TY - BOOK ID - 77884305 TI - Working girls in the West PY - 2008 SN - 1282593528 9786612593529 0774855800 9780774855808 9780774814560 077481456X 0774814551 PB - Vancouver UBC Press DB - UniCat KW - Canadian literature KW - Women employees in literature. KW - Women in literature. KW - Work in literature. KW - Women employees KW - Women KW - Human females KW - Wimmin KW - Woman KW - Womon KW - Womyn KW - Females KW - Human beings KW - Femininity KW - Female employees KW - Women workers KW - Working women KW - Workingwomen KW - Employees KW - Woman (Christian theology) in literature KW - Women in drama KW - Women in poetry KW - Canadian literature (English) KW - English literature KW - History and criticism. KW - Social conditions UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77884305 AB - As the twentieth century got under way in Canada, young women who entered the paid workforce became the focus of intense public debate. Young wage-earning women � "working girls" � embodied all that was unnerving and unnatural about modern times: the disintegration of the family, the independence of women, and the unwholesomeness of city life. These anxieties were amplified in the West. Long after eastern Canada was considered settled and urbanized, the West continued to be represented as a frontier where the idea of the region as a society in the making added resonance to the idea of the working girl as social pioneer. Using an innovative interpretive approach that centres on literary representation, Lindsey McMaster takes a fresh look at the working heroine of western Canadian literature alongside social documents and newspaper accounts of her real-life counterparts. Working Girls in the West heightens our understanding of a figure that fired the imagination of writers and observers at the turn of the last century. ER -