In turn-of-the-century 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 examines the working-girl heroine of literature alongside social documents and newspaper accounts of her everyday counterparts. "Working Girls in the West" heightens our understanding of a figure that fired the imagination of writers and observers in her day.Taking a fresh look at the working heroines of western Canadian poetry, prose, and fiction, "Working Girls in the West" will appeal to scholars and students of Canadian history, literature, and women"s studies.