The 1930s were a period of serious economic depression and consequently a difficult period for many Canadian working-class women and their families. Two writers undertook to write about how these women lived through that period. One was a fictional work, The Tin Flute, written by the celebrated Canadian novelist Gabrielle Roy. The other is a scholarly study by a Toronto historian, Katrina Srigley, and is based to a great extent on interviews with women who lived through those years.

Your assignment is to compare these books. Specifically,

What similarities and differences can you find in what the two books have to say about the experience of working-class women in Canada in the 1930s?What are the relative merits of fiction versus oral history in telling the story of those workers?