The feminization of clerical work in early twentieth-century Montreal /

This research examines the changing relationships of gender, place and identity wrought by women's entrance into Montreal's financial service sector between 1900 and 1930. I seek to answer two related questions. First, what kinds of identities were enabled in the new spaces created by the feminization of clerical work? In particular, how was gender, sexual, and ethno-linguistic difference constructed within the mixed-sex clerical workspace? Second, what effect did women's entrance into corporate workspaces in the financial district have on prevailing notions about gender, class and urban space? How did this change in labour markets affect representations of women in public more generally?I make three arguments about women's entrance into Montreal's white-collar workforce. First, I argue that this process created a new kind of "contact zone" within and beyond the white-collar workplace. In these spaces, people came together across cleaves of difference, and ideas about nationalism, class, religion, and language were negotiated in new ways. Secondly, I argue that women's entrance into this sector of the labour market was marked by contradiction. On the one hand, women were held responsible for bringing sexuality into the white-collar workplace, and were sexualized within corporate culture. On the other hand, ideas about "respectability" defined through sexual propriety and corporeal restraint were central to the corporate image as well as media representations of female clerical workers. Finally, I argue that the feminization of clerical work re-mapped relations of gender, class and space. In the highly modernized offices of the financial district, ideas about public womanhood competed. I argue that this change in labour helped legitimize representations of modern womanhood which were consummately urban in nature