Taming and Training Greek “Peasant Girls” and the Gendered Politics of Whiteness in Postwar Canada: Canadian Bureaucrats and Immigrant Domestics, 1950s–1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on the voluminous government records as well as selective interviews in a large oral history archive created over several years, this article explores Canada's recruitment of Greek female domestics in the 1950s and early 1960s within the context of the feminist scholarship on female labour schemes as well as more recent whiteness literature on the in-between racial status of peripheral Europeans. In considering the contradictory features of a large but little-known labour scheme through which more than ten thousand Greek women arrived, many of them before their families, it documents the role of the bureaucrats – who envisioned the domestics' transformation into models of modern domesticity while portraying them as victims of their patriarchal communities and manipulators of Canadian immigration policy – and that of the women who negotiated various challenges. To account for the scheme's remarkable longevity, a key argument probes the mix of factors that repositioned a traditionally non-preferred Southern European group of women into a desirable white source of immigrant labour and future Canadian motherhood. Ultimately, Greek women enjoyed a racial privilege and mobility not afforded to later arriving women from the Caribbean and Philippines.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".