Working [on Imperial] Families: Bettina Bradbury’s Imperial Re(turn)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When I returned to Calgary after giving a version of this paper at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association this past May in St. Catherines, I opened my office door to discover a copy of Bettina Bradbury’s Working Families resting on my desk. In my absence, my colleague Tom Brown, who, like Bettina has just retired, bequeathed me his copy of this thoughtful and terrain-shifting study. I was reminded of Tom’s generosity as I began to revise this paper for Labour/Le Travail and I share this recollection here as a way to thank him for his kindness and for his unexpected help in bolstering my assertion that Bettina is best known for the award-winning study that I found on my desk. To be certain, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal originally published in English in 1993, in French in 1995, and then reprinted again in English in 1996 and 2007, continues to influence students of Canadian and Quebec, family and labour, women’s and gender history.1 An unintended consequence of this focus on Working Families, however, has meant that Bettina’s more recent work on imperial families, and the important historiographical contributions she has made to the fields of gender and empire history through that research, have been overshadowed. By tracing Bettina’s shift from Working Families to working on imperial families I hope to illustrate that individual family histories and their transimperial kin as well as the politics of their daily lives not only anchor Bettina’s imperial turn, but also mark a continuity between her earliest and most recent research.2 Such a focus seems fitting, especially as Bettina plans her departure from Rusholme Road and imminent return to New Zealand. I begin by highlighting how Bettina’s most recent monograph, Wife to Widow, especially the framing of that project, was inspired, in part, by international feminist historiographies of empire. I suggest that this not only led Bettina to situate
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.072 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| 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".