Women Teachers in Canada, 1881–1901: Revisiting the 'Feminization' of an Occupation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, this essay reconsiders the changing ratios of women to men in teaching in Canada in the late nineteenth century, and the relationship between macro-historical change and individual experience. The complete-coverage census micro-data for 1881 make it possible to explore possible associations between characteristics of 192 districts and the feminization of teaching in those districts. The hypothesis that an available pool of immigrant men delayed the feminization of teaching in parts of rural Ontario receives support at the national level. The economic structure of districts does not appear to be associated with the feminization of teaching. The feminization of teaching is associated with districts having relatively large proportions of French-Canadian Catholics and English Anglicans. The size of the school system, as measured by teachers per capita, is negatively associated with marital fertility. There is evidence that the status of women teachers had improved by the end of the century, although the reactions of individual teachers were ambiguous and conflicted. In Ontario the earnings of women teachers increased steadily in real terms. Women were being drawn into an occupation in which they were subordinates in a hierarchy of gender and income, but their movement into teaching was also a movement towards material independence, intellectual self-realization, and social respectability. A l’aide de méthodes qualitatives et quantitatives, l’auteur de l’essai réexamine les variations du ratio femmes/hommes dans l’enseignement au Canada á la fin du XIXe siècle, et le lien entre les changements macro-historiques et les expériences individuelles. Les micro-données du recensement exhaustif de 1881 permettent d’explorer les liens possibles entre les diverses caractéristiques de 192 districts et la féminisation de l’enseignement dans ces districts. L’hypothèse selon laquelle la disponibilité d’hommes immigrants aurait retardé la féminisation de l’enseignement dans certaines régions rurales de l’Ontario reçoit un appui au niveau national. La structure économique des districts ne semble pas être associée á la féminisation de l’enseignement, qui est plutôt liéeá la relativement grande proportion de Canadiens français catholiques et d’Anglophones anglicans dans ces districts. La taille du système scolaire, mesurée selon le nombre d’enseignants par personne, est associéenégativement á la fécondité des mariages. A la fin du siècle, la situation des enseignantes s’était améliorée, même si les réactions de certains enseignants étaient parfois ambiguës et contradictoires. En Ontario, le salaire des enseignantes était en croissance constante en chiffres absolus. On attirait les femmes vers un travail dans lequel elles étaient des subordonnées pour ce qui est du sexe et du salaire; mais leur passage vers l’enseignement a favorisé leur indépendance matérielle, une prise de conscience intellectuelle et le respect social.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".