"In case you hadn't noticed!": Race, Ethnicity, and Women's Wage-Earning in a Depression-Era City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article unites an extensive collection of oral histories with the documentary record — newspapers, the census and government records — to examine women’s employment during the Great Depression in Toronto. It asks how privilege and disadvantage based on race/ethnicity, gender and class influenced women’s work experiences. In Toronto’s garment industry and as clerical workers, domestics and teachers the women in this study had various levels of economic stability, came from varied ethnic and racial backgrounds and enjoyed, as a consequence, different job options in a period when employment access was particularly important for women and their families. For instance, despite their shared gender, training and class backgrounds women such as Claire Clarke and Mildred Johnson did not have the same employment options. This article explores the intersection between identity and job access to show why this was so in the 1930s. Ultimately, individual experiences indicate that gender should not be given analytical predominance for understanding all Depression-era labour markets. In some historical contexts and for some women gender had less relevance to their experiences than race, ethnicity, or class. Resume Cet article rassemble une multitude d’histoires orales et de documents historiques (journaux, recensement et documents gouvernementaux) afin d’etudier l’emploi des femmes a Toronto pendant la Grande Crise des annees 30. L’article cherche a identifier comment la race, l’ethnie, le sexe et les classes sociales influaient sur l’experience de travail des femmes. Dans l’industrie des vetements de Toronto ou en tant que commis, employees de maison et enseignantes, les femmes qui paraissent dans cette etude demontraient des niveaux de stabilite economique varies, provenaient de differents groupes ethniques et raciaux et profitaient consequemment d’occasions d’emploi differentes dans une periode ou l’acces a l’emploi etait d’une importance toute particuliere pour les femmes et leurs familles. Par exemple, bien qu’elles etaient du meme sexe et partageaient une formation et une classe sociale communes, certaines femmes, telles que Claire Clarke et Mildred Johnson, n’avaient pas les memes occasions d’emploi. L’article vise a explorer l’intersection de l’identite et de l’acces au marche du travail afin d’expliquer ce phenomene pendant les annees 30. Somme toute, l’experience des individus indiquerait que le genre ne merite pas une place primordiale dans l’analyse de tous les secteurs du marche du travail pendant la grande depression. Dans certains contextes historiques, et dans l’experience de certaines femmes, le sexe etait un facteur moins pertinent que la race, l’ethnie ou la classe sociale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".