ABSTRACT

At the turn-of-the-century, no figure appeared more often or in a greater variety of contexts than the urban working-girl. The subject of numerous fact gathering surveys and reform movements, a prototype for female heroines of mass-marketed romances, high-brow urban novels, and popular tenement tales, she is an object of censure and sympathy, of reform and fascination. 1 The most obviously “new” product of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, she cuts across disparate spaces, a hyphenated figure defined by her shifting positions in the home, in the workplace, and in the commercial and social places of the urban environment. Not only does the working-girl work, she performs double duty as a symptom through which the changing spatial relations of public and private and their gendered implications are constructed. She functions as an axis of displacement and condensation that holds together heterogeneous spaces and through which the gendered implications of urbanization are articulated and refigured in cultural texts of the era.