Kym Bird: Redressing the Past: The Politics of Early English-Canadian Women's Drama, 1880-1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
KYM BIRD Redressing Past: The Politics of Early English-Canadian Women's Drama, 1880-1920 Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2004. xii + 269 pp. SHELLEY SCOTT Nightwood Theatre: A Woman's Work is Always Done. Edmonton: AU Press, 2010. 344 pp. Despite differences in time periods, Kym Bird's Redressing Past: The Politics of Early English-Canadian Women's Drama, 1880-1920 and Shelley Scott's Nightwood Theatre: A Woman's Work is Always Done share certain commonalities: both originated as PhD dissertations, both examine contributions of women to Canadian theatre, and both interweave political, gender, and aesthetic concerns. Moreover, both books situate themselves as feminist projects of recovery: Bird's work is described as preliminary attempt to fill historical gap (4); while Scott's stated desire is to recognize and preserve contributions, thereby arresting further loss (224). Both achieve their recuperative goals and, by adding to our body of knowledge, effectively engender a more complete and diverse picture of Canada's theatrical past. Redressing Past focuses on small but significant body of texts written by Canadian women between 1880 and 1920 in response to first wave of sustained feminist political activity (4). Included in analysis are closet dramas of Sarah Anne Curzon, mock parliaments of suffragists, plays of Kate Simpson Hayes, and comedies of Clara Rothwell Anderson--a sampler of dominant genres chosen by women at time. Bird identifies common traits in work, such as didactic purpose, construction of new roles for women, and an often contradictory ideological tension between liberal (or equality) and maternal (or domestic) feminist strains of day. Bird posits continuous dialectical between the struggle for political and social advancement in terms of both liberal and domestic feminism, and/or a reactionary position supporting status quo and an ideology of separate spheres (13). Bird aptly illustrates this duality with each subject and, given her chronological arrangement of material, further demonstrates overarching trajectory of Canadian feminist movement in this period. Drawing on a materialist feminist approach, Bird analyzes conditions and texts, expertly exploring relationship between biography, politics, and genre to uncover influences and intersections that contributed to formulation of work at hand (4). The first chapter critiques Curzon's Laura Secord and The Sweet Girl Graduate in relation to Canadian nationalism, political activism, and generic configuration, revealing a liberal feminist philosophy with some contradictory maternal feminist underpinnings. Chapter Two imaginatively re-constructs a mock parliament--a collectively-devised satirical parody of role reversal in which disenfranchised men appeal to a government of women for right to vote. Bird identifies a political discrepancy in form, given reverence for democratic process on one hand, and a concurrent condemnation of system due to gender bias on other (91). Chapter Three focuses on Kate Simpson Hayes, whose personal life and dramatic work (no longer extant) suggest a liberal feminist politic, while her later plays (Slumberland Shadows and The Anvil) demonstrate a full conversion to domestic feminism and doctrine of Social Purity. The fourth chapter examines feminist comedies of Clara Rothwell Anderson, a minister's wife who achieved church support and literary acclaim reinforcing maternal and Social Gospel precepts while simultaneously expanding women's roles and delimitations of drama. With above case studies, Bird adroitly examines tensions and contradictions of woman movement, bringing to light heretofore neglected plays and playwrights, and thus confirms existence of an early feminist dramatic tradition in Canada (15). …
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".