Ungodly Grandmother: Marian Sherman and the Social Dimensions of Atheism in Postwar Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the activism of Marian Sherman, a churchwoman-turned-atheist in postwar Victoria, British Columbia. Between 1946 and her death in 1975, Sherman promoted atheism and humanism throughout her community, province, and nation. Her secularist journey offers a useful lens on broader changes and continuities in Canada’s postwar religious culture. Broader currents of secularization, including the spread of critical discourse on religion and the rise of secular humanism, contributed to Sherman’s growing prominence as an atheist spokesperson during the 1960s. Responses to Sherman indicate, however, that most atheists continued to feel silenced in this era. Sherman’s outspoken atheism was made possible, in part, by her specific social location, particularly her class, gender, age, and place. This article adds further texture to the picture of religious change in postwar Canada, and demonstrates the significance of women to the making of British Columbian culture in 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".