The Evolution of the <i>Birth Control Handbook</i>: From Student Peer-Education Manual to Feminist Self-empowerment Text, 1968–1975
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Peer education has been recognized as a significant means of educating youths, especially about sexual health issues. Although considered a relatively recent development, there are, however, older examples of its existence. In Canada, the Birth Control Handbook (1968) stands out as a stellar example of one student peer-education manual. This article establishes the Handbook's student peer-education roots. But it also charts the Handbook's evolution from a revolutionary student peer-education manual to a key feminist self-empowerment text within the Quebec context between 1968 and 1975. Finally, this article includes the recollections of some of the key individuals involved in the development, production and distribution of the Handbook. In so doing, this article confirms the Handbook's significance to both anglophone and francophone student and feminist politics as well as to women seeking information about birth control.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".