Applying to be ‘Industrial Soldiers’: The Letters of Young Women Wanting to Train as Chemistry Laboratory Technicians, 1942-1944
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Between 1942 and 1944, just over 100 young women from southwestern Ontario applied to, and were accepted into, one of four female chemistry laboratory technician courses held at the University of Western Ontario under the aegis of the Dominion-Provincial War Emergency Training Program. This paper constitutes a social discourse analysis of the letters written by the young women. It explores the backgrounds of the participants in the communication, as well as its social and institutional context, seeking to understand how the young women presented themselves as they sought entry into this course. Did they duplicate the discourse provided to them? They did, but only to a degree. For example, they emphasized educational attainment but did not reference patriotism and a desire to help Canada’s war effort. This exercise suggests that Canada’s Total War did not touch every Canadian quite as profoundly as we might believe.RésuméEntre 1942 et 1944, un peu plus de 100 jeunes femmes venant du Sud-Ouest de l’Ontario posaient avec succès leur candidature à l’un des quatre cours de formation de techniciennes pour des laboratoires de chimie tenus à l’Université de Western Ontario sous l’égide du Programme de formation d’urgence en temps de guerre du Canada. Cet article présente une analyse sociale de la teneur des lettres de motivation écrites par ces jeunes femmes. L’auteure s’intéresse à la fois aux antécédents ainsi qu’à la situation sociale et académique des candidates afin de mieux comprendre comment ces jeunes femmes se sont présentées elles-mêmes en vue de leur admission à ce cours. Ont-elles reproduit le discours qui leur était suggéré? Oui, dans une certaine mesure. Par exemple, elles mettaient l’accent sur la réussite scolaire, mais elles ne faisaient aucune référence au patriotisme et au désir de contribuer à l’effort de guerre canadien. Cette étude suggère que l’effort de guerre n’affectait pas tous les Canadiens aussi profondément qu’on l’aurait cru.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".