A Manly Art: Plowing, Plowing Matches, and Rural Masculinity in Ontario, 1800–1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article draws on recent studies of masculinity, labour and recreation to consider rural men. More Canadian men worked in farming than any other single occupation and yet we know little about their sense of masculine identity. This article examines the processes of fashioning, practising and performing masculinity associated with the archetypal farming skill passed down from father to son – plowing. In the early 1800s improving farmers created the plowing match, an educational and sporting event. The author analyzes media representations of the match, reporters' rhetoric, visual images and interviews with plowmen and spectators. She argues that their depictions and discussions of plowing at home and at the match shed light on their masculine ideals, ideals that were challenged with the introduction of the tractor. Rural men continued to value a rugged individualism and mastery over nature, but the value of being a skilled horseman, stoic toiler, and muscled man gave way to new masculine ideals based on speed, comfort, and expertise with machines. In the process farmers helped reposition the countryside in the shifting cultural hierarchy and moved in parallel with other Canadian men who were refashioning concepts of manliness, skill, fatherhood and recreation in the new industrial age.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".