Writing Desire: The Love Letters of Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the intimate relationship produced by and reflected in the written correspondence between Frieda Fraser and Edith Williams, arguably the largest correspondence of its kind in North America. Frieda Fraser was a professor of microbiology at the University of Toronto and Edith Williams was one of the first female veterinarians in Canada. Their correspondence was written from 1924 to 1927 and then intermittently from 1933 to 1943. This dissertation contends that Frieda’s and Edith’s correspondence was a place wherein the women created a self-defined sexual description that was in dialogue with cultural discourses that denoted the meaning of the modern lesbian. Frieda and Edith referred to themselves as “devoted women,” their designation of a sexual subjectivity that marked their differentiation from these discourses. Edith and Frieda arrived upon a unique notion of romantic devotion, shaped alongside an awareness of contemporary depictions of the lesbian in literature, in science, and in the theatre. This dissertation analyzes how two middle-class Canadian women came to live their lives as “devoted women” within a culture that did not recognize, nor mirror their sexual identities. Affected by modernism, Edith’s and Frieda’s letter-writing produced, enhanced, and helped the women define their desire for one another. Moreover, the women’s devoted relationship benefitted their medical careers and their medical careers benefitted their partnership. In relation to family and profession this dissertation asks to what degree was discretion employed in order to preserve their relationship? In focusing on the correspondence, this dissertation is more than an exercise in “finding the lesbians” in Canadian history: it asks “how did the lesbians find themselves?”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".