Midwife-Healers in Canadian Mennonite Immigrant Communities: Women who “made things right”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For Mennonites who immigrated from Pennsylvania to Upper Canada beginning in the early nineteenth century and for those who arrived from the Russian Empire later that century and from the Soviet Union beginning in the 1920s, the community midwife served multiple purposes: not only did she assist at numerous births when hospital deliveries and physicians were rare or inaccessible, but she also provided a wide range of essential health care services that were crucial to individuals and families experiencing the trauma of uprooting and the challenges of rural settlement. Community and family studies profile some of the more prominent midwives in early Mennonite settlement communities, supplementing the information found in the midwifery journal of Mennonite immigrant Sarah Dekker Thielman. While women such as Sarah did hold characteristics that fit the image of the “neighbour” midwife, a concept that has dominated historical portrayals of women who assist at childbirth, their personal lives and chosen career paths exhibited a great deal more diversity. Chez les Mennonites qui ont immigre de la Pennsylvanie au Haut-Canada au debut du XIXe siecle et chez ceux qui sont arrives de l’Empire russe plus tard durant ce siecle et de l’Union sovietique au debut des annees 1920, la sage-femme du village s’acquittait de roles multiples : non seulement aidait-elle souvent les femmes a accoucher la ou les hopitaux et les medecins etaient rares ou inaccessibles, mais elle offrait egalement une foule de services de sante essentiels qui etaient cruciaux pour les personnes et les familles aux prises avec le traumatisme du deracinement et les defis de l’etablissement en milieu rural. Des etudes sur les communautes et les familles dressent le profil de certaines des plus eminentes sages-femmes des premiers etablissements de pionniers mennonites, etoffant l’information trouvee dans le journal de sage-femme de l’immigrante mennonite Sarah Dekker Thielman. Si des femmes telles que Thielman correspondaient bel et bien a l’image typique de la sage-femme du « voisinage », un concept qui a domine la representation historique des femmes aidant a l'accouchement, leur vie personnelle et leurs choix de carriere logeaient a l'enseigne d’une diversite beaucoup plus grande.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".