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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".