Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A neglected aspect of the perceived “embourgeoisement” of the British working-classes in the 1950s was the representation of a blurring of class difference around questions of sexuality. In different ways, female bodies and sexuality in the postwar period became a means of talking about changing class identity and the modernization of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the working-class body and working-class sexuality served as counterpoints to largely middle-class ideas of modern femininity and sexuality. Working-class women's inability to control their reproduction was portrayed as one cause of the deprivation experienced by the working classes. In the fifties, by contrast, working-class bodies and sexuality had become signifiers of the modernization of British class society. Working-class women were perceived as being able to control the size of their families. Such control was, with full employment and better housing, a mark of a modern, affluent working class. At the same time, working-class marriage was represented as increasingly incorporating notions of companionability and sexual pleasure previously only seen in middle-class life. “Embourgeoisement” in postwar Britain was thus represented as having a sexual aspect.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".