“Princesses and Sweated-Wage Slaves Go Well Together”: Images of British Sweated Workers, 1843–1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Taking a long-term perspective, this article charts how sweating was represented in different ways in different periods. It examines the practical difficulties reformers faced when moving from portraying certain images exposing sweated labor to the advocacy of remedies for it. At the turn of the twentieth century, the explanation of sweating as a wider issue of poverty had changed considerably from the narrow definition of sweated labor dating back to the 1840s. Initially this identified needlewomen and male artisans in declining trades as the primary victims of sweating. Jews later stereotypically featured prominently as both exploiters and exploited. By the 1890s, women homeworkers were simultaneously foregrounded as passive victims as well as perpetuators of a degenerate sweated “underclass.” From 1906, those depicted in sensational exhibitions plying their trade of sweated labor were no longer designated as isolated “white slaves” but as exploited citizens denied a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. They were also viewed as a danger to national efficiency. Even so, a Liberal government was only prepared to concede one small anti-sweating measure in the form of the 1909 Trade Boards Act. This piece of legislation was gender neutral and covered homeworkers as well as factory hands. But it encompassed only the most notoriously low-paying industries and less then a quarter of a million workers. Successive British parliaments shied away from enacting a national minimum wage until 1999.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".