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Working Girls in the West Working Girls in the West T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd1 1 11/27/07 8:46:55 AM T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd2 2 11/27/07 8:46:55 AM Working Girls in the West Representations of Wage-Earning Women Lindsey McMaster UBC Press • Vancouver • Toronto T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd3 3 11/27/07 8:46:55 AM © UBC Press 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca. 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Canada on ancient-forest-free paper (100% post-consumer recycled) that is processed chlorine- and acid-free, with vegetable-based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McMaster, Lindsey, 1972- Working girls in the West : representations of wage-earning women / Lindsey McMaster. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7748-1455-3 1. Women employees in literature. 2. Women in literature. 3. Women employees – Canada, Western – Social conditions – 20th century. 4. Women – Canada, Western – Social conditions – 20th century. I. Title. ps8103.w6m25 2007 c810.9′3553 c2007-905911-2 UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts , and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083 www.ubcpress.ca T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd4 4 11/27/07 8:46:55 AM For Rob T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd5 5 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd6 6 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM Contents Acknowledgments / ix Introduction / 1 1 Working Women in the West at the Turn of the Century / 16 2 The Urban Working Girl in Turn-of-the-Century Canadian Literature / 44 3 White Slaves, Prostitutes, and Delinquents / 88 4 Girls on Strike / 121 5 White Working Girls and the Mixed-Race Workplace / 145 Conclusion: Just Girls / 169 Notes / 176 Bibliography / 190 Index / 199 T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd7 7 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd8 8 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM Acknowledgments Writing a book is a daunting task, and I am immensely grateful to all those who advised, encouraged, and supported me in this undertaking. First to be singled out is my PhD supervisor, Richard Cavell, whose exquisite mentor- ing saw me through many of graduate school’s dicey moments. He always told me, with all the authority of his wonderfully alive intellect, to keep going, so I did. I also give heartfelt thanks to Pamela Dalziel, whose kind encouragement and editor’s eye make her an academic girl’s best friend. Many friends and colleagues have made the journey to authorship an intellectually and personally rewarding experience. I salute the contributors and editors of the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) student publications the Graduate and Babel for creating the stimulating intellectual community that graduate school is all about. It was in editorial meetings for these that I met Anna Lehman, a force of nature and just the person to share a few of life’s milestones with, and Maria Ticinovic, a true writer and intellectual, whose acerbic insight is a light to her friends. Thanks to Sharon Alker and Karen Selesky for organizing the work-in- progress meetings and staging the mock oral exams for UBC’s English PhD students; the good fellowship and intellectual rigour of these meetings were an inspiration. I was lucky to receive generous assistance in the form of graduate fellowships from the University of British Columbia and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The librarians of UBC’s Koerner Library and the archivists at the Vancouver City Archives and the British Columbia Archives, in Victoria, were of great help in my research as I zoomed through miles of newspapers on microfilm and searched for rare and fascinating documents. I was also ix T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd9 9 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM x Acknowledgments fortunate to spend a delightful afternoon with Irene Howard, talking about the inspiring life of labour activist Helena Gutteridge. Finally, I come to the big inspirations. It’s not every budding academic who can call up her mom and get not just the unqualified reassurance of a mother but also advice from one of Canada’s smartest scholars of English. I’m that lucky. And I’m doubly lucky because a chat with my dad will delight and surprise like an intellectual version of eating chocolate. My husband, Rob, saw me through not only the creation of the book but, during the same time, the birth of our daughter, Liv, and I thank him for thoughtful intellectual discussion during the day and for perhaps equally thoughtful bath times and diaper changes at night. When you have a child while in the midst of revising a scholarly book, you also need a seriously understanding editor, so to Jean Wilson too, sincere thanks. T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd10 10 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM Working Girls in the West T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd11 11 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd12 12 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM Introduction In 1891 Alice Barrett Parke went to visit her friends Lizzie and Mary Harding, who were living in Vancouver and working as school teachers. In her diary Parke recorded this singular evening of girl talk: We were all talking about marriage the other night, & Mary said so many people wondered why she had never married – how she had managed to withstand the opportunities and importunities of a new country, where so many men are walking about unattached. It seemed to me they are something like the little pigs in our old nursery rhyme who used to run about with knives & forks sticking in them, crying “Who’ll take a piece of me” – only these self-sacrificing creatures are pleading to be allowed to give the whole of themselves. However, to return to our subject, Mary said she had so long earned her own money, and spent it as she pleased, not having to give account to any one, that she could not bear the idea of having someone else give it to her, & she added “To tell the truth I don’t care to give up a sixty dollar school for a forty dollar man.” It sounded so funny I had to laugh.1 This rare account of female conversation in turn-of-the-century Vancouver touches playfully on issues of work and marriage and suggests the pleasures as well as the pressures experienced by young women inhabiting this far shore of Canadian civilization. Parke refers to the large number of unattached men in the West who outnumbered unattached women and who, according to this account, dashed about in search of a woman who would take them. The expectation that all young women would indeed marry was strong, and twenty-five-year-old Mary attests to the curiosity 1 T003 - UBC McMaster Artwork.indd1 1 11/27/07 8:46:56 AM 2 Introduction surrounding her single status. Her answer is a striking assertion of female independence that places the labour market against the marriage market in the most rationalist of terms. Her words would have confirmed the fears of many social critics who believed that women’s domestic roles as wives and mothers were put in jeopardy by the increasing entrance of women into paid employment, a dubious moral sphere where social and financial independence might weaken women’s inclination to marry. My interest lies in the social discourse that surrounded the figure of the “working girl” in the West, where specific social and geographic conditions shaped the debate concerning women and work in the city. Parke’s depiction of young women blithely setting men against paycheques was not the vision of womanhood that the fledgling nation espoused. This book addresses representations of young wage-earning women in western Canada, who, in the early part of the twentieth century, became touchstones for judgments on city life, work, and morality. Young, single, wage-earning women were something new and troubling to the middle-class administrators and social critics of the time. The numerous single working men, with their overcrowded dwellings and tendencies to unionize, were considered somewhat disorderly, but the necessity of their presence in the rapidly expanding urban centres of the West was never questioned. Young working women, by comparison, seemed to embody all that was unnatural and unnerving about modern times: the disintegration of the family, the independence of women, and the promiscuity of city life. So serious was the moral danger surrounding these “working girls” that the very future of the nation, symbolized in these future mothers, appeared to be at stake. Indeed, the figure of the working girl gained increasing notoriety in her time and was the subject of intense public debate.
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