The First Mrs. Rochester: Wrongful Confinement, Social Redundancy, and Commitment to the Private Asylum, 1883‑1923
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historians have debated the growth of asylums as either a movement towards social control or as a benevolent reform; yet commitment was primarily initiated by kin. The rapid overcrowding of asylums reflected the success of institutions in responding to family crises. Through analysis of 1,134 case histories of a private asylum, the Homewood Retreat of Guelph, Ontario, the dynamics of the late Victorian and Edwardian middle-class household are evident in the circumstances which culminated in the decision to commit. Urban industrialization and the declining birth rate rendered households less able to care for the insane, while the permeation of capitalist relations into family life rendered the heads of households less willing to care for nonproductive adult members, particularly socially redundant women. The diagnosis of neurasthenia enabled members of the middle class to institutionalize kin for behaviour which, although not violent or destructive, was irritating and antagonistic, thereby reflecting the high standard of middle-class proprieties.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".