The Sin of Laura: The Meaning of Culture in the Education of Nineteenth-Century Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the iconography of nineteenth-century female education, the centralfigure is a woman at the piano. This figure embodies a form ofeducation, the female "accomplishments" — music, art, modern languages, literature, and the natural sciences — which was widespread in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century and which spread rapidly throughout the English-speaking world. Yet this form of education has been overlooked or dismissed by both mainstream and feminist historiography. This paper considers the rise of the accomplishments curriculum as a precursor to the emergence, late in the nineteenth century, of the “worthwhile education” of women. This earlier development, in the author's view, requires a reconsideration of that sacred cow of feminist theory, the man/culture, women/nature dichotomy. A study of the female accomplishments also illustrates the earlier rise of the enduring and oppressive myth that there is a natural affinity between the humanities and the female mind — with its equally enduring implication that there is a natural affinity between science and the male mind. Historians of the Edwardian period have noted that the rational, scientific frame of mind, which underpinned the capitalist exploitation of the natural world, was considered to be a "natural" male predilection. Feminist historians have rightly exposed the use of this pseudo-science as a justification of the contemporary intellectual subjugation of women. They have, however, failed to note that intellectual attitudes which were evident more than a century earlier, and which underpinned the emergence of the female accomplishments, ensured that women would be excluded from the great intellectual adventure of the twentieth century.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".