Working Girls
Working Girls offers a cultural and literary history of telegraphists, typists, shop-girls, and barmaids. It argues that these occupations helped to shape a distinctively new identity for emancipated young women, and explores how authors used this to navigate a precarious literary landscape.
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Working Girls offers a cultural and literary history of telegraphists, typists, shop-girls and barmaids. It argues that these occupations helped to shape a distinctively new identity for emancipated young women, which rivalled and even displaced the better-known caricature of the New Woman. But the book is not solely concerned with the prevalence and prominence of a distinctive class of female characters, and the ideological freightings of their multiple representations. It is, centrally, about the ways in which writers navigate anxieties about the act of writing. Repeatedly, typists, telegraphists, barmaids and shop-girls prove peculiarly alluring surrogates through which authors obliquely navigate a precarious literary landscape and the consequences of the modern cultural market-place.
