The urban working girl in turn-of-the-century Canadian fiction

At the turn of the twentieth century, Canada's rapid industrialization drew on a relatively new urban labour force: young, single women. A denizen of factories, city streets, and department stores, the single, wage-earning woman represented to her contemporaries everything that was unnatural and unnerving about modern life. Where she made her way into fiction, we find rare social documents that speak of cultural codes unravelled and gender norms discarded.