article
“Deficient in love-interest”: the sexual politics of the office in Canadian fiction (1890-1920)
“Deficient in love-interest”: the sexual politics of the office in Canadian fiction (1890-1920)
Autor
Galletly, Sarah
Institución
Resumen
Using the concerns of the period over female workers’ susceptibility to office romance and sexual harassment as a starting point, this article will explore the depiction of secretaries and stenographers in Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and Bertrand Sinclair’s North of Fifty-Three (1914). It will examine the pressure to gain economic independence and personal autonomy through office work, alongside the need to conform to cultural ideologies, which still argue for women’s destiny to be centred on marriage and children. Did the working-girl literature of this era support and endorse the image of the independent, hard-working, emotionally fulfilled working woman? Or was women’s clerical labour instead seen merely as another step in their ‘natural’ evolution from girls to mothers? This article will also uncover whether the fictional office was presented as a site of potential female growth and autonomy, or as a hostile and dangerous space where women should escape from as soon as possible for the safety of the home.