The title of this book was changed from Who Do You Think You Are? to The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose prior to its release in the United States, in part, because Munro's American publisher believed that the colloquial criticism "who do you think you are?" (an expression which also appears in Lives of Girls and Women) would not be familiar to American readers. Despite this change, the attitudes and cultural biases that give rise to the colloquialism remain a central concern of these ten linked stories, which trace the maturing of Rose from childhood through middle age.

Rose grows up with an ingrained sense of a society divided according to the trappings of class, a cultural assertion expressed in the organization of the town of Hanratty itself. In Hanratty proper, "the social structure ran from doctors and dentists and lawyers down to foundry...