A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: Bi-modal Fertility Dynamics and Family Life in French-Canadian Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historians have struggled with an ingrained perception of what constituted the “traditional” Quebec family at the beginning of the twentieth century. Early studies on the demographic history of Quebec portrayed women as generators of large families, a practice prescribed by the political elite as well as the Catholic Church. The new social history, and most especially the recent generation of feminist-inspired historians, has revisited and criticized the myth of the large family. Aggregated demographic statistics would indicate that francophone families continued to produce significantly more children than their English-speaking counterparts well into the twentieth century, despite a longstanding experience of industrialization, urbanization and contraception — the so-called hallmarks of modernization. Yet statistics also make clear that, even before the onset of declining fertility in the late nineteenth century, the majority of Quebec families did not do so, and there was in fact wide variation in family size. The real distinctiveness of Quebec’s fertility decline was its unique and persistent minority of very large families that disappeared virtually overnight in the mid-twentieth century when the children of these families chose not to continue the pattern.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".