploration of depictions of liberated wage-earning women. McMaster uncovers evidence that writers sympathetic to working women, as well as some female workers themselves, believed employment facilitated freedom. A journalist in Toronto recorded one working woman’s description of her social life: ‘“Monday night, an occasional (that means a man who just calls upon one sometimes); Tuesday, my steady; Wednesday, another occasional; Thursday, steady; Friday, another occasional; Saturday and Sunday, the steady”’ (41). McMaster also discusses a 1919 autobiography of a prostitute who worked in Winnipeg and later opened a brothel in Alberta. This author did not romanticize her trade, but neither did she suggest her work compromised her morality. Consciously writing against victimization narratives, she argued that prostitution enabled her to live independently. One of the few books in Canadian historiography to look at gender and urbanization outside of Ontario and Quebec, Working Girls enriches both gender history and the history of western Canada. Yet because the demography and culture of the prairies differed in some ways from those of the coast, one wonders if more attention to the subtleties of western circumstances may have nuanced the book’s findings. Since the book’s sources are weighted toward Vancouver and to a lesser extent Winnipeg, its conclusions may not always be applicable to Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is somewhat surprising that Working Girls focuses exclusively on textual representations. The book’s cover includes a photograph...

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