Women in Botany and the Canadian Federal Department of Agriculture, 1887-1919
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the nature of women's involvement in the science of botany in the federal Department of Agriculture from 1887 to 1919. It argues that the professionalization and bureaucratization of science in the department created distinct opportunities for women but also confined them to specific jobs deemed appropriate for their sex. Because the botany that was first undertaken in the department emerged from the natural history tradition, women first contributed as unpaid "amateur" observers, collectors, and correspondents. As science professionalized and bureaucratized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the contributions of unpaid "amateurs" were no longer desired or needed. At this juncture, women were employed as paid assistants and members of the support staff. As civil servants, women entered an organization that was undergoing a process of professionalization and bureaucratization. As a result, women were subjected to hierarchical and territorial segregation, undertaking 'women's work' in botany. They performed tasks which were undervalued, underpaid, and offered little or no opportunity for advancement, and were, therefore, rejected by men. Satisfying the demands generated by the professionalization and bureaucratization of science as well as of the federal civil service, women were a pivotal part of the botanical workforce of the Canadian federal Department of Agriculture from 1887 to 1919.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".