Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930

Rebecca Murdock is a lawyer with the Toronto firm Ryder Wright Blair &
Doyle, Barristers and Solicitors.

“The relentless sexualization of working girls’ behaviour” is the
theme of this book, which explores Toronto’s moral preoccupations
during its emergence as a leading centre of industry and Anglo-Celtic
society. As the author notes, the appearance of young single women in
Toronto’s urban landscape between the years 1880 and 1930 offered the
city, and the country, a repository for anxieties about
industrialization and female sexuality. Not surprisingly, the two were
often intertwined in the minds of turn-of-the-century city dwellers.

Although Strange makes cursory reference to the upper-class
“career” woman as well as to sex-trade workers, she is most
interested in working-class woman. These women, many of whom were
employed in garment factories, were viewed with a mixture of paternalism
and suspicion. On the one hand, social agencies such as the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, Big Sisters, and the YWCA were established
to assist young working women in preserving their moral integrity. On
the other hand, Toronto’s Morality Department (est. 1886) attempted to
control the supposed proclivity of working “girls” for “occasional
prostitution” as a wage supplement. As one observer noted at the time,
“Young men tell me that girls employed by T. Eaton Co. are many of
them prostitutes. That is to say, a young many must first get well
acquainted with them, so that they know who he is, and then the results
will follow.”

This book is an entertaining read, well researched and lucidly
organized. Strange relies on an impressive array of police records,
commissioned studies, municipal documents, and local literature to
describe, often in anecdotal fashion, an urban society prescient with
the knowledge that women’s entry into the work force would profoundly
affect domestic relationships.

At times, Strange’s attempt to develop discrete social cycles within
the 50-year period she examines seems strained and unnecessary. Her book
would have benefited from a more explicit feminist and/or class
analysis. While she makes periodic reference to social theorists, a
greater application of Michel Foucault’s work on discipline and
sexuality, for example, would have made her text more conceptually
rigorous. That said, Toronto’s Girl Problem is exemplary at what it
does best: recovering a very specific and unique piece of Canadian
working women’s history.