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This thesis examines the labour experiences of post-war immigrant Italian women who were employed as household workers in the greater Toronto area. As a sub-text, it also explores the social construction of fictional immigrant Italian women's lives in Italian-Canadian literature. My approach to this study is based on the notion that those who have lived an experience know more about it than those who have not. In this case, the experiences of Italian immigrant household workers expressed through oral interviews I conducted, are compared with the images of immigrant Italian women as victims of triple oppression commonly found in Social Science and Popular Literature. Extant popular literature on the situation of Italian females in Canada is flowering, but immigrant women have not received proper analysis because their stereotyped image has not been fully debunked. A qualitative analysis shows that they are portrayed by both female and male writers in a variety of ways, most of which perpetuate stereotypes. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)