Thread in Her Hands - Cash in Her Pockets: Women and Domestic Textile Production in 19th-Century New Brunswick
Bibliographic record
Abstract
HOME WEAVING TURNED women into drudges, complained a correspondent in New Brunswick’s Colonial Farmer in 1865. “Agricola”, a Northumberland farmer, feared the social implications of home weaving. He felt that women’s roles in the household should not run to manufacturing since “if the women are to be drudges, they can have no opportunities of acquiring those little accomplishments and pleasant manners which go so far to make life pleasant, and the consequence is that she makes him a drudge too”. Agricola was also concerned about spending money on equipment for the farm. The purchase of weaving tools would be a wasted investment, for it was “better for the farmer to spend his spare capital in labour saving machinery for the farm, than to invest it in spinning or weaving apparatus, which at best would be of the clumsiest”.1 Agricola argued that cloth was “better done and cheaper by machinery than by hand labour”. After all, William Park’s cotton mill had just opened in Saint John, and industrial production surely heralded the arrival of a new age in New Brunswick.2 Agricola’s commentaries set the tone as Maritime Canada was poised to embrace encroaching modernity with a new emphasis on commercial farming, improved farm machinery and new manufacturing opportunities. Although home weavers in New Brunswick produced 60 per cent of the woollen and cotton cloth made in the province in 1871, within 15 years new cloth factory manufacturers would gradually begin to displace the smaller enterprises based on home production.3 Home weaving was a concern in 19th-century New Brunswick, and a vigorous debate followed in the pages of the Colonial Farmer. From today’s perspective, a discussion of home manufacturing in New Brunswick is part of the new interest of
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".