Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article examines an effort in the first quarter of the twentieth century to install public toilets in cities throughout the United States, especially in the prosperous industrial region of the Northeast and Midwest. The campaign illustrates the frustrated ambitions in the Progressive Era for a new relationship between public authority and the private body, a relationship in which the state would protect privacy, encourage personal care, and hence refine the inner character of the citizen. In contrast to nineteenth-century public urinals (which were few in number and intended mainly to prevent public health nuisances) twentieth-century “comfort stations” were typically large, underground structures at major public squares. They were to have replaced the privately-owned alternatives in saloons and other businesses that attracted customers by exploiting their bodily needs. Women's groups, drawing on a long-established belief that women were the prime guardians of private wellbeing and moral discipline, were prominent in the campaign for comfort stations in Chicago, New York and other cities. Municipal governments even in the largest cities hesitated to build more than a few comfort stations because of the high cost of construction and maintenance. Comfort stations proved unsuccessful in competing with department stores, hotels and other privately owned alternatives. Women in particular opted for the consumer model of privacy, which preserved class privilege by excluding the less affluent. Almost all of the early twentieth century comfort stations have since closed, as American cities have abandoned the public role in promoting bodily privacy.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".