Rational Creatures and Free Citizens: The Language of Politics in the Eighteenth‑Century Debate on Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the intersection between the debate on women and the wider political debates of late eighteenth-century England. During this period the meaning of concepts such as liberty, equality, and rights was contested not only with regard to political relationships among men, but also as they applied to civil and domestic relationships between men and women. The language of politics encouraged the definition of women's oppression in terms of the unrepresentative nature of authority exercised by men. The values of rationality, equality, and independence espoused by radicals in the debate on women were part of a larger conception of virtue, which carried with it political as well as moral implications. These political implications came to the fore in the conservative response. Conservatives' ideas on women were part of a larger vision of social and political order in which duty, obedience, and dependence operated as the unifying principles. Within this framework, radical proposals for a more egalitarian family structure were viewed as a potential threat to political order. At the heart of this debate lay not only a dispute regarding the condition of women, but also a struggle between two conflicting visions of the ideal society.
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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 | 0.008 | 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 | 0.013 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".