“It was a Hard Life”:Class and Gender in the Work and Family Rhythms of a Railway Town, 1920‑1950
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most social histories of the working class have focussed on women's or men's experience alone. However, while studies of working-class women have often been sensitive to the way in which class and gender relationships are constructed and reconstructed simultaneously, histories of working-class men have been largely gender-blind. In an attempt to provide a more comprehensive understanding of gender-based divisions in the working-class experience this study examines the relationship between male and female work worlds in the railway ward of Barrie, Ontario between 1920 and 1950. Based primarily on oral history, this paper argues that the class and gender conditions and relations of the period set limits to what was available and possible for the men and women of the railway ward. In most families, husbands were breadwinners and wives were full-time homemakers. This pattern was the response of railroad families to the constraints created by the gender division of wage work, railway labour rhythms, the prevailing conditions of reproductive labour, and the ideology of patriarchy. None the less, railroaders and their wives also made choices within the limitations of their lives. These choices had different implications for the men and women of the community. The strategies men and women adopted for survival and well-being also began to change over the period, both altering as well as being changed by the constraints they faced. As conditions changed, concepts of masculinity and femininity which informed their strategies began to shift — but not dramatically. The experience of the railway community revealed that the construction of gender identities was a complex and contradictory process. Indeed, the historical literature on the social construction of gender has really only began to grapple with the many dimensions which comprised that process.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".