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Record W119490937

Unsexed by Labor: Middle-Class Women and the Need to Work

2008· article· en· W119490937 on OpenAlex
Lynn M. Alexander

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe American Transcendental Quarterly · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAmerican Literature and Culture
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMiddle classWorking classQuarter (Canadian coin)Gender studiesWork (physics)Spanish Civil WarSociologyCensusHistoryLawPolitical sciencePoliticsDemographyEngineeringPopulation
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In the post-Civil War struggle in the United States to regain economic stability it was not uncommon for single, middle-class women to leave home and seek employment either out of necessity or, increasingly, out of a desire to develop a professional career. Whether needing money or discontented and unfulfilled, the number of women entering the job market continued to increase. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the number of women outside the home skyrocketed: by 1890 almost 4 million--approximately 20 percent of American women--were what the Census Bureau called gainfully employed (Change; Foner 257). It was during the 1870s, however, that writers began to incorporate such women into their fiction, exploring these difficulties. During the first part of the decade, two works appeared that looked at such issues: Louisa May Alcott's Work and Lillie Devereaux Blake's Fettered for Life. In their portrayals of working women, Alcott and Blake raise most of the important, sometimes troubling questions working women faced, as well as they presented to their society. The authors also examine why a woman would want to work, especially why a properly brought young woman would desire to do so. In 1873 Alcott published Work, a novel exploring the employment possibilities available to a young, middle-class woman forced to earn a living. Through a series of dead-end, but acceptable, jobs--seamstress, governess, companion, and actress--Christie Devon fuses the notions of the lady and the worker. Since she never enters the factory (which by this time had lost the genteel coloration of the Lowell Experiment (1)) or becomes an advocate for proletarian reform, Christie can be viewed as encompassing the fine instincts [and] gracious manners of the upper classes mixed with the skill and courage of working women (430). Within Work, Alcott's representation of labor focuses on those too refined to stand it for long and all but ignores the jobs and indignities faced by many working-class women. The novel's depiction of feminine labor outside the laboring poor, particularly involved in factory work, represents a new area for women writers. (2) A year after the publication of Work, Blake published Fettered for Life which, like Work focuses on the lack of employment possibilities middle-class women faced despite their intelligence, education, and drive. In fact, the two novels have many points in common: both feature young female protagonists who appear to be driven by necessity, temperament, or principle out into the world to find support, happiness, and homes for themselves (Work 11), and who feel that their father (in the case of Laura Stanley) or male guardian (in the case of Christie Devon) is overbearing and harsh; both fear that if they stay home they will end up in stifling, unhappy marriages; both encounter a wide range of characters as they search for an occupation; and both eventually find love. Yet the two novels do differ. Work, like most novels of the time, explores women's labor, especially that of the middle classes, as a continuation of their duties at home, thus supporting the concept of separate spheres and women's essential domestic nature. In contrast, Fettered for Life repeatedly demonstrates not only that women often possess the skills and intelligence to surpass men, but also that women who are not allowed a definition of self beyond wife and mother are frequently destroyed by their domestic lives. The most notable difference between the two texts is in the narrative perspective. The perspective of Work is strictly Christie Devon's. Although she encounters a wide range of characters, many based on revolutionary people of the time such as Harriet Tubman and Henry David Thoreau, the focus remains on Christie and her search for 'a better sort of life' than a 'dull one made up of everlasting work, with no object but money' or a life of 'dependence where there isn't any love to make it bearable [. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.562
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.181
Teacher spread0.173 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it