“Neither forget nor remember your sex”: sexual politics in the early twentieth-century Canadian office

Description/Abstract

This paper examines social relationships in the early twentieth-century Canadian corporate workplace, focusing on Quebec—where the majority of the nation's financial services industry was located. I argue that in the course of building new networks for the flow of information and capital, women and men in the early twentieth-century white-collar workplace also produced new meanings about work and gender. This paper has two parts. Part one charts an overview of when clerical work feminized in Quebec, drawing on published census data and a 10% sample of the 1901 nominal census of Montreal. Drawing on personnel files and company journals from several Canadian financial institutions, part two explores social rules and mores about contact across differences—particularly of gender and religious affiliation—in the early twentieth-century white-collar workplace.