Re-Working Respectability: The Feminisation of Clerical Work and the Politics of Public Virtue in Early Twentieth-Century Montreal

The author explores what it meant to be “respectable” for men and women in early twentieth-century Montreal, and suggests how claims to such status were used both by women seeking clerical employment and the corporations for which they worked. Her information is drawn from personnel files housed at the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Bank of Montreal, and Sun Life Assurance Company, as well as the Montreal Herald newspaper between 1920 and 1930. She argues that corporations employing increasingly large numbers of women by the first quarter of the twentieth century drew on rhetorics of respectability in order to assure that their employees would be viewed favourably by patrons and others, even though understandings of what constituted the respectable were changing during this period. She notes that while women were engaged in clerical work in a great number of large and small offices at this time, the archives of the two banks and Sun Life house a significant portion of the very little qualitative personnel information to have survived from this era. The Herald newspaper, one of Montreal’s primary entertainment journals, focussed as much on the work-a-day concerns and pleasures of city life as on world events and, as such, it provides an excellent way to address questions about the meaning of social space in Montreal at this time.

Power, Place and Identity: Historical Studies of Social and Legal Regulations in Quebec

Montreal

Montreal History Group

1998

151-168

en

0-9697890-2-5